Chinese isn’t that bad to learn to speak. The tones are a little tricky, but the grammar is simplicity itself after you’ve learned a handful of quirks. It’s literacy that presents an enormous challenge: thousands and thousands of characters! However, literacy will also allow you to read things written by a speaker of any Chinese dialect, while the same is not true of learning only to speak Mandarin or Cantonese or what have you.
Chinese isn’t that bad to learn to speak. The tones are a little tricky, but the grammar is simplicity itself after you’ve learned a handful of quirks. It’s literacy that presents an enormous challenge: thousands and thousands of characters! However, literacy will also allow you to read things written by a speaker of any Chinese dialect, while the same is not true of learning only to speak Mandarin or Cantonese or what have you.