For each person, the degree of difficulty to learn a language depends on many factors. One factor is the learner’s original language, for example: a native English speaker will find that Spanish is much easier to learn than Mandarin, since English is more similar to Spanish than Chinese. Second, it depends on personal interest in learning the language. If you are very interested in a language, no matter how difficult it is, I believe that you can overcome it through your own efforts. As for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, I think Chinese is easier to speak and widely used. Besides, learning to speak Chinese can help you learn Japanese more easily, especially the writing. As long as you learn the basic things such as pronunciation and Chinese characters carefully and earnestly, I think your Chinese learning will be not hard.
If you want to learn to speak Chinese, you can have a look at https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/speak-chinese.
If you have more questions, just feel free to email me at
jennifer.zhu@echineselearning.com or you can still ask questions here. I will be glad to help you.-Jennifer

Yes, when I began to learn to speak Chinese, the pronunciation was a little hard for me, but I stuck to it. So now I find it is not so hard than before.

I have learned to speak Chinese for almost one year. I have learned a Chinese saying “功夫不负有心人Everything comes to him who waits and works hard.” So if you are determined to learn to speak Chinese, just keep on trying and you will succeed at last.

Let me add more information.

I am a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and English, and have studied some Japanese, Korean and Spanish. To comment on different aspects of the three major East Asian languages:

GRAMMAR: Chinese grammar is remarkably similar to that of English. Its order is subject-verb-object. It has no verb conjugations (cf. Spanish/French), no noun declensions (cf. Latin), no noun genders (cf. Spanish/French). Korean and Japanese, on the other hand, have grammars that are quite alien to English speakers. For example, the verb always go at the end; nouns and verbs have a wide assortment of inflection (declension/conjugation).

HONORIFICS: Noun and verb endings in Japanese and Korean change depending on the relationship between the speaker and audience, and the level of politeness. Chinese, on the other hand, is just like English in that there is generally one way to say something, though you can always add extra words to make it more polite (”May I ask who’s speaking?” vs. “Who are you?”).

PRONUNCIATION: Japanese is easy to pronounce correctly: It has few consonants and vowels, and its syllables are very short (”arigato”), similar to Spanish or Italian. Chinese and Korean, on the other hand, have many consonants and vowels that do not exist in English. Furthermore, Chinese has tones.

VOCABULARY: Chinese vocabulary is actually quite small and self-logical. Instead of turning to foreign languages like Latin/Greek for sources of new words, Chinese looks to itself. For example, “computer” is literally “electronic brain”, “elevator” is “electric stairs”, and “snack” is “little eat”. Korean (and to a lesser extent, Japanese) has historically borrowed heavily from Chinese vocabulary in a similar way that English borrowed from Norman French, Latin, and Greek, so knowing Chinese helps in understanding Korean vocabulary. However, this means that many words exist in two forms in Korean: the “native” form and the Chinese form. A similar situation occurs in English: “sweat” is (native) Germanic, but “perspire” is from Latin. Knowing when to use which form depends on the context (use “sweat” in casual conversation but “perspire” in medical journals), which can be a headache to learn properly.

WRITING: The Korean alphabet, Hangul, is widely praised as the most scientifically designed writing system. It is incredibly easy to learn. Japanese is more complex: It has two sets of syllabaries (kana), both of which has one symbol representing one whole syllable (and thus has more “letters” than Korean or English), and also uses some Chinese characters (kanji). Knowing which of the three systems to use to write a particular sentence is straightforward, yet a skill to learn. Chinese has perhaps the most complex writing system in the world: Each morphemic word has its own character.

In terms of learning curve: If you’re just learning a bunch of basic phrases, Japanese is the easiest to pick up (simple pronunciation). A Chinese learner, on the other hand, would have to spend hours getting the tones and new sounds correct. Once you move on to full sentence construction, though, you’ll be able to breeze through Chinese, while Korean and Japanese will bog you down in inflection and honorifics. At the most advanced level, you will always have to learn many new Chinese characters, some (but not as many) new characters in Japanese, and none in Korean.

In terms of learning all three eventually: Korean uses mostly Chinese-origin vocabulary, and Korean grammar is similar to Japanese grammar. Thus, someone who knows both Chinese and Japanese should be able to learn Korean very quickly. Alternatively, one could learn Korean as a “bridge” language if one already knows Chinese or Japanese, which eases the learning of the remaining third language.

Hope this helps!

Please contact me at pmchang51@yahoo.com for more information. I'd love to help you.

Easiest = Japanese
Mediate = Korean
Chinese = please infer from the ascending order

@Henry Answer 2

功夫不负有心人 should be 皇天不负有心人

if you are trying to quote the common proverb.