I have been struggling with the Chinese language all my life. As a young man, I was studying it at university (in addition to other languages and subjects), and I got a degree in it.

To "study" Chinese may mean several things:

- You can just study Mandarin or one of the major Chinese "dialects" (in fact, a different language than Mandarin) like Cantonese up to various levels of proficiency.

- You may have then option of just studying the spoken language by way of its romanization system, Pinyin and ignore the written language with its complex script.

- You may study the modern spoken and written language (Mandarin) with or without additional training in the ancient (mainly the ancient written language also known as "Classical Chinese" that even a modern native speaker of Chinese could not master without additional training for years).

If you have studied both the classical and modern variants of Chinese written and spoken up to a reasonable level of proficiency, you have already gone a long way. But the way is much longer than just that. It takes you a lifetime to study, train and apply.

Some points that may make Chinese language study difficult for a Western foreigner:
- It`s basically pronunciation and the script that would require most of the efforts.
- Basic Grammar is not difficult to handle, you may "get away" with it more easily than with studying French or even English Grammar. At a more advanced level, Chinese Grammar can be quite tricky: There are sentences passive in meaning but without an explicit marker for Passive Voice (English passive sentences always have). There are certain rules when not to use a subject in a Chinese sentence, and in certain Chinese verbs you may find certain parts called "objects" by Chinese grammarians that actually do not function as objects in a Chinese sentence.
- There are certain cultural things in the Chinese language that make it difficult to comprehend for a foreigner if you do not know the basics of Chinese culture - these are certain proverbs consisting of a sequence of four syllables that have a certain meaning and may be often heard in everyday language.
- You need to have "musical" ear to distinguish the various tone levels of a word (syllable) in spoken language.
- You will need to activate your right brain hemisphere in particular when you study the Chinese script. This consists typically of a very large set of graphical symbols that because they are meaning-based appeal to imagination in a way as paintings do. Not everybody´s cup of tea but you will need to train that as a habit to use when memorizing Chinese characters.

There are some other things I could list here, and the list above is not comprehensive (this is an article spontaneously written and not one worked out so well for a scientific journal).

I have translated important texts from Classical Chinese on Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine as well as on religion (Daoism), folk tales and commented on them in my publications. I have written introductory textbooks on the Chinese script and instruction manuals on Chinese Grammar and some more scientific research studies on Contrastive Chinese-English Grammar. I am reading Chinese newspapers daily, and I am mailing with my Chinese friends in Chinese. I began my first studies of Chinese as a student more 30 years ago; and now, at the age of almost 60, I still do not recognise certain characters so easily and I have to consult a special character dictionary like Xinhua Zidian or Ci Hai to look it up. When speaking Chinese, I still notice from time to time that I have used the wrong tonal level when pronouncing a certain Chinese word.

In other words. struggling with Chinese as a foreign language is a life-long process that never ends.