I am having Chinese classes on Monday and Wednesday evenings now, and it is tough. Pronunciation is extremely difficult, and that makes everything else challenging as well, from listening comprehension to memorizing vocabulary.

Chinese has more consonants than I am used to, and some of them are very close to each other, making it very hard to tell them apart. Take for example the following three words, which only differ in their consonant (Flash movies taken from the excellent pinyin table over at quickmandarin.com, mouse-over to hear the sound):

Even more tricky are the four tones, a concept that is missing completely in the other languages I know. Depending on how the pitch changes during the syllable, it becomes a different word. Mandarin has four tones, other Chinese dialects have even more (up to nine in Cantonese). Here are the four "ma" again:

Put these two together, and you get twelve very similar syllables with completely different meanings. In fact, since there are so many different sounds, Chinese words are very compact, usually just one or two syllables long. This makes for very short phrases with no redundancy; every syllable counts. In Western languages you can probably skip or mangle half of the sounds and get away with. Not in Chinese.