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 At the end of the day Chinese is just another language and like any language you will need to be committed to learning it if you want to succeed. Chinese might look intimidating at first, mainly because of the characters, but for each challenge there is an advantage and bellow you will find some of the main concepts about Chinese that you need to keep in mind before you get started.
Also, remember that everyone is different and a book that worked for one person might not work for another. The first task will be for you to find the learning method (book, teacher and school) that truly works for you and that matches your personality the best!
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The Chinese grammar is much simpler. Unlike many European languages, Chinese has no irregular verbs or noun plurals to learn, because words have only a single form, with no suffixes for tense, number, case, etc. (There are some particles which work somewhat like tense endings, but they always take the same form, no matter what they are added to).
Chinese has the same word order as English: SVO. There is a large use of placing verbs at the end with a helper verb, but we have similar structures in English too, example: please have something…. be/ done.
Mandarin’s learning curve is the opposite of the English one. The more you learn the less you will need to rely on dictionaries and everything will become self-explanatory. The opposite is true for English, once you’ve mastered the basics, you have to upgrade to an advanced dictionary to learn even more words.
For example in a specific field like paleontology the names of dinosaurs are difficult to remember and spell in English (unless you’re a 6 year old boy) but in Chinese they are actually quite easy to remember and you could easily find a 24 year old office worker able to recall the names of many popular dinosaurs.
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 There are a few possible syllables (400+) and several tones. Chinese is a tone language, different pitch patterns do not just add emotional color, as in English; they actually distinguish one word from another. For example a simple word like “ma” could mean “horse” or “mother” depending on the tone that you use. This often leads to misunderstandings on which a lot of Chinese humor is based.
The typical stage comedy will portray a farmer from the countryside coming to the city and trying to get his way around using all the wrong tones. His accent leads to misunderstandings that often are quite funny e.g. I came to the city riding my “mother” instead of riding my “horse”!
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The writing system may be hard to learn, though there is nothing conceptually difficult about it; there is just a lot to memorize. There are 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters in Modern Chinese. To read and understand 90% of Chinese article, you need to learn at least 1,000+ common characters. Fortunately, Chinese is much easier to read than to write, and if you can recognize Chinese character and master their pronunciation (Pinyin), you will be able to easily input the characters into computer and print them on paper.
Chinese shares very little vocabulary with European languages, so speakers of these languages have to work harder than if they were learning another European language. But as mentioned above, Chinese has advantages on speaking and understanding words on a specific field.
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