This is technically true but in real life people mispronounce tones all the time and get understood fine. Mandarin songs have no tonal distinctions at all and n

This is technically true but in real life people mispronounce tones all the time and get understood fine. Mandarin songs have no tonal distinctions at all and nobody has problems understanding them. Getting tone right is super important if you want to be extremely terse (as is traditional) but you can get away with a lot of tone mistakes if you add context. (I'm also learning Mandarin at the moment, as my fifth language)