> I can guarantee that tones are not particularly useful and that you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up, and that's perfectly fine.
Not at all. Tones are extremely important. If you have all the tones messed up, you can hardly communicate in Mandarin. It's true, as you said, that different regions of China have different dialects, and you'll find that people can communicate normally because: 1) The tonal differences in nearby regions are not too significant, and people can still try to understand based on context. And 2) In many cases, people switch to regular Mandarin when their dialects cannot communicate with each other. This is why Mandarin exists. It is an officially regulated dialect that all Chinese people learn, to solve the dialect problem among different regions. Chinese people may speak their own dialects at hometown, but when two Chinese people meet and find that their dialects cannot communicate, they immediately switch to Mandarin. Therefore, the tones in Mandarin are very important. To a considerable extent, Mandarin exists because of tones. You cannot communicate in it with messed up tones.
Even for non-Mandarin/Guanhua, such as the Shanxi dialect, I can understand them because the pronunciation is much closer to mine, just the tones are completely novel.
> To a considerable extent, Mandarin exists because of tones. You cannot communicate in it with messed up tones.
These statements are false. If they were true, it would be impossible to understand written tone-free pinyin; in reality, it's not just possible but easy.
Point being, this idea of a Universal Reference is exactly the kind of linguistic erasure that is wrongheaded to begin with. Nor does this completely prevent comprehension, these debates underestimate how much human communication is contextual, you read what I wrote above and most of it was your mind already filling in (gasp, like an LLM) the next words enabling you to read relatively quickly.
"Because as soon as you leave Beijing, you’ll find all the tones are shuffled because of every region has their own dialect and accents, which doesn’t stop people from communicate at all. "
Isn't this in fact one of the reasons why China relies heavily on the written language because the different regions lose vocal communication ability as the changes in tones and pronounciations render the language understandable to people from other regions?
That might be true between native speakers of similar enough dialects who otherwise speak "properly" with each other: proper grammar, idiomatic expressions, predictable accents (also regarding tones, which are not random, just different patterns from the standard). Language learners make errors in all these categories and there providing more motivation to neglect the tones is harmful. If tones were completely irrelevant regarding understandably then they would have disappeared long ago.
I just tried the tool and it couldn't properly recognize a very clearly pronounced "吃" and instead heard some shi2. I think it needs more training data or something. Or one needs a good mic.
The other two are probably things that could be fixed with a bigger and more varied dataset.
I've found that especially true with Mandarin because (I think) a beginner speaker is more likely to speak a little more quickly which allows the listener to essentially ignore the occasional incorrect or slightly mispronounced tone and understand the what theyî're trying to say.
(This is anecdotal, but with n>1. Discussed and observed with other Mandarin language learners)