/s
This is from hellochinese, the mandarin learning app.
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.