Comment by hnfong

Cantonese is "hard" mainly for two reasons-

1. tones, and generally the gatekeeping of some Cantonese communities towards people who haven't gotten the tones completely right

2. the lack of learning materials relative to the number of speakers, the confusion between written Chinese and written Cantonese (and also the general lack of the latter)

As they say, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy"... I'll leave it at that.