Vocal exercises will be key since it’s a tonal language. When you practice, try hard to match every aspect of the examples. Like full blown try to sound exactly like the person speaking. You likely won’t match their vocal quality exactly but it will certainly help you get the pitch changes.

As with any language, you should try forcing yourself to write/speak in Mandarin. (Writing Chinese characters can suck though so typing or writing out the pinyin is probably a better if you’re just starting out.) The best way to learn to speak a language is going to be trying to translate your thoughts into that language. You might be able to parse mandarin well if you only listen to or read it, but speaking requires more thought and helps you build vocabulary better.

As you get more used to the language, watching shows or reading books in the language will become easier and should allow you to learn the meanings of words through context clues—like children do—rather than relying on translation/dictionaries directly.

好运！

The grammar isn't intrinsically "easier" or "harder", but it's harder for English speakers because there's less common ground, so less room to transfer your previous knowledge (from English) into Haitian than in French.

Just for the sake of example, here's two:

• English places the article before the noun; "the book". French does the same: "le livre". Haitian does the opposite, they go after the noun; "liv la". (There are five definite articles, by the way: a/an/la/lan/nan. They depend on euphony rules.)
• English declines the pronoun to mark possession; I→my, so "I read my book". French does the same: je→mon, so "je lis mon livre". Haitian does it by juxtaposition; so "mwen li liv mwen an".

Individually they don't look like a big deal, but they do pile up. And it's in a way people don't usually notice when casually seeing the language, because all that complexity is in the syntax (word order, more words), while English and French still rely a fair bit on the morphology (change words to get new words).

Also, regarding the vocabulary, note sometimes the same word diverged a fair bit between French and Haitian. Compare for example

Sometimes it makes sense if you remember some preposition or article might have become part of the root, as in zwazo←les oiseaux or diri←du riz. But sometimes it's counter-intuitive; that pann? It's from pendre /pɑ̃dʁ/ "to hang", a verb.