Learn to speak Chinese today
i have always had an interest in the chinese culture and would like to learn chinese, How hard is it to learn the chinese language? How long roughly would it take?
Thank you 
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If you’re still in school, I would start taking classes ASAP. If you’re no longer in school, I would try to find night classes or weekend classes if you really are dedicated to learning the language. It’s extremely difficult to pick up without a teacher guiding you along… and it’s not really one of those languages that can be "picked up."
I’ve spent the last three years of college studying Chinese and have gone to China each summer because I’m terrified that the three month summer vacation would cause my Chinese to disappear. However, it’s a very rewarding language to learn, and once you get a basic understanding of characters, you can frequently piece meanings together. The other day, a friend sent me an e-mail using the characters for "hot" and "point (like a period)" and I figured out that it meant hot issue or important issue/point. Things like this get more and more common as you start to learn more and more characters.
After three years, I’m still no where near where I want to be, but I’m getting better. Without something forcing you to stay dedicated, unless you’re EXTREMELY determined to learn Chinese, it’s hard to keep pushing through the learning process. CDs and books are helpful, but so much of Chinese involves listening, so I would really recommend finding classes or getting a private tutor-at least for the beginning. After that, you could probably branch out a bit and do things like Chinesepod.com with online tutors.
The hard thing is:
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. And even though Chinese shares vocabulary with several Asian languages (especially Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese), this shared vocabulary is often difficult to recognize.
The writing system is definitely hard to learn, though there is nothing conceptually difficult about it; there is just a lot to memorize.
Chinese is a tone language–that is, different pitch patterns do not just add emotional color, as in English; they actually distinguish one word from another. How much of a problem this is depends a lot on the individual student: students with a good ear do not necessarily find this a difficulty.
Easy thing is:
Unlike many European languages, Chinese has no irregular verbs or noun plurals to learn, because words have only a single form, with no suffixes for tense, number, case, etc. (There are some particles which work somewhat like tense endings, but they always take the same form, no matter what they are added to.)
Chinese speakers are usually tolerant of a foreigner’s mistakes–perhaps because so many Chinese themselves speak standard Mandarin Chinese as a second language.
Additionally, here is Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency:
ARABIC, CHINESE, JAPANESE, &KOREAN- 1320
Hope this helped
Can’t be too bad billions of Chinese have learned it. Actually having a Chinese friend I am told the hard part is learning to read and write it
It’s soo confusing :S
as easy as English…
Learning Chinese is difficult or not, it depends on the way you are learning, where you are and how hard you work.
If you study chinese in china and you make lots of chinese friends, learning Chinese is very easy,then you may speak fluently chinese in three months.
And if you can’t come to china and you haven’t lot’s of chinese friends, then you’d better pay more attention to your methods of learning chinese. My suggestion is that you can learn chinese online. Through this way you can have a very professional chinese teacher. This can save you a lot of time and energy. You know the teacher will cut your coat according to your cloth. By this way, if you work hard and come to the courses on time, you may speak fluently chinese after you finish all the courses.
Echineselearning is one of the best chineselearning school. You may take a free trial to see wether it suit to you.
You can visit:
http://echineselearning.com/free-trial/index.html?ecl=ptEEEEEEya081002
Chinese has 4 tones and that’s the most difficult part of westerners. Try listen to the tones and see if you can tell the difference?
http://www.sayjack.com/learn/chinese/pinyin
If you can, then Chinese won’t be too hard for you.