Dear Tim,

I'm very sorry that you had trouble learning Chinese. However, by no means is Chinese a difficult language to learn. Take my advice, and you will learn Chinese well.

First, you need to learn pinyin. Pinyin is the phonetic system that we use in Chinese. It is just like the English phonetic symbols or phonics. The pinyin has 23 onsets and 24 rimes, just like the 21 consonant letters and 5 vowel letters in English.

Second, you need to learn the Chinese characters. Unlike English, Chinese characters don't represent sounds, but they represent meanings. We call the Chinese characters pictograms, because the characters look like the things they represent. For example, the character 口 represents mouth and looks like a mouth. The character 人 looks like a person that is walking. You should learn hundreds of thousands of Chinese characters. The Chinese characters don't change because of where they are in a sentence.

Take my advice, and you will learn Chinese well.

虽然你题目没打完，我也大概知道你问的什么了。。