It occurred to me that from what I know about Chinese, in particular Cantonese, most of what you are saying about these nuances goes away.

You say that by just this little change in tense, you've already communicated something about the whole situation. In Chinese you can't really do that. If you try, you're making your text just unnatural and cumbersome to read. Must be a real challenge for translators in either direction.

From my personal conversations I also know that even pretty accomplished speakers coming from Chinese languages don't pick up on these cues when speaking English. All tense just goes through type erasure in parsing.