> I surely hope not, learning English is much much easier than Mandarin for a good 60% of the world : anyone speaking a language using the latin alphabet As we

> I surely hope not, learning English is much much easier than Mandarin for a good 60% of the world : anyone speaking a language using the latin alphabet As well as the writing system, there is another factor: Mandarin is tonal, English isn't. If your native language is non-tonal (true of roughly 50% of the world population), trying to learn a tonal language is an extra challenge on top of the general challenge of trying to learn another language. Your brain just isn't used to considering tone as semantically significant.