Tones are hard but far less important than people make out. If you can copy someone else's sound, you will eventually just get tones right automatically. This i

Tones are hard but far less important than people make out. If you can copy someone else's sound, you will eventually just get tones right automatically. This is how Chinese learn. There's no need to learn them formally. (Source: 16 years, native English speaker, fluent Mandarin, some capacity with multiple tonal languages + dialects)