[lingoberry]

Where is your data on Chinese not being "that" hard? According to US Military studies it's about 10 times as hard to learn as another Germanic language. In my experience, being fluent in two languages and learning Chinese, it's crazy difficult. Everybody has difficulty with different aspects of the language, for me pronunciation and tones are easy, but the ambiguity and "same soundedness" of the words really makes it difficult for me to remember anything. I know that if I put as much effort into learning German as I have Chinese, I would be pretty fluent by now. Instead I'm a still complete newb.

[westiseast]

It's my personal experience. I don't really know how you quantify a language as being 10x as hard? Do you need to be 10x more clever or work 10x more? The American foreign diplomat service routinely trains its staff to relative fluency in a couple of years.

As with my other comments, taking Chinese as a whole it is difficult, but breaking it down into components, some parts are crazy hard and parts are quite easy. I think once you get past the hump of becoming used to tones and some of the initial grammar weirdness (for English speakers) then there aren't many grammar complexities, vocabulary is very repetitive and even poor pronunciation isn't as big a deal as you think - witness Mark making lots of tone errors but being understood quite well.