<p>It isn’t hard to speak better Mandarin than a good portion of China’s population, because since so many Chinese citizens speak Cantonese before learning Mandarin, their accent is very bad and very hard to understand to a normal Mandarin speaker. Very frequently you will find Cantonese speakers speaking broken Mandarin. </p>
<p>I find reading and writing to be easier than speaking, and then writing, but there’s hardly a difference. None of them pose too much of a difficulty…but I guess I’ve been around the language longer than a lot of students.</p>
<p>It is very possible to learn to speak and “write” Chinese without ever learning characters, because Pinyin fills in that gap between the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters. AFAIK, most Mandarin speakers can read Pinyin as well as they can characters, but it’s hardly - if ever - used besides in education.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s just me, but I’d encourage anyone interesting in learning an East Asian language to learn Chinese, and then move on to others if they’re interested, as learning Chinese strokes and tones sets a precedence for understanding these things in Korean, Japanese, other Chinese dialects, and other East Asian languages as well.</p>