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> As for the second sentence, for a person with no background in tonal languages, learning the tones in Mandarin is extremely challenging.

The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously. Really, they aren't that important. If you screw up a tone in context you'll still be understood. Focus on words and grammar first, pronunciation isn't that important since most people have dialects. Cantonese people speaking mandarin can be quite entertaining though.

When I first moved to Beijing, I had problems getting the taxi drivers to understand me since I wasn't putting the 'er' behind everything, which is local dialect. Suffice it to say, I now speak with a Beijing accent.

"The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously. Really, they aren't that important."

One of my friends, who is native Chinese insisted the tones are critical. I asked her how they understand lyrics in music since the tones get dropped in favor of the melody.

Turns out the tones aren't that critical.

> The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously.

I'd like to add that this depends on where you are. The Taiwanese almost completely merge s/sh, z/zh, c/ch and also n/ng in some cases. You cannot distinguish between 4 and 10 without tones here. I have often heard that the Taiwanese rely more on tones, and Beijingers rely more on the actual sounds (as in Western languages).

Also, most of the time when people do not understand me, it is precisely because of the tones. I still often encounter situations where a friend will repeat my last sentence character for character, making me think "that's what I said!!", but apparently I didn't.

Reading is super easy, handwriting is a useless but fun hobby. Pronunciation is super tough.

(I am German, though - but if anything, I feel that we have it easier to pronounce Mandarin sounds.)

Eventually, you just start getting the tones right because you speak and listen so much. I can get by native sometimes (limited only by my bad vocabulary) and I've never study tones consciously for words I learn.

When I'm really tired, I sometimes change my 'sh' to 's' and sound more southern. Nobody really cares. However, I do screw up sometimes when saying words like "jichang" and "jingcheng," and will wind up on the wrong expressway in the taxi. This has not much to do with tones though.

> According to the Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin and Cantonese (you didn't specify what kind of Chinese) are among the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker.

But their criteria is the study time required to reach proficiency in both spoken and written language. Arguably, Chinese and Japanese wouldn't take so long to learn if they had simpler writing systems.

I will second this. A friend was trying to teach me the four different tones of the sh syllable, I had no clue what the hell was going on, they all sounded exactly the same.

I'm not even a native English speaker, I'm Greek, which also isn't tonal.

Interestingly enough, ancient Greek [1] did happen to be tonal even though modern Greek is not. More specifically, it had had pitch accent [2] which is somewhat different than fully tonal languages like Chinese but more involved than languages like English which have stress accent.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytonic_Greek

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent

Ah, yes. The pronunciation changed over the years and nobody in recent memory can remember when Greek was tonal (I'm not entirely sure when this was), but we got rid of it about 60 years ago? My dad can remember writing in polytonic, but it didn't make any difference to pronunciation by then.