Ms. Franci ,
Yes, for every foreign language student , he or she must meet great difficulties, one of which may probably be the influence of his or her mother tongue . He or she should forget his or her " mother" temporarily while learning the foreign language. Of course , at the very beginning , it would be much better to have a better bilingual teacher and more ideal teaching materials to direct the study process.
Summing up many English and Chinese teaching experiences, I compiled the 10 lessons . I did express my teaching goal in the introduction of the lessons.
Your English is good. But if there is no better Italian-Chinese teaching material in your country, you have to travel a big cycle to get your target . What a great challenge for you ! There is no more short cut but just Do as Romen ( Chinese ) Do.

Hai Pan

I agree with you!!! i would like to reply point by point:

- i find chinese more difficult than romance languages also because it's a "ternary" language: i mean, you have to learn how to write, pronounce and the meaning of every single word (while with romance languages you only need to know how to pronounce and the meaning).even thought i studied ancient latin and greek, the latest having a different alphabet, i only needed to be able to read and translate without speaking, wich is the most difficult skill in every language.
- materials: here in Italy it's very hard to find easy books or newspapers for beginners
- time: it's true: it takes time to study. i found that it's better to study 10-15 minutes every day than one hour once a week.
- practice: what i'm lacking in is practice. i take a two hours lesson once a week with an italian teacher and we don't have to much time to speak.

p.s. sorry for my english!!!!!!

您好老师！

I can only guess because I still have my enthusiasm :)

From an English speaker point of view: when we are learning Spanish or French or another "romance language", the learner gets to the point where they can speak/ read sentences and express themselves fairly quickly. This is because the languages are similar to English.

With Chinese (and I would guess Russian too), we have to learn a whole new way of reading and pronouncing before we can even learn! This can be very daunting, and I've seen people give up when they realize they have to learn a lot before they can begin to learn.

There is also a great lack of beginning Chinese material - for instance, simple books, children shows, pinyin / simple language newspapers. Without those things the learner has no experience that they have learned anything. For example, I try to read 新化网 every once in a while, but there are so many 字 that I don't know that I become discouraged. If there were simpler stories / news / shows / books online that used mostly beginning level 字, I think that would give the feeling / understanding that the learner really is making progress.

Time - that's my biggest obstacle. It is hard to make time to study. I am trying to get to the point where I study 15 minutes everyday, and then I am going to try to increase. As it is now, I study one or two days for an hour or two, and I feel that I sometimes I mess up because of the long duration of no Chinese.