Challenges

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.