I took Chinese for a couple years, and while the tones can be annoying for the first few weeks, there's only 4 (or 5) of them. It ain't rocket science. If you can recognize the melodies of songs, then your brain has the necessary parts to recognize tones too. Nobody in any of our beginner Chinese sections ever found the tones "just not doable". Some people would take a few days to get the hang of them, and other people a couple of months, but if more than a billion people in China can do it, you almost certainly can do it too.
(And if you're really having trouble you can always hire a private tutor. Honestly, most people with pronunciation problems in any language, just need some individualized help. A group classroom might not do it, but one-on-one tutoring almost certainly will.)
On the other hand, most people simply don't have the time to memorize the characters and pronunciation. The fact that there are virtually no cognates makes the hurdle to amassing vocabulary simply gigantic, let alone the characters. You say that "anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters", but "some work" in this case is a truly gigantic amount of work.
This. If you can sing along to a song, you can definitely figure out tones. It might take some associating each word with a tiny little snippet of music, but that is essentially what it is.
Re: figuring out whether your tones or speech is correct, try talking to Siri or Google voice search. I tried my French on the French Siri and it was humbling.
> This. If you can sing along to a song, you can definitely figure out tones.
I think you understate the difficulty of recognizing and reproducing tones. Quite a few people can't carry a tune to save their life. Even among the majority who passably can, doing so extremely well - aka having "perfect pitch" - is recognized as a rarity.
First of all, that's not what perfect pitch is -- it is rare, but it has absolutely nothing to do with how well you can carry a tune.
But secondly, if the entire population of China can do it, then statistically, you're almost guaranteed to be able to do it too. And the tones in Chinese are really very, very simple. They're no different from the way you end a question with your voice moving upwards, or the recognizable "valley girl" pattern. It's the same idea, just applied to single words instead of whole sentences.
The characters also fall out of your memory after long periods of disuse. Like many Chinese Americans, I went to Chinese school on the weekends as a child. Eight years later, I can't even compose a basic sentence in Chinese.
I took Chinese for a couple years, and while the tones can be annoying for the first few weeks, there's only 4 (or 5) of them. It ain't rocket science. If you can recognize the melodies of songs, then your brain has the necessary parts to recognize tones too. Nobody in any of our beginner Chinese sections ever found the tones "just not doable". Some people would take a few days to get the hang of them, and other people a couple of months, but if more than a billion people in China can do it, you almost certainly can do it too.
(And if you're really having trouble you can always hire a private tutor. Honestly, most people with pronunciation problems in any language, just need some individualized help. A group classroom might not do it, but one-on-one tutoring almost certainly will.)
On the other hand, most people simply don't have the time to memorize the characters and pronunciation. The fact that there are virtually no cognates makes the hurdle to amassing vocabulary simply gigantic, let alone the characters. You say that "anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters", but "some work" in this case is a truly gigantic amount of work.