> The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as chi

> The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a tenth of the time. I'm not sure what you mean by this - that is very much person-dependent. As a primary English speaker, I was near-fluent in German before attempting Mandarin, and I found the inflection and tonal side of the language relatively trivial, whereas writing/reading (and generally rote vocabulary) have always been a struggle for me (similar experience across attempts to learn Latin, German, French, and Mandarin).