A couple Beijing hostel travelers struggling with the tones here asked me for advice, and this always works: you can learn these tones in about a minute, then memorize vocab, then you can speak Mandarin. There’s not much grammar and no gendered vocabulary.

Tones:

Aside from the neutral tone, which means you don’t need to place any special emphasis on a syllable, there are the four flat, rising, falling then rising, and falling tones - bad descriptors.

length, intensity, volume are not described.

Most English speakers know what robot(flat), question(rising), unsure(falling and rising) and angry(falling) sound like intuitively, it’s how we talk.

ni2hao3 is question, then unsure.

ni2 question, like you’re asking a question - “knee?”

hao3 unsure, “yea-a?” first syllable falling, second rising.

bu4yao4 - angry, angry. “boo!yow!”

It takes even less time to learn when you hear the four examples in audio of course, so here’s a short podcast episode explaining this method.