I know a few words Mandarin, here's my opinion: Language structure: Very simple structure. No conjugation whatsoever. Tense are very simple too. Phonetics: Nothing really difficult here. Some terms sounds strange, 'ch' in 'chi' i.e. - but many Chinese pronounce those wrong too as 'ci'. Tones: ignore them. Meaning comes from context, not from tones. Just copy what you here and you do fine. Sounds: Mandarin is a very poor language when it comes to sounds. It has only about 420 sounds, add the tones then you are at about 1200. That's easy, but difficult is that everything sounds similar and it's difficult to remember structures. It will make more sense when you know more. Characters: To build up character knowledge you need to repeat, repeat, repeat comprehensible test. Get primary school books, start with grade 1. It is possible to build up a few 100 characters in a week or two. But you need to read read read. Words: There is not much logic here, you need to remember that. One character has a meaning, another characters has a meaning. Put together they may have a completely new meaning that does not relate to any of the individual characters. Sentences: It can be hard to catch the meaning, even you know all characters/words in a sentence you will often not get the meaning. Again, read more and from time time have some sentences you really don't get explained to you. Last point: stop complaining that it's difficult. In the end you believe it and it hinders your learning. If you don't learn it it's really your problem and not the problem of the language.

大部分都是声调的问题

the pronunciation of some mandarin words. i have some hard time following the pitch and intonations.

a lot of letters. if i not mistaken chinese have a very big massive of letters. i think it's first and global problem for european students, for example

When people try to write words in pinyin, they are not always spelled the same, an it does not always accurately represent how the word is pronounced. I prefer to learn just by listening firs, then learning the real characters.