When it comes to learning Chinese people often tend to get intimidated by the fear factor that surrounds it.
However it is their approach more than anything else which is faulty.
Learning Chinese is basically like learning any other language, it takes patience, dedication and perseverance to succeed at it.
It must also be realized that Chinese, like any other language has its peculiarities and odd angles.
For instance, Chinese is a tonal and pictorial language.
Also it has 40,000 characters which are used for expression.
This is something that people acclimatized to the phonetic western scripts find very daunting.
However with the right approach such difficulties can be bypassed.
For a start it is very important for a student starting out to gain an understanding of the tones and the pronunciation of the words in Mandarin.
Mandarin Chinese has 4 basic tones which are the flat tone, the rising tone, the falling rising tone and the falling tone.
Each tone fulfills a function and even the slightest change in configuration of tones in a word can completely change its meaning.
An example here is ma which is spoken with a flat tone means mother while má spoken with a falling tone means a hemp.
A system especially designed to aid people with English background is the Pinyin script.
Pinyin was passed as the official Romanization of the Chinese script in 1958 and has been recognized in Singapore and the American Library Association and the US Library of Congress.
Using Pinyin you can afford to overlook the characterization in Chinese while focusing on the verbal expression instead.
After you have gained sufficient understanding of the tone system of Chinese you can move on to the characters.
This way you can be assured of results while gradually picking up the written language to.