Additionally, 8 (and somewhat 9) are the only ones that apply to speaking/listening to Chinese. The rest are fully restricted to writing and reading.
I only spent 6 weeks studying Chinese so I'm sure I have some misconceptions, but speaking Chinese (and to a lesser extent hearing it) were actually pretty easy to pickup. Most of my classmates just threw up their hands and quit on intonation, but it's not THAT hard especially if you're just speaking slowly. This might have been a consequence of short study of the language, but grammatically I thought it was vastly simpler than Western languages particularly in respect to verb conjugation.
I only spent 6 weeks studying Chinese so I'm sure I have some misconceptions, but speaking Chinese (and to a lesser extent hearing it) were actually pretty easy to pickup. Most of my classmates just threw up their hands and quit on intonation, but it's not THAT hard especially if you're just speaking slowly. This might have been a consequence of short study of the language, but grammatically I thought it was vastly simpler than Western languages particularly in respect to verb conjugation.