It’s hard, yet it’s very satisfying.
My first language is Indonesian, which has no similarity at all with Mandarin Chinese.
The easiest part is reading and writing. I can pass the HSK 3 test with a breeze in the reading and writing part. You just need to have the “Pleco” app and your textbook side-by-side, recite the vocabs regularly and diligently, and translate and learn many Chinese songs (e.g. 童话，告白气球，后来，这么了).
It’s time consuming yet it’s very rewarding to be able to understand a little bit of Chinese.
The hardest part is speaking and listening. I have no one in my environment that can speak Mandarin. My mother can speak Fuzhounese but that dialect is somewhat unintelligible to Mandarin 普通话. All of my friends speak Indonesian and English. Without any chance to explore speaking Mandarin, it’s kinda useless.
Likewise, I can’t immerse myself to listen to direct Chinese conversation. Only my grandparents speak them, whom I rarely meet. Resorting on listening easy songs and audioclips, I’m easily bewildered with the tonality of Mandarin language. For example, the word “qing” can mean a lot of things (请，晴，清，情，青，轻， etc). As my vocabulary is still limited at around the HSK-3 and HSK-4 level, distinguishing the correct “qing” is not that easy.
(Imagine reading this poem without the correct tone: 石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。氏时时适市视狮。十时，适十狮适市。 是时，适施氏适市。It will be hilarious.)
Nonetheless, the best part of learning Mandarin is its PHONETIC SCRIPT. Am I crazy for revering that thousands of characters to memorize? Nah! There’s a concrete reason for that.
Writing the Hanzi 汉子 is like an art. To swift your pen in a meticulous direction to create beautiful strokes is very aesthetically pleasing. Most interestingly, the Chinese script is very meaningful of historical aspects. Imagine that the every Chinese characters can be understood by the same meaning through different spoken languages (Mandarin, Wuzhounese, Hokkien, Cantonese, Fuzhounese, Teochew). For example, 我 is pronounced {wo3} in Mandarin but is pronounced {ngo5} in Cantonese.Many of these spoken languages/dialects are unintelligible to one another yet they share the same writing system. Cool!
In essence, I feel that Chinese is hard and daunting to learn, yet it gives me personal satisfaction and sense of art.
( Trying to learn one of Jay Chou’s most popular song – 等你下课！）
( Another song – 那些年 – containing challenging vocabularies！)