In our traditional opera, the ancient people paid a lot of attention about the relationship between the tones and the melody, that would require a lot of researches and efforts to make an opera both pleasing to the ear and correct in the tones so that the audiences could enjoy the operas without misunderstandings. However, for now days, people just got lazy, they just wrote a song's melody and put some lyrics in, so sometimes we can get really confused of what the singers are singing. Hope this could be helpful. : ) Li Ying

in modern songs the tones are neglected this is why the advice "listen songs to learn the language" is useless... in traditional songs pronunciation is correct but it's hard to listen to them because they have no western rhythm or rhyme

In songs, we follow the melody rather than the tones of the characters. That's why sometimes people get confused what singers are singing about.

Yeah, tones do get lost over the melody to me, and I don't know if composers will consider about the tones when they compose,sorry~

How about 《声律启蒙》？ You can download the mp3 version of this book. It is indeed fabulous. I lstarted to learn it at about 4. You just need to read after the mp3. I don't think opears or songs are good choice for you to improve your Chinese pronunciation. Chinese people today don't learn language from them at all. Let there be no complicated method, let's keep it simple. TRUST ME, LISTEN TO THIS.