Mandarin - My Pespective

I have been learning Mandarin at home for the better part of a year now (on/off- taking breaks as is necessary as my family situation dictates)
All and all, I have to say that whilst it is a challenging language for native english speakers to learn, I don't believe it to be the insurmountable barricade that most people claim that it is.

In Australia, roughly 94% of students drop out of learning Mandarin before the completion of their course.
Of those who choose to stay on as students, the majority were found to have asian or han ethnicity.

I have heard a litany of excuses as to why one shouldn't attempt to learn the language or why the language is too hard for most people to grasp.
To give a more recent example, one woman (who claimed to know Arabic and various other languages) made the claim that if one doesn't have a musical background or hasn't learned Mandarin since early childhood, they probably won't be able to tackle the language (or words to a similar effect).
In my own personal experience, this simply isn't true.

Others have warned me that Mandarin doesn't have an alphabet, and that one needs to master at least 2000-3000 characters just to to be able to read a newspaper, and about 8000 to be on par with the average ethnic speaker.

It sounds daunting, doesn't it?

By comparison, Japanese is more widely offered as a language choice to students here in Australia, yet the Japanese language (as a whole) makes the notion of memorising 2 or 3 thousand Hanzi look like a cakewalk.

In the Japanese language, there are of course, more than one alphabet. and the false sense of confidence that is soon to follow the memorisation of all Hiragana, Katakana and various Kanji.

For starters, Japanese grammar littered with exceptions, the counting system is scattered, honorifics are a 'polite' pain and omyomi and kunyomi readings strike me as an unnecessary complication and an afterthought that was slapped together at an eleventh hour pyjama party.
It is a lifetime commitment for the average foreigner, one with many pitfalls and many traps.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to deter anyone from learning Japanese. Just please don't be lulled into a false sense of security if you're learning it for reasons of 'wanting to read a manga book' or getting a Japanese girlfriend.
These are phases and they will pass, many years before you will ever be semi-fluent in the language.

Mandarin in comparison, will also likely take a long time to master.
I guess the major difference I have encountered between the two languages is that Mandarin builds on itself in that, the more characters you know, the more words and phrases you'll soon be able to form. There are very few 'dead ends' so to speak (with the exception of various idioms, which I am still attempting to wrap my head around).

But what about the tones! FIVE TONES, I hear you say!
I won't lie when I say that the beginning is definitely a steep learning curve. It took me about two months to be able to even hear the difference in tones, or notice that i was saying them correctly in speech without even really thinking about it.
After a while, it becomes instinctual, and you don't really 'actively listen' for them anymore.

So if Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world, it's grammar system is much simpler than most languages on offer in many Australian universities and schools, then why is it not more widely available in terms of an actual nationally certified qualification?

The conspiracy theorist within me dares to speculate that it's for similar reasons that Russian isn't widely offered.
Japan, Spain, Italy and France are considered 'western allies' whereas China and Russia are depicted as trouble-makers, spies and bullies by our media.

This is a great shame. It's an even greater shame that so many people believe everything they read without so much as a critical thought.

To sum up, I still have a long way to go in terms of fluency. I've barely touched the tip of the iceberg, but so far, grammar seems somewhat intuitive and largely predictable.

Right now I'm pushing for an equivalent of HSK 3 fluency by mid 2020.

My goal is to reach HSK 4 or above within a year of that timeframe.
Bear in mind that I've only ever taken mock exams (as I cannot travel to complete any form of official certification). I just use these sample exams as a guide to my fluency and how far I have to go.