I am currently studying Vietnamese, which has a lot of benefits and drawbacks.

Some of the benefits are that modern Vietnamese has a crazy high number of Mandarin loan words, and as I studied that language previously, it is easy to remember a lot of that vocabulary. Being a Latin based script, it is quite easy to learn how to read and write.

There are some difficulties though. As my native language is English and my second language is Mandarin, both of these languages focus heavily on consonant sounds, and if you can get all of the consonants pronounced correctly and in the correct order, everyone will understand what you intend to say, even of your pronunciation is terrible. Vietnamese is exactly the opposite, the focus is very much on vowel pronunciation (and they have a lot of vowels), along with 5 (technically 6 if including ‘no tone’) tones, which are much more important than tones in Mandarin for understandability. Also, being a visibly obvious foreigner comes with some complications for practicing speaking. Living in a major city, English language education is quite good among the younger generations, so any time speaking with them, the vast majority are eager to practice their spoken English, even when conversation is initiated in Vietnamese. Among older generations, they know that their language is an incredibly difficult one and they do not expect foreigners to learn it, so much so that many older people will simply refuse to engage with a foreigner who tries to speak it, and just call over their child to translate for them.

When I studied Mandarin, I found it really beneficial to practice hand writing as a way to ingrain each character into my brain. Learning them visually and typing them can be fine for some people, but I found that practicing hand writing to be much, much better for memorization. Even a decade later, I can still remember the meanings of most characters, even if I have forgotten their pronunciation.

To paraphrase an old teacher of mine, “writing characters is similar to doing Tai Chi, the movements to create the characters are as symbolic as the written characters themselves, how we write carries as much meaning as what we write.”

Everyone learns differently, so this might not be as helpful for you as it was for me, but best of luck! 好好学习天天向上！