It’s been a long time that I’m thinking about starting to learn Chinese. I somehow have this idea in my head, that the people who are able to learn Chinese, usually are good in singing. I mean - as Chinese has tones, I feel like I would have to be able to “sing”. I am not scared of the grammar and neither so much of the writing system. My fear is really just about the pronunciation and especially tones. What about you guys? Those ones that are studying Chinese, can you share your story with me? Can you tell me at what level you are now and after how long time? What was your motivation? And can you sing? 
I really don’t mean it in any bad or offensive way, I simply have this feeling that you have to have the “feeling / sense” for the music and sounds to be good in Chinese. I hope I am wrong and there is still some hope even for me 
I know many non-native Mandarin speakers who pronounce correctly and I don’t think that all of them are especially good at music, so basically it’s just a matter of practice. Also, Mandarin only has four tones that are clearly distinct from each other, so I would say it’s one of the easiest tonal languages to pronounce.
When I was young, I just learned a few simple useful sentences in Mandarin with correct pronunciation (without aiming to learn the language that seriously). I repeated sentences like “My name is Takashi”, “I’m from Japan” many times with correct pronunciation (I don’t really remember, but I think I had an audio material I could practise with). I practised the four tones with these sentences enough, so that I got to be able to reproduce them by myself with confidence.
Many years later I started to learn Mandarin seriously, but I already had some basics of the pronunciation and it went very smoothly (at least I didn’t have any big issues with the tones). So my personal recommendation would be to concentrate on the pronunciation/tones first before going further.
I’m not really aware of the relation between the tones and my sense of music. I played music in my childhood and liked to sing karaoke, but I never felt that I sang when I learned Mandarin. I think it just depends on how well you can imitate the pronunciation of native speakers.
Hi Michaela,
The tones seem daunting at first, but I don’t think they’re so bad. It’s just like copying somebody’s intonation, such as when they ask a question (for example, “are YOU going?” your voice might drop on “you” then rise on “going”).
For me, the hardest thing about Chinese has been the different sentence structures. There are no verb conjugations or past/present tense, which is nice, but the way to structure sentences differs a lot from English and there are so many specific ways to say certain things. For example, something like “She is taller than me” would be said like “she compare-word me tall” (I think). So it’s not so hard getting to A levels, but advancing to B levels is where it gets challenging I think.
I would just take a few lessons and see how it goes! You obviously have some passion to learn it, so I say go for it!
When Chinese tutors say the language has an easy grammar, they must be underestimating the sentence structure. Chinese syntax is indeed very challenging for native speakers of most Indo-European languages.
Yes actually I was thinking about Japanese and Chinese in this way - you may learn the grammar and all … but then the translation must be really tough because of the multiple meaning of the words (as you mentioned). So if you have the verb that can mean the 1st, 2nd or 3rd person … present tense but also past tense or so … I mean it must be difficult then to make the translation But it’s challenging and interesting.
Thank you for your suggestion, I think I will try