Has your perspective changed since starting to learn Chinese?

[David Wong]

@renzhe, I do concede that heritage learners have an advantage in certain areas and that might've colored my response.

I was thinking more about the difficulty of building vocabulary, and also about the stage that comes after learning the first 3000 characters.

Difficult because it takes three steps to acquire each character or word: 1) recognition; 2) pronunciation (which cannot be reliably determined by looking at the character, but words get easier if component characters are already familiar) and; 3) definition.