I can’t get rid of the impression, as if the chinese folks drew a secret pleasure out of their four tones. The four ways to pronounce each syllable of a word, each syllable of those couple of thousand one to three syllable words must be pronounced correctly.
A nightmare for the western chinese language student. And if just one syllable isn’t the right one, the word, and possibly the whole sentence, is TOTALLY and FULLY incomprehensible, not understandable. 听不懂。That’s just madness, masochism, sodomy, or, just as I said, a secret pleasure.