I've found that one of my biggest struggles in learning Chinese - besides some syntactical stuff - is that sounds. I'm extremely un-music-oriented and practically tone deaf (mostly in the layman's definition, though differentiating pitch/notes/etc is often a struggle for me) which makes Chinese tones difficult for me to grasp, and piling the kind of ridiculous vowel combinations and consonant variations, and, well... *keels over*
So, any advice on how to get a better grasp on the sounds of Chinese? Particularly in learning how to hear tones in speech and learning how to grasp the often minute differences between consonants?
Please and thank you! :)