I agree with “ignore tones in general”. In ordinary speech they are very different than the ones teacher’s teach. I stopped worrying about tones in year 3 (of learning to hear Chinese).
Chinese has many homonyms (same sound, different meaning). Tones help this a little, but not very much. Almost all the recognition in speech is based on context, not tones.
English has even more of this: we call it “30 meanings for 1 word”. And we also use pitch in sentences for meaning. Think of tones as like the stress patterns in English. Which syllable is stressed more?