There are lot of works having the same 声调 in Chinese. This is a part of word, so I suggest that you had better not have the idea that it can be avoided. Right, we can understand you, if you speak without serious grammatical error. But i don't think it's the reason for you to neglect them. All you have to do is to do more practice. That's all my opinion, you know, nothing is impossible.

I hate to say this but I think...yeah, the only way to familiarizing yourself with 声调 is by rote learning. Even though chances are an element or a radical of a hanzi suggests the sound of the whole character but (a) the suggestion is very often shaky, and (b) you still need to know the pronunciation of that element/radical by rote memorization. At the end of the day, you still need to recite over and over again. One of my foreign friends speaks Mandarin with very good 声调. He used to major in music in college and he once said to me that 声调 might not be that hard to learn if you imagine yourself "singing" Mandarin when you're actually speaking it. Well, that's one way to look at it and I hope it'll be of some kind of help.

When I am learning new Chinese words I point my finger in the direction of the 声调. So 中文 would be pointing straight then up. It sounds silly but this physical cue can cement 声调 into your brain making it a kind of song and dance. Also make sure when you are reviewing vocabulary to say the words out loud.

Here is a really good post on tones. http://laowaichinese.net/master-the-tones.htm And the other thing I've heard is actually user colors to code the characters (for example if you use a highlighter). http://laowaichinese.net/color-coded-tones-on-mdbg.htm This is a good picture of the idea. I think just come up with a system that works for you. (Blue for 1st, Green for 2nd, Black for 3rd, Red for 4th, etc.) Then you have something else to associate the characters with. (over time it should get easier)

I think it would be difficult if you memorize the pinyin tones for each word individually. This is because you might get easily confused when you put all the words together to form a sentence. As long as the sentences you speak are grammatically correct, most mandarin speakers should be able to understand it. So my recommendation to you is to speak and listen more, you will naturally remember the tones as you get more used to Mandarin conversations. :) がんばれよ！