A lot of, if not a vast majority of, students learning Mandarin cannot hear the difference in the tones, so they’ll end up misinterpreting what they hear or render wrongly what they’re trying to say.
In my second year of teaching on the evening programme (where students came along to learn for fun), the last lesson of the school year saw only one student turning up, so I asked him if he had anything he wanted special focus on that we couldn’t find the time for in class when there was a crowd.
He said “tones”, so I took him through pronunciation drills, reading him sentences, which he would repeat after me. I’d correct the wrong tones. After a while, he said, “Why do you keep correcting my tones? I’m saying it exactly as you have said it.”
A common feature with Westerners is that they will end a sentence with a falling tone (which is the fourth tone in Chinese), and pause in the middle of a sentence with a rising tone (which is a second tone in Chinese). This means that all final sounds in a sentence get changed to a fourth tone, e.g., I have lots of books / wǒ yǒu hěn duō shū becomes wǒ yǒu hěn duō shù / I have lots of trees. This has happened with English and French speakers in my experience that I can remember.
See https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/08/chinese-tones.html
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