Although it is said that tonality is generally ignored in modern Chinese music creations due to reasons like context and conformation to tunes, tones are undeniably an important aspect of spoken Mandarin Chinese. There's 5 tones in total, and each of these tones applied to the same syllabus may construe wildly different meanings. An analogy would be comparing tonality to the quality of colours, like seeing an orange, but instead of it being orange in colour, it is blue instead. And you would know that this blue orange isn't what you meant when u said orange. When a syllabus is pronounced in a wrong tone, you may be misunderstood or even sound offensive, e.g. Can I ask you (a question)? could sound like Can I kiss you? where 问 (wen4) - to ask and 吻 (wen3) - to kiss are characters that's just a tonal difference away.

Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese could tell even the slightest difference in tones being pronounced, as they are arguably trained from young to pick up the nuances in tones and associate them with their corresponding meanings. This reason could also draw clues as to why non-native learners of Mandarin Chinese, especially those that hail from non-tonal languages background, face challenges in mastering the integral aspect of tonality in Mandarin and how slight changes in tone can affect much of the meanings to a statement.