Mandarin is actually pretty easy. the only reason English speakers find it so difficult is the use of tones; English speakers are not used to restricting the tones we can use, or even acknowledging them as part of speech. We're more used to looking at emphasis and literal-ness providing the meaning, like the difference between
sure we'll go ( emphasis on 'sure' implying great agreement and enthusiasm. )
sure we'll go ( emphasis on 'we' implies a question of 'but will anyone else?' )
sure we'll go ( emphasis on 'go' implying that other things may be expected of us, but all we mean to do is show up )
this of course isn't the same thing AT ALL, but it's the closest English comes to affording meaning to a word based on vocalization. other than that, context should tell you what is meant. like the famous example of ma(mother) and ma(horse), if you're talking about going out to the stable to feed your ma, most people will deduce that your mother doesn't live in the stable or allow you to ride her for several hours a day (depending) also, unless you fuck up ALL the tones in your sentence, most people will know what you're talking about, and if you watch movies in mandarin you will see that the tones are sometimes barely distinguishable, it's really not that strict.

so all we have to do is learn what the tones sound like, and then learn which words they go with to mean what. Once you're familiar with the idea of tones, the rest is easy. Mandarin often displays a very very similar sentence structure to English in that they both tend to go "subject-verb-object"

I eat rice
wo chi mi-fan

In comparison, Japanese pronunciation is much easier for English speakers but the grammar is way, way tougher, as it incorporates a lot more particles and measure words as well as some odd tenses. Well, the tenses aren't especially odd, but they can be difficult for english speakers, as we don't usually learn how to conjugate verbs in our own language, we just kind of pick them up intuitively. There are also irregular verbs in Japanese. In Mandarin, you use a particle to indicate past tense, and there are only two tenses, present and past, everything else is contextual.

the other issue is the writing system or hanzi 汉字.
each character has a sound, though sometimes more than one, attached to it, and a particular order in which each stroke is written. But there are very handy general rules and all characters are made of a series of the same basic strokes.. I think there are about 15ish in total, I'm too lazy to check. once you know a good number of solitary characters, you can put them together to form more complicated ideas. like the character zhong (jong) 中 means middle, and the character wen (more like wun) 文 means language or grammar, so together 中文 means Chinese. you only need something like 3000 characters to be more or less literate and be able to read newspapers and stuff, there are something like 6-8000 in common use, and if you know those you can read stuff like Mao's little red book and more classical literature. we learn about 30 characters a week in my class, which some kids are really bogged down by because they're taking other classes. I have no trouble with it, because Mandarin is my only class and I have allll the time in the world to study haha! in comparison, the japanese students only learn like.. 60 throughout the whole course, but again, the grammar they do will be much more difficult.

and that song is a cover of a song from a video game. I guess it still takes work and intelligence to compose it and make it sound like the original enough to be recognizable but different enough not to be a straight up ripoff, personally I have a lot of reverence for electronic composers, I'm just used to my dad the music snob and all his dickbag opinions on music.


anyway enough of that.

Rosetta Stone is a brilliant program, I have used it, there is not a word of English in it and it teaches you the same way you learn your first language, by showing you pictures and saying words and getting you to repeat them. at first, you won't know what some words are supposed to mean, but you see them in different contexts and then you start to know what they mean. it's really good, but THE price is very high, some people might choose to download or PIRATE it, because it's free but they may then need to keep the authorities at BAY somehow.

NOT RAMBLING ANYMOAR NOW. MY DAY WAS FINE THANX <3

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it's the internet! who the fuck am I going to impress!