Here in China, we're always sharing tips about how to learn English - read more, listen more, say more… If it's anything like that with people learning Mandarin, I think what I have to say would be appreciated. Chinese, as you probably know, differs from most modern languages around the world. Instead of a number of letters, there are tens of thousands of "characters" which make up even more words. So how do we learn them all? Well, we don't. As for English speakers with English, we only learn and use a small portion of all Chinese characters and words - roughly 5,000 to 10,000 at most out of 100,000 or so. For most sentences, 40% of the characters used are in a short list of a few hundred "most popular characters", and with the most popular 1000 words you can write 90% of all sentences in Chinese. Most Chinese nowadays start learning written Chinese in preschool and learn to speak Mandarin as soon as they can talk. Pinyin is the first thing you learn in elementary school. Pinyin is the system by which Chinese characters can be pronounced. It was adopted only in 1958 and since then it has helped a great deal to make Mandarin more accessible to the masses. In first grade, you learn how all the "letters" in pinyin are pronounced. They are very different from English letter pronunciations, so when you learn it, never assume you know how it is pronounced. After mastering pinyin, you'll have unlocked the Chinese dictionary, and at school, you'll start learning passages with vocabulary in each to learn. We don't really study grammar because Chinese grammar is so simple. But we do spend an unusually long time practicing Chinese handwriting. You have to practice until college or even into adulthood because having bad handwriting is considered embarrassing. In middle school, you keep on learning vocabulary, though it is no longer the main focus of the lessons. You learn how to analyze texts and some basic knowledge of traditional Chinese culture and literature. In high school, you learn ancient Chinese texts known as Wenyanwen (Literary or Classical Chinese). Apart from memorizing the most famous works, you also learn how to translate ancient Chinese into the modern version. That is perhaps one of the most difficult things about Chinese class in high school.