When your pronunciation is wrong, the meaning changes completely

I wanted to say something personal to someone in their first language — not just accurate, but natural. Every translation tool I tried gave me one answer, no explanation of whether it was casual or stiff, no way to hear what it actually sounded like. The problem with reading a transliteration is that tone contour and vowel length don't survive text. In Mandarin, the difference between mā (mother) and mǎ (horse) is a pitch curve, not a spelling. In Arabic, a long vowel held half a beat too short...