if you only care about the speaking and listening part. you dont even have to learn pinyin.

that takes a long time to learn. its like how baby learn to talk. you know before 1900s, 90% of chinese cant read. we still manage to live for thousands of years.

But here is the thing.

Chinese language belongs to a different type of language system compare to western language. I wont get into details. but you have to know that English is a language that the written words represents how you pronounce the character. Chinese characters often represent the meaning, it does help with the pronunciation sometimes but you still need to have certain level of understanding even for that.

Japanese has the character that represent pronunciation. but by only learn to use or write one form, you wont go very far. from my understanding, (my wife is Japanese) Japanese literature writing is actually as hard as chinese.

Cantonese is a dialect in southern china and many asian country. it shares the structure of chinese. characters mostly just pronounced differently. however there are some structures that it doesnt share with mandarin.

like Hakka, there are several dialects that when written down, majority of chinese can read but they just wont understand when talking.

some dialects are pretty much similar language. thats why they are called dialects instead of different languages. you can tell it becuz they share 99% of the logical and sentence structure.

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surprised? yea, you been culture shocked!