When Chinese sing, how do they understand the meaning of the song?
No, most Chinese popular music doesn’t use tones, the singers just sing it according to the tune as per English-language music, but they don’t have any trouble understanding it. This is because although tones are important, most Chinese can tell by context which word you mean in a given situation, and to be honest there aren’t many different topics in mainstream Chinese pop music. There are a few other reasons why it doesn’t matter. For one thing, karaoke is massive in China and Taiwan so if they didn’t understand a word first time they would learn it from the lyrics. Also, although Chinese is monosyllabic, most Mandarin nouns and verbs are made up of two characters, so it’s a lot easier to understand what someone’s saying, even without the tones.
