It amazes me that I did not think of this pair when writing the article! I’ll add them to the list of examples. Thanks!

Yeah, I remember having trouble with that pair, too. However, it seems to be more of the “oh, why did you go there to… ah, I see, you meant party” type and unlikely to persist for long. Still amusing, of course, foreigners really like to queue? 🙂

Oh, I think I remember you telling me about this story before! I remembered someone had told me about it, but couldn’t recall who. You bring up an interesting point, though, namely that if there are two possibilities and one is very unlikely, you can run into problems if you actually want to say the unlikely word. I don’t see why you would do this, but let’s say you actually went to the zoo and saw some awesome chest hair there, then you’d probably be in trouble even if your tones are good. However, I think this situation is so rare that it might never have happened in real life. 🙂 But in theory, it’s probably possible to construct extremely specific situations in which even bizarre mix-ups would cause trouble.

I think these sort into the “amusing, but don’t really cause confusion” category, right? Or have you actually been in a conversation where someone truly believed you meant one while you actually meant the other? 🙂

It seems you are making the same argument as the article does? The main idea I’m trying to convey is that a) most tone mistakes of the kind listed in other articles about tone mistakes typically don’t cause any confusion (such as panda/chest hair), and b) some tone mistakes actually do cause confusion, as proved by the fact that these are all real examples (these are very rare, though, the examples here took years to collect).

Another definite tonal one is gan1 and gan4. Dry and to do. And in Taiwan my students giggled about gan4 as a swear word.

When you’re speaking a language other than your own, you very quickly tell your interlocutor a great deal about yourself. If you have never shown them and their language the respect demonstrated by making the attempt to pronounce it sensibly, or at least humbly, then you have instantly signalled your arrogance, or stupidity, or inability to function in the real world, or all three.

Getting some intonations wrong is not a problem. If you have established your good standing, people will forgive, will make the effort to see through the haze of your errors, and will often, perhaps usually, try to help you improve. If you haven’t — if, for instance, you have moved your voice up a register in tone or volume because the backward natives are always iggerant — people in all countries will instantly adjust. In most cases, they will simply treat you like an infant, take up some distance, and try to be kind. On rare occasions, they will respond with a hostility equal to that implied by your insensitivity.

That, not the nonexistent danger of confusing panda-bears and chest hair, is why paying attention to intonation is important.

I guess that goes to show how it could go the other way – even if you say exactly what you mean in Mandarin, if the idea sounds too strange (walking up to a man & kissing him vs. walking up to a man and asking him), another Mandarin speaker might (mistakenly) assume that you made a tone mistake.