As a someone who knows some mandarin Chinese already, it's a very difficult language to learn. It requires some very serious effort to get to anywhere near-fluency. The learning process can take anywhere to several months to several years depending on your intensity.

However, if you do manage to go through with such as undertaking, I'd commend you and wish you only the best. It's quite a beautiful language and you'd know doubt find a lot of practical applications for it

@CodeandSolder "translation technology potentially rendering the issue obsolete relatively soon." Some 10 years ago I was working on a language learning app. There was a bunch of big improvements to Google Translate made at that time and I became convinced that language learning would soon become obsolete. I couldn't have been further from the truth, and I think it is very similar now.
I now live in a country that I don't speak the language of, and I absolutely do not see any tech available or on the horizon that would even approach making learning a language obsolete

@lukres I recently put a non-english movie through whisper.medium on "translate" and it output subtitles very simmilar to the official ones at faster than real time (on a 3080), and it wasn't even designed to do that

@CodeandSolder I agree text translation is pretty perfect, was thinking more of communication generally, voice and in person

@lukres I'm not sure that is known, whisper goes off audio. For social contexts sure, hard to replace, for professional applications earphones that filter out the original speach and replace it with a half-sentence-delayed translation should work just fine are nearly possible right now