Dang that is true I didn't think of that. good observation.
12 karma · joined January 28, 2014
They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important.
In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more tolerant of bad or variant pronunciations than english(Assuming you can get tones right but there are really only 5 tones to learn). Tones just make a few more bits available for error correction.
As background I have studied chinese for 8+ years and lived in asia for a couple of years as well.
Disclaimer I work here so I am already sold on the concept.
This is cool because it is the best in both dimensions.