Just take a look at this;found it when i was researching for language courses. makes me feel like a genius, knowing that Mandarin seems to be one of the world’s most difficult languages in the world

(Taken off Cambridge Languages Website):

 Comparison with other Languages – Chinese shares very little vocabulary with European languages, so speakers of these languages have to work harder than if they were learning another European language. And even though Chinese shares vocabulary with several Asian languages (especially Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese), this shared vocabulary is often difficult to recognize.

The Writing System – It is definitely hard to learn, though there is nothing conceptually difficult about it; there is just a lot to memorize.

Inflection – Chinese is a tone language-that is, different pitch patterns do not just add emotional color, as in English; they actually distinguish one word from another. How much of a problem this is depends a lot on the individual student: students with a good ear do not necessarily find this a difficulty.

Grammar – Unlike many European languages, Chinese has no irregular verbs or noun plurals to learn, because words have only a single form, with no suffixes for tense, number, case, etc. (There are some particles which work somewhat like tense endings, but they always take the same form, no matter what they are added to.)

Acceptance – Chinese speakers are usually tolerant of a foreigner’s mistakes–perhaps because so many Chinese themselves speak standard Mandarin Chinese as a second language

 look at the ‘acceptance’ portion; how true can that get? the thought of me not going to be in any contact with Mandarin in school for the next 2 years suddenly saddens me- i think i might totally lose the language proficiency altogether