My difficulties when learning Chinese

A simple explanation of my initial struggles

I'm practicing Chinese again and I want to talk about the difficulties I'm encountering in the process. Me and Shirley have been tweeting about who speaks better Chinese, but it's quite hard to say at this point, because I don't really know how good she speaks and she doesn't know how good I speak.

I can say I'm a beginner. I never really studied Chinese: I mean going to a course, pass tests and sticking my head in books for hours. Nope. Some 3 years ago my ex started to teach me few phrases, but I really learned the most during my few months long stay in Malaysia this year, because I lived with a Chinese family. I listened to them and repeated it and if I mispronounced, they corrected me. I also learned a lot from kids and TV, because they always watched Taiwanese shows. But I also had a small notebook, where I would write down some phrases and learned them by heart. The last thing that helped me to improve my Chinese, especially the written one, was when I got my Nokia from Malaysia, that allows me to switch from English to Chinese when writing text messages. I learned so many Chinese characters that way and I'm now able to write a good text message in Chinese. [*Yay!]

Here's the things I learned in the process:

1. Chinese can't be translated 1 to 1 into English. I had to learn how Chinese would say it, not how I would say it.
2. Basic Chinese is easy to master, but the advanced one is very complicated
3. It is easier to understand spoken Chinese than speaking it yourself
4. It is easier to read written Chinese than writing it yourself
5. The hardest thing to learn for a non-Chinese are the 4 tones, still giving me headaches

Nevertheless, I'm not discouraged. It's hard, yes, but it is doable. But then, when I thought things are going fine, there's another thing: Traditional Chinese. For me simplified Chinese was already hard, but I got a grip of it. But Traditional seems like a whole new language. This difference only applies to writing the Chinese characters: Traditional has more strokes and it's therefore harder to draw. Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore use simplified Characters, while Hong Kong and Taiwan use traditional. See few examples for yourself:

gè: classifier for people - SC: 个 TC: 個
huì: will (future tense) - SC: 会 TC: 會
kāi: open - SC: 开 TC: 開
guǎng: wide - SC: 广 TC: 廣
tǐ: body - SC: 体 TC: 體

So now you see that I am indeed very poor, but I'm still eager to learn. First of all: I have a great teacher. And secondly: I have plans for next year, where my Chinese knowledge will be of essence. I'm happy that I'm able to understand basic questions and tell something about myself, plus I can utter something very silly and make people laugh. That's ok for now, but I need to advance and learn more words and phrases, if I want to live in a Chinese environment again. So wish me good luck!

Those of you who learned (or are learning) Chinese, what difficulties did you encounter?

[My LEARN CHINESE page][Photo source: Chen Yue Tong]