@LivInTheLookingGlass
Generally the largest hurdle at the beginning is learning the individual sounds of Mandarin that are quite a bit different from English.
Comparativley, English has more vowel sounds, while Chinese has more consonant sounds. So, it's a bit of a struggle to accurately produce them if you can't hear the difference.
I would advise going through the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) for mandarin and mapping the places of articulation to the appropriate Pinyin.
At the same time, there should be a focus on getting lots of novice level input so that you can better hear the sounds. Youtube has a lot of comprehensible material that definitely should be taken advantage of.
The comprehensible input can also be used to learn the characters and to practice reading and writing with them.
Basically Pinyin is an indispensable tool to learn Mandarin, but also to write and to read it. It would be prohibitively time consuming to not use it, if someone is coming from a language using the Latin alphabet. It should definitely be used in conjunction with learning the rest of the language.
#mandarin #LanguageLearning #ComprehensibleInput