I did about 50 hours of study with Mandarin. It's brutal if you're learning the characters with the language. Not to mention if you self study like me, the pinyin isn't 100% phonetic like you'd imagine it should be. Also it's kind of funny, but when I hear an American speak Chinese, I can understand a lot better than a chinese person saying the same words. It almost feels (to me anyway) like chinese speak very sloppy chinese and slur their words more.
Mandarin. Cantonese is spoken by a tiny fraction of the population though it was the language of my idol Bruce Lee haha.
So going with the flow, eh? Nothing wrong with that! But it would be cool to speak Bruce Lee. Be not the cup, but the water in the cup.
Yeah I cannot do this alone, Chinese is too difficult. Private teacher, who is native Chinese. Spent a month just trying to prounounce the tones correctly. need a native speaker to show you as pinyin is not spelled how it sounds (for example shui is "shway" not shoo-ee; xi = shee, shi = shir, etc..). New Chinese Practical Reader is the text and now on Book 2. Not a language recommended for self study or Rosetta Stone haha.
Well that is because numerous other countries learn English as a second language. This is referring to native spoken languages. But you get further speaking their language then they speaking English.