The most difficult of learning Chinese of my opinion is a frequency of practice in speaking, writing and so on. We must have a time to practice or usually  to use the Chinese, so I'd like to talk to someone who is native mandarin spearker via skype as much as I can.

 

Thanks.

PART 3
 
I met so many students,which learned chinese for 2 years in their homecountry and than went to china ... more than 40 % quit their studies afterwards,because they can not stand chinese habits (u may know what i mean) ... i travelled more than 100.000 km in china ... foreigners in China only know love and hate ... i nearly met none,who said china is mamahu  ... they just answer :i love china or where is the emergency exit.

So,go to China first,not to waste two or more years of your studies and forget your countries standards,
u may love China ... I DO !!!

THE END

Part 2

4.Pianpang i think its in pinyin ... Radicals ... nobody taught us,so i had to teach my friends :-) because i learned them by mysel
5.If you are in a beginners class with many japanese and koreans ... both know more than 2000 charcters from the beginning,we just know the a,b,c ... so 4 classmates and me left our beginners class,because we should learn 200 Hanzi A WEEK ... that was impossible ... end of part 1

This 5 difficulties i had when i started learning chinese ...

and i can only give one advice:If you start studying chinese in your mothercountry, GO TO CHINA FIRST

End of Part 2 ... to be continued

Because i dont know,wich kind of difficulties chinese kids have,learning chinese (even if i know many) i try to answer your question out of a view of a western foreigner,me.

1.Find the right place in China to study;for must universities teaching foreigners is just making money.
   I wasnt used to typical frontteaching,so that was my first problem.
2.Hanzi ... if a teacher just shows you how to write characters,its not very helpful,because you also should be inroduced into the parts of a characters.
3:Using of a dictionary ... if a teacher always tell you "Yihou zai shuo ba" (by the way my favourite chinese sentence now) and even at the end of the term doesnt tell you how tu use one
 
End of Part 1