The Trouble With Learning Chinese

Like most things I'm interested in I tend to do a few power-learning sessions on learning mandarin. This makes me knowledgeable in the topic but for a seemingly short period of time.

This is great if you're trying to impress (or bore) a few people with an exotic language you've picked up but the long term stability of the knowledge is far from stable. So after, say, three months or so, I tend to have another power-learning session but there's often a problem with the learning curve, as it it somehow lost its flexibility and become more of a learning corner.

An example of this is when I'm revising various greetings and whatnot. Half of it I'll remember and feel the urge to skip over all that but then I'll notice a few things I should most definitely recap. So I need to trudge through all the stuff I know, just in case I miss important things I need to learn, stuff that didn't stick into memory the previous time(s).

The trouble with learning Chinese, a language and culture I have been in love with since I was 12, is that you're not actually learning just one language. Much of the the time you need to learn another utility language in order to learn the main one. Here's an example (note: Chinese font must be installed onto your operating system to view this):

~ After leaning that this sentence is translated to 'Goodbye, miss' it's still not easy to read it aloud in Mandarin or any other Chinese dialect. This is mostly to do with the fact that there is no indication in the characters in how to actually pronounce them. Unlike words in European languages that are built up using a small set of characters, usually from A - Z or similar, the Chinese character set reaches well over 10,000 characters in size.

To an English reader, if you have just read a word you've never seen before, but have said it perhaps a hundred times before in your life, it is fairly easy to associate the written word with phonic sounds and then into the spoken word with ease of association. With Chinese, it is not so simple. This is mostly to do with the fact that a character or word written in Chinese is pronounced differently all over the country depending on the region but the written meaning would remain exactly the same. Good news for newspapers and authors, bad news for radio and TV.

In order to read that example out loud we need to know how to pronounce it. Luckily each character has a guide associated with it. The most common guide is called 'Pinyin'.
The pinyin with the example is:

Now that's a big help. However we'd find that 'zài jiàn, xiáojie' is not as easy to pronounce as you'd think if you'd never learnt pinyin before. For a start 'zài' is pronounce a bit like: 'ds-aye'

Another thing overlooked might be the tone marker above the 'a' in 'zài'. This means that this particular character is said in the 4th tone.

4th tone?

There are four tones in Mandarin. Tone in English matters little. One place it often makes a difference is a rising tone at the end of a sentence to make a statement into a question. Saying zài in a different tone would make the whole sentence mean something completely different.

The 4th tone is a sinking tone. So 'zài' here should start being pronounced at a high tone, then falling to a lower tone by the end of the phonic.

The tones are as follows:
1st: High continuous tone
2nd: Ascending tone
3rd: Starts mid-tone, dips low but rises to a higher tone at the end.
4th: Descending

One other thing that might cause trouble is that the example text is in 'Simplified' text. A few thousand characters where re-designed to help increase literacy during the 1950s and 60s by the People's Republic of China's government by simplifying some of the details, however 'Traditional' Characters are often still used for aesthetic reasons, especially in calligraphy.
The example I've given could be written as:

Adding to the confusion.
The above example is not that altered. Some words are more difficult to pick out though.
个 and 個 are the exact same word, only the former is simplified.