Originally Posted by
moondog
2) When in doubt, default to first tone. There are actually Chinese people that speak in this manner ("farmer Chinese"), and it works for them
I completely agree. In fact, the language known as Mandarin (as opposed to Putonghua/Standard Mandarin which is a b4stardisation of Peking Mandarin) has many dialects, many of which have tones that are completely different from Standard Mandarin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
So most Mandarin speakers are already used to picking up different tones -- it's called an accent.