There are many reasons why Chinese is difficult for English speakers to learn.
(1) There are many thousands of characters, so you're effectively learning two languages at once: spoken Mandarin and written Chinese. Reading Chineasy might help you get started won't help much after that. Alphabetic languages have at most a few dozen characters.
(2) There are no cognates. German and Swedish, for example, have lots of cognates recognizable to English speakers.
(3) There are very few loan words. There are lots of English words in Japanese, and lots of Japanese words in English.
(4) There's a huge cultural gap.
(5) There are different languages all called Chinese. Learning Putonghua won't help you much with pre-revolutionary (1911) texts, as they were written in Classical Chinese.
(6) Unless you go to China, the Chinese people you meet will usually speak better English than you will Mandarin, so conversations will lapse into English.
On the plus side: The tones are the least of your problems, and pronouncing Chinese isn't much harder than many other languages. Chinese grammar is dead simple. It has a fixed word order, which is similar to English, and there's no inflexion. I'm also told that once you know a certain number of characters (still several thousand), you can easily guess and infer unfamiliar words. The Practical Chinese Reader series stops using English altogether once you reach Book 5. (It's been superseded by more modern texts.)
(1) There are many thousands of characters, so you're effectively learning two languages at once: spoken Mandarin and written Chinese. Reading Chineasy might help you get started won't help much after that. Alphabetic languages have at most a few dozen characters.
(2) There are no cognates. German and Swedish, for example, have lots of cognates recognizable to English speakers.
(3) There are very few loan words. There are lots of English words in Japanese, and lots of Japanese words in English.
(4) There's a huge cultural gap.
(5) There are different languages all called Chinese. Learning Putonghua won't help you much with pre-revolutionary (1911) texts, as they were written in Classical Chinese.
(6) Unless you go to China, the Chinese people you meet will usually speak better English than you will Mandarin, so conversations will lapse into English.
On the plus side: The tones are the least of your problems, and pronouncing Chinese isn't much harder than many other languages. Chinese grammar is dead simple. It has a fixed word order, which is similar to English, and there's no inflexion. I'm also told that once you know a certain number of characters (still several thousand), you can easily guess and infer unfamiliar words. The Practical Chinese Reader series stops using English altogether once you reach Book 5. (It's been superseded by more modern texts.)