I'm not a beginning learner - I grew up in a Chinese household with weekly lessons from a young age. However, this is still a far cry from real, immersive learn

I'm not a beginning learner - I grew up in a Chinese household with weekly lessons from a young age. However, this is still a far cry from real, immersive learning, and I've recently recommitted to learning the language more fully. If you don't mind being thoroughly unable to read or write the language, you can ignore the ideograms. I've found that spoken Chinese and written Chinese differ quite significantly anyway in grammatical convention, word choice, and concision, so it kind of feels like learning two separate languages with overlapping vocabulary sometimes. Of course, you'll probably still want to learn _some_ ideograms so you can navigate around, but luckily English translations are widely displayed in China nowadays. Spoken Chinese is really only challenging because of the tones; the rest is vocabulary and a _small_ amount of grammar. Written Chinese is challenging because of the need to recognize thousands of characters, and the general concision of the written language. If you're going to focus on spoken language, you'll have to get good at the tones - there's no way around that. I lucked out by hearing Chinese [Mandarin] spoken consistently from a young age, but this will be a big challenge for people who only speak English (or any number of other Western European languages).