Tones in Chinese are tricky even to me as a native Chinese speaker. We have various dialects and accents spoken by people from different parts of China, and some dialects have no tones at all, like Hunan dialect. I think that partially explain why we are used to look at subtitles when we watch tv shows or films. I understand learning tones can be frustrating for learners, but please be aware that we Chinese can, sometimes do, understand each other without tones or with different tones of different dialects; so please don’t think that is a weak but accept it as interesting part of this language. We understand each other more in the context than by tones and grammars, the same sentence can means different in different contexts. We have some patterns but it doesn’t work the way English grammar and patterns work. Hope it helps a bit.;)

I empathise with you. End of day, it is familiarisation and practice. I started learning Chinese and English since I was a child. It was tough learning the Chinese characters. Tones were basically memorised together with the characters. For English, it was rather troublesome with so many rules, agreement, tenses,..... However with lots of practice, I overcame these difficulties. I went on to learn French and other languages. I hope you will enjoy more and more in learning Chinese and Spanish. (:

Human beings are very good at pattern recognition. We are excellent at this, and luckily most language learning is basically just pattern recognition. If you could see a spread-sheet of the words and phrases that you use across a year, you would be shocked at how much we repeat ourselves. But this is also a good thing. Rather than trying to memorize rules and logic (unless that is what you truly enjoy), try approaching it from this perspective: These particular humans make these particular sounds in this particular situation. Then copy them. If you do this enough, over a period of time, it will all click into place. I, strangely enough, enjoy studying grammar, but most of my progress in the languages I have studied came from simple daily interactions with people in the language I was learning. Your brain will piece it together later. I do think Spanish is easier than Chinese, but it all depends on the motivation for learning it. Also, the goal is not perfection, it is simply to understand and to be understood. After that, it is merely a task of cleaning things up. Good luck!

😃Good morning! Thank you for inviting me to answer this questions. I usually interpret the tones in Chinese as roller coasters. You can imagine the feeling like →↗↘↗↘. And for memorizing tones, my advice is to try to pronounce a few sentences every day until you get them exactly right and there are no mistakes. Maybe You will feel it difficult at first, so you can choose shorter ones with fewer sentences, and make it harder as you feel comfortable. This will help you form muscle memory.Then You can speak more easily when you see the sentence.