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Howdy

China has been my home for over 4 years. In that time, I have managed to learn the language at a decent level and want to share with you guys whether I think Chinese is difficult to learn or not.

From my experience, there are aspects of Chinese that are easier than English, and other aspects that make it difficult.

Why Chinese Can Be Easy

No prefixes or suffixes. Instead, certain characters are added to sentences to indicate whether an action has been completed. For example, the character “了” (le) is usually added at the end of a sentence to indicate that an action has been completed. The character “要” (yào) can be added before a verb to indicate that you are going to do something.
No plural forms of nouns. Similar to part 1, certain characters are added to indicate that more of one thing exists. As a result, you do not need to remember the singular and plural forms of a noun because the plural form will just have a generic character added after the noun to indicate more than one. For example, the character “我” (wǒ ) means "me" or "I". However, if you add the character “们” (men) after it to make “我们”, the two characters mean "we". The same rule applies for other nouns.
No verb conjugation. A verb does not change based on tense. There are no past, present or future tenses of a verb. The verb stays the same but like I said in part 1, certain characters are added to indicate whether an action will be, is currently happening, or has been completed.

Why Chinese Can Be Difficult

Chinese is a tonal language. Chinese has 4 tones. It is difficult to properly pronounce each character with the proper tone. When you change the tone, you change the meaning. Even some words with the same tone can mean different things and be represented by different characters. This can be really confusing. The characters “要”and “药” (yào) both sound identical. The first character means "want" and the second character means "medicine". When talking to others, you have to understand the context in order to realize which one they are saying.
Too many accents and dialects. Practically every city and province has it's own accent and dialect. This can make conversations with many people difficult to understand. The only people that really speak "Standard Chinese" are news anchors. The average person will speak with their own flavour and neighbouring cities can have different dialects. For example, I live less than 1 hour away from a city called Tangshan. However, when I go there, I find that they have a really unusual dialect that is difficult for me to understand even though they live fairly close to my city.

Overall, I think anybody with motivation to study Chinese will succeed in learning the language at a decent level. I actually don't think my Chinese is that good because I feel like it should be better for the amount of time that I spent here. I studied a lot in my first year in China, but once I had enough fluency to get by and have casual conversations, buy things and travel, I lost a lot of motivation to keep studying. However, recently I have started studying again because I think Chinese will be an extremely important language to know in the near future and it would be a damn shame if I didn't become at least semi-fluent while in this country. China's economic power is changing the world as we know it and I think those that can adapt by learning how to speak Chinese will benefit immensely.

That's all for now.