Learning Chinese

Sometimes I have to ask myself, why am I studying Chinese? Why did I have to pick maybe the hardest language in the world to learn? I feel like I have made a lot of progress in 2 1/2 months, so much so, that I have gotten to the point where it is getting really difficult. I've never had to study much to do well in school but recently the two hours of studying a night that I have been doing is quickly becoming not enough to keep up with everything (that doesn't include my two hours every Mon, Wed Fri that I have my tutor). So, next week, I am going to have to kick everything up a notch and really buckle down.

A few things of note about Chinese:

Chinese grammar is considerably easier then English grammar, however, I have found that since I don't know anything about English grammar it is hindering me in learning Chinese grammar and Chinese. In fact, my Chinese tutor knows English grammar better then me, granted she was an English major in college but still. So, I have begun a quick crash course on English grammar to help me understand it.

Also, when you speak your native language you don't realize how many words there really are. That changes quickly when you study a foreign language. For Chinese particularly, and why it is one of the hardest languages to learn, is that you don't just learn the a word, its meaning and pronunciation but you have to learn the character, how to write the character (which is different from recognizing it), its meaning and its pronunciation. The pronunciation is also different from most languages because Chinese is a tonal language. What that means is that one word like (ma) can have many different meanings depending on how it's pronounced and the context it is used. Chinese has four tones and a neutral sound. So for example Ma depending on the tone can mean: mom, horse, hemp, to scold or be used as a question particle. Of course, each of them have different characters which makes them easily distinguishable but in spoken Chinese its all based on the tone. 

For those who don't know much about the Chinese language there is just a small taste of what I have to deal with...lucky me!