Originally Posted by
ElevatorEnthusiast
This might be controversial, but the tonal nature of Mandarin makes it much harder for foreigners because we are much more likely to make mistakes. “Shi” means a lot of things.
IME/IMO, the importance of nailing tones is exaggerated because nobody uses single words in isolation. E.g. 城市 and 诚实 are phonetically equivalent (apart from the tones), but it's impossible to conflate them in context, no matter how poor your pronunciation is.