I started learning Mandarin Chinese on Coursera today. We are being taught in Pinyin, the romanized alphabet. This is much simpler than having to learn Chinese characters right away.
The first thing we learned is the way tones or changes in tone affect the words. This concept is similar to how in English, we raise the tone at the end of the sentence to signify a question. The difference is that Chinese tone changes happen during a single vowel. It’s really intriguing.
Learning Chinese from English is very difficult in comparison to learning Spanish from English. The are many sounds in Chinese and some sound very similar. I will have to review the first lesson many times just to get the basic building blocks in place.