Sure, the spirit may be willing, but the reality involved in teaching yourself Chinese is a little more complicated. American speech patters are not familiar with Chinese language which is produced from a variety of tones and sounds.  The try to learn and speak Chinese language by many by putting best efforts  is laudable.  There are a wide variety of books, CD-ROMs, and other formats available to help them along the way, if anyone has the inclination to learn how to speak Chinese Mandarin should get ready to purchase them.



To speak the truth, not at all.  As compared to the grammar of European languages , Chinese grammar is much simpler.  English speakers sometimes complain that languages like Spanish have a complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc), whereas the Chinese language has little or no bound morphology and there are no grammatical paradigms to memorize.  Verbs do not take prefixes and suffixes to show the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject as each word has a fixed and single form.  To show their number or their case, nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes.  I'm not trying to tell you that Chinese has no grammar; what I mean is that due to the lack of inflectional morphology, Chinese grammar is mainly concerned with how words are arranged to form meaningful sentences.  Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that's why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle.

To learn Chinese language, there is a huge wealth of books in the market from learning Chinese the 'fast and fun way', to Chinese for Dummies to Chinese 'made easy for kids'.  Inorder to learne Chinese, of course, there is a treasure of fundamental courses on beginner's Chinese, and we should not forget about a large number of Chinese phrases and Chinese language dictionaries.  A problem is there with these books as they are not in a format which can be easily used by the people and they are also not available at an economical price .

Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this.  I do not intend to convince you that Chinese is very easy to learn or other languages like English are much harder.   What it means is that Chinese is truly not that difficult as you thought or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but differ does not mean hard necessarily, correct?  And that hard Chinese idea won't be of any help in your study.  Once that fear factor is surmounted, the language is actually not that hard to learn,  have faith in you.  Wish you good luck with your Chinese language study.

Engaging private tutors would have been a better idea than wasting money on books is the opinion of many who have spent lot of money.  Many people think that private language tutors are way beyond their budgets. In addition, some wishing to learn to speak Chinese live in rural areas, where Chinese language tutors are not to be found.

Communicating with those who speaks is an ideal way to learn any language.