Is Chinese difficult?

The spoken language is not difficult. The only hard stone in Chinese are the ideograms (called 汉字 hàn zì)。This is the only obstacle in this language that does not have conjugation of verbs and declinations of adjectives. That's why the majiority of expatriates in Shanghai can speak Chinese but cannot write or recognise more than 10 ideograms. Even language schools in Shanghai offer the teaching of the Hanzi in separate courses, as if the Chinese language could be so easily split in phonetical and grafical representation. 

The learning of the ideograms requires time. To be able to read a newspaper you need to learn 3000 ideograms. An additional problem of the ideograms is that you have to continuosly train the writing as you may risk to forget them after a while. My Chinese teacher, a 50 years old lady, does not remember how to write the colours (黄色，蓝色，红色）as she hardly write these hanzi in her everyday life.