I agree here, I took several years of Mandarin and the language itself is pretty intuitive, it's just the writing that bogs you down. That said, I learned chara

I agree here, I took several years of Mandarin and the language itself is pretty intuitive, it's just the writing that bogs you down. That said, I learned characters mostly by handwriting- if I had been taught exclusively using a QingPin input system, I could have focused on recognizing more characters than trying to remember stroke counts for each word.