Just to read the average Chinese newspaper, a person will need to have some mastery of over 2,000 Mandarin Chinese characters.
The use of puns and play on words are more popular than other types of Western jokes, when spoken in Mandarin.
The hardest part in speaking Mandarin are the tones. There are four primary tones and a single neutral tone.
Mandarin Chinese is the language spoken by the most native speakers in the world, followed in order of usage by English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French.
Mandarin Chinese is considered one of the five most difficult languages to learn, followed closely by Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean.