I dont entirely rely on pinyin and studying which character is which tone. I listen to other people speak (first take note of who has a good accent) and try to remember how certain words are said. Sometimes chinese people mistake me for being chinese because of my accent, I guess im just good at imitating.

When you first start learning with pinyin,I think you tend to care more about the syllables than about their tones,it's like a first step,like you read,or listen to the syllable,and then you're like"yes!!I know this syllable!!...wait what was the tone?",and you gotta come to the point where you care as much or more about the tones,like when someone is outside the door asking to enter,even if the syllables are not clear because this person is talking from oustide and you can barely hear,the music of the tones you hear make you understand this person is asking to enter...I think it's always about practicing,listening and listening,and trying to repeat as well as you can,then the music should come to your mind as something as much meaningful as the syllable...now I can't tell for sure 'cause I'm far from being comfortable with tones(nor syllables LOL).But this is complicated for many languages,english seems easy,but if you actually wanna talk like an english person,the music of their sentences and words is also something pretty complicated,but people don't bother because it doesn't change the meaning if you don't stress the right words.All this to say,it's always complicated because the music of our own languages came to us naturally,and we never payed attention to it,but if you enjoy learning a language it's much more easy!!Then of course the best thing is to spend a couple of years in the country of which you're learning the language lol.

talking to native speaker maybe the best way to learn to 4 tones more quickly.

I remember when Sarah Brightman was invited to sing the song "you & me" for the olympics, she said the Chinese part was not that difficult for her singing. I guess that is because the tones are totally replaced by the melody. But we native people could still get the lyrics as long as the pronounciation was clear enough. So I suggest you just take it easy. What we Chinese called ''洋腔洋调" (a little weird but almost right pronounciation ) could also be understood. As you have known, in Chinese, 1 syllable with each of the 4 tones probably relates to various Chinese characters. I believe when you learn a lot about the large amount of varieties, you may also learn the differences between one and another by pronounciation.

Actually, there're altogether 5 tones in "Mandarin Chinese", as follows, 1, 阴平（第一声）(yīn píng) 2, 阳平（第二声）(yáng píng) 3, 上声（第三声）(shǎng shēng) 4, 去声（第四声）(qù shēng) 5, 轻声（第五声）(qīng shēng)