Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word (though it's maddeningly easy to think of it as separate, with your English-brain saying that they can be safely ignored).

I've had a bunch of German, and just passing contact with Latin, but a lot of German grammar started making a lot more sense when I started thinking of those languages as similar in a sense, because of declension.

> Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word

True that. Also, it's just a different use of tone - English uses tone to differentiate questions from statements, and to otherwise add meaning to words/sentences. There are other mechanisms for that in Chinese dialects.

The best explanation I've heard of tones is the different pronunciations of "really" in "Really?" "Really!" "Really hungry" "Really good" etc

Yes about the intonation of the word. The difference is that that "really" would mean "mom", "stupid", "really", "nothing" according to the tone. Some embarrassing mistakes.

Well, the previous poster's examples of "really" could be defined like this, based on interpretation of their intonation:

"Really?": Convince me; "Really!": I'm indignant on your behalf; "Really hungry": exceptionally [hungry]; "Really good": average.