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This is from hellochinese, the mandarin learning app.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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I'm learning Mandarin right now as well, and in some ways it's much easier than other languages I've learned. Grammar is pretty straightforward, there's not conjugation or tenses to worry about either. If you learn a word, you just have to learn it once, there aren't any variations. The whole thing with tones is largely overstated I find. Even if you get the tones wrong, people will understand you from the context. Where it gets trickier is with writing because the character based system is genuinely more difficult to learn than an alphabet. The characters are basically words written in two dimensions instead of one. Most are composed of subcharacters of which there is a common set of. But the upside here is that once you learn them, reading is a lot faster because each one is basically like an icon. So, you can scan through text a lot easier than with words all written out left to right.
It was always the tones that made me anxious about trying to learn it; I'm glad to hear that's overstated.
Same, I'm basically tone deaf and just assumed that Mandarin wouldn't be accessible to me. But then I finally decided to give it a go, and turned out to not be much of an issue at all. I also find that it's easier to remember the tones in a context of a sentence. It's a lot like when you put an accent on different words when you speak English, so you can just memorize the cadence of the sentence, and you'll start learning the tones implicitly.
I've just decided to postpone the writing for now. If you're mainly going to be using a keyboard, then they convert pinyin into the correct characters anyway. When learning I turn pinyin off tho, so I can get used to fully recognizing the characters for reading, even if I couldn't draw them from scratch.
That's the approach I took as well. For the first year, I just stuck with pinyin, and then once I got comfortable enough conversationally, I started making some effort to learn the characters. I find drawing them out really helps you memorize them so you can recognize them later, so even if you're going to write using pinyin, practising writing is still useful. And it does get easier, because there is a fixed set of symbols that all the characters are composed of. So, once you learn the first batch, it only gets easier from there. But yeah, putting that off is the correct call.