Now that I am almost done with the first semester of Spanish, I have found a few more amigos in Subway restaurants and the Mexican market, both of which I frequent weekly. These are the places I practice my broken Spanish.
So how easy is it to learn Spanish compared to learning Chinese Mandarin? It’s hard for me to compare because I speak Chinese with my parents, and I learned both Chinese and English for 12 years in school. A Shanghainese classmate, who has decided not to continue with the Spanish class next semester, commented on how easy it was to learn her mother tongue versus learning Spanish:
In the Chinese language, we don’t have present or past tense. We don’t have present participles either. If you say “I do this now” in Chinese, the “now” implies you’re doing it. Similarly to express “I have done it,” you say “I do it already.” You learn one word (“do”) in Chinese and you can express do, doing, did, and done.
Es muy fácil, ¿no? 
That is so interesting about past and present tense! A definite advantage to learning a new language: one verb form. What a concept!
What has always intimidated me about learning Chinese is of course the alphabet. Now that I think of it, learning spoken Chinese seems just as complicated…