Thanks for sharing! You mention something here I didn’t mention in the article or podcast, namely that because languages are difficult in somewhat different ways, people will also have different experiences depending on preference/aptitude/attitude. I engage a lot with teachers in upper-secondary school here in Sweden, and it’s common for students to choose Chinese because they want to learn something different, sometimes even to get away from the endless grammar of German or French. Naturally, I think this also indicates that there are problems with how these languages are being taught, but it’s certainly true that student prefer different things, and that will influence how they perceive the difficulty of learning Chinese.

As for your list of hardest things, I have experienced all those myself too. I think the first one is probably the biggest in terms of impact, but the others are important too. The third one I think goes away once you’ve fully learnt Pinyin. There aren’t that many syllables and once you’re familiar with them, it’s more a matter of which sound it is than what sound it is. For tones, this persists longer, I feel, and I still sometimes double check tones with native speakers to make sure I got it right.