Mandarin lessons

So last night was our first Mandarin lesson over here. We started with the basics, simple pronunciation of the pinyin and moved on to some pretty simple sentences and conversation.
你好!
你好!
你好吗？
我很好， 你好吗？
我也很好
That sort of thing. In translation it means:
Hi!
Hi!
How are you?
I'm very well, how are you?
I'm also very well.
Not exactly the most stimulating conversation but we have to start somewhere I guess!

I do have the benefit of having reasonable pronunciation and perception at least. I spent a long time at uni learning how to hear and reproduce these sounds, it would be a shame if it didn't help at all. However Mandarin is on the lists as one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, partly because of the tones, partly because of the idioms they have, but mostly because of the characters.

Learning the characters is going to be a big and difficult thing. In my class in Sydney some people asked whether it's possible to get by just by learning the pinyin (the Romanised translation of the characters) and our teacher said "not really". That was a serious understatement! Most of the time all you will see are characters and it's impossible to work out from context (at least for me) what any of them are. I spend a lot of time looking up stuff on my phone and trying to match them on signs and menus. So really the pronunciation is a pretty small (but important!) part of the process.

I'm really looking forward to the time when I can read a little and sort of understand something of what people say. I'm also coming to the conclusion that may not happen in the time we are here :)

So I have the first homework I've had for a while but there's kind of an incentive to do this, the more I can learn the easier life will be.