I need to take two semesters of a foreign language, but I'm not sure which language to learn. My choices are French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and German. I've been leaning slightly toward Chinese; I don't really like the "sound" of Romance languages, and Chinese culture seems interesting. I've heard that Chinese is pretty difficult, though, and it probably wouldn't be as useful as Spanish. Also, I intend to learn Japanese someday, and I'm worried that knowing the Chinese readings of characters would mess me up (or would it actually help?).
Any advice?
Any advice?
As a Chinese, I'm willing to remind you that learning Chinese is not that rewarding as learning IndoEuropean languages. You should be prepared that after one year of study, you will be still struggling reading element school level materials, while your friends who chose French are already happily reading Bastiat without any difficulty.
Not because Chinese is intrinsically harder. It's just too different from English in almost all aspects.
Learn Chinese if you wanna learn Japanese someday. You won't regret it. The katakana(or was it hiragana?) alphabet for Japanese comes from Chinese. In fact, I don't know Japanese but I could survive for two weeks at Japan - you can pretty much figure out wtf those words are on the signboards if you know Chinese. Most of the similar-looking words have the same meaning. Also, ribuck has a good point there. Many countries are starting to set English as an must-take language in addition to their native tongue.
Friedcat has a point there - Chinese is damn hard to pick up if you don't have a base. However, most of the kids over my country learn 3 languages here, and some Indians even go to 4 as they learn Indian as their native language. I'm sure you wouldn't have any problems picking another language up.
