I think 'some people' are wrong. It works as a rule of thumb for English, but English words and sentence structures have much more 'redundancy' than Chinese, you can make multiple 'mistakes' in English yet still be understood. Chinese is much less forgiving: every scrap of information is important, and a word with the wrong tone will often, if not always, render your speech into nonsense. Most native Chinese speakers don't really notice the existence of tones, or consider them to be a problem, any more than native English speakers notice the aspiration of consonants: it is all just something we do as 'second nature'. The objective here is to reach a similar level of proficiency. My only suggestion is to train your brain to know and understand tones, e.g. by using an app such as trainchinese Pin Yin trainer. I am sure there are other apps and other ways of doing it, but that one worked for me. It took time and patience, that is the only certainty!

1. I would suggest to listen more, and read along with the audio whenever you can. 2. Try to remember and associate the pronunciations of the words with the Chinese characters, not the hanyu pinyin spellings. 3. For those words that you're unsure about of the pronunciations, mark the accent down above those words. 4. Don't mislead yourself into thinking that there are 4 pronunciations to a character. Just like English, typically, for every word, there is only one right pronunciation.

Tone is not a problem if you know how to say you know the tone. Its a little bit complicated for a foreigner to learn tone.

Best way, as they say that practices makes prefect.

Hi Ben, from my side, this problem is not so hard and not so easy. yeah, it's bore xxxx.😂😂. As a Chinese child, he have to study this from grade one for a whole year in primary school, and then further study more words and making complex sentences. On the other hand, even many Chinese people also read a word in wrong tone. What is I wanna say just like Jimmy said above, pay more time on it, do a systematic practice. By Bruce