Still stinging from Dr Milker’s sharp rebuttals. One last response. “Tone Dependence” is a term I learned from Mary Knoll Taiwanese classes many decades ago. I have no idea if it is even a real linguistic term. But the concept seems right in actual use. As the Sisters repeatedly and forcefully pointed out, l can get by with my bad Mandarin and crappy tones as long as there is enough context to be understood. You will just sound like a lazy foreigner. Not so with Taiwanese, “laziness just wont cut it, Taiwanese is a very tone dependent language”. It rings in my ears like it was yesterday. If the tones are off just a little I will not be understood. I don’t think it’s as bad as they made it sound, but there is some truth to it. I don’t get a lot of “thiann-bo”s, anymore, but I never get any “oh, your Taiwanese is so good” crap like with Mandarin. I only get “your tones make my ears hurt”. The old Mary Knoll teachers back then were brutal, but I learned to thank them. And that is what I mean about the tones.
Yes, as the tone is the word, and I know that’s frustrating as I still sometimes get that even though I’ve been speaking it well over a decade.
My listening is pretty much fluent, I can even understand most talk shows and the news. Sometimes the news has idioms and metaphors I don’t get as I never learned formally. My mandarin seems at roughly the same level as a junior high student. I can understand basically everything people are gossiping about on the metro , it opens ones eyes a bit 
I’m amazed at the level of Chinese of those foreigners who go on local TV chat shows. And many who have YouTube channels. It’s quite impressive. Very curious about their lifestyles and how they got so fluent.
Have noticed a theme amongst them all - they’re all incredibly childish. Does this help with conquering Chinese? Seems it does
I’ve been watching the incredibly childish TV show foreigners on a very small old black and white TV set and I can confirm that they are not only childish, but also tiny and lacking in colour. 
Awesome !
Where are you located? I’ve never met any Taiwanese person who was cognizant of this concept, much less would explain it to me.
I can barely understand my own language if there’s a lot of background noise. This has been the case all my life.
I am in the south, Pingtung and Kaohsiung. Every farmer in my town tries to correct my tones (ok, an exaggeration). I have a few coworkers who like to explain tone changes to me. Over and over. Like it will help. I know what the right tone is and what it should change to. But anything complicated and I subconsciously slap Mandarin tones on a Taiwanese words. The old nun at Mary Knoll was right, I stink.
That’s awesome. People up here seem unaware in my experience at least, of just about anything beyond “taigi u chhit hsiaN”.
It’s rough. Extensive listening over time is the only way to ever get it down IMO.
Just came across this, started to like it, saw who it was, and became sad.
You need to be very outgoing , very chatty, whatever shite people come out keep it all light and frothy 
, that’s my impression about most of those people. It works for them I guess . You need to be outgoing and chatty because, well, most Taiwanese are not so you have to push it. Have a lot of tolerance for repetitive conversations . You have to like people a lot too, making friends…
I’ve known a few business people with good Chinese, I think that mostly came from chatting with their wives or they studied it formally before doing business .
It gets harder when you got older. Your ears can’t pick out certain sounds/pitches from the background noise. Its just a fact. I think .
Yeah they never explain tone problems to me either. Which makes learning rough. Do not want to criticise Taiwanese ppl too much but generally they make terrible teachers.
And yes I know it’s not their job ,as my wife says, to teach me or correct my Chinese . But I really wouldn’t mind somebody correcting it every now and then.
Well, as we know, most people in the West never think about explicit grammatic structures and the like until they have to, either!
Again, that local NJ dialect is Mandarin. This seems to be a problem with the definition of Mandarin. There’s Standard Mandarin (Guoyu, Putonghua), and then there’s all those Mandarin dialects, like the Beijing dialect, Southwestern Mandarin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin (of which the NJ dialect is a part).
Sorry, didn’t mean to tear you a new one.
You’re going blind and deaf too. Welcome to the club fella.
You’ll be getting piles and incontinence next.
My adult students like to teasingly goad me into learning Taiwanese. I’m still nowhere as proficient in Mandarin as I’d like to be, but I do like languages so I bought Taiwanese Grammar: A Concise Reference a couple of years ago to check out the basics. After not too many pages I got to the complicated tone change section, complete with dizzying chart.
Nope, ain’t gonna happen. The book is gathering dust on my bookshelf.
Forget that. No one ever learned Taiwanese by studying a tone chart. It’s something worth understanding, but you don’t need it to learn.
Yet I’m reading how critical correct tones are in Minnan. How do you learn all those complicated (at least to me) changes?
By extensive listening over time. People will still get what you mean if you’re off as a beginner. If you get stuck on thinking you have to have perfect tones you’ll never get anywhere.