<p>leolibby, this is actually a very popular predicament for many students worldwide, and even I, myself, spent countless hours deciding on the “best” language to learn.</p>
<p>In terms of difficulty, the writing systems are for the most part equally difficult. Verbally, Chinese is harder to pronounce and Japanese has more difficult grammar. On the grand scale, their difficulties are more or less equivalent.</p>
<p>As you know, China is poised to have the world’s largest economy within a decade or so. Japan, meanwhile, currently has the world’s third largest economy (after the US and China). China has many, many more people, both within China and worldwide, whereas Japan has a much smaller and rapidly declining population. On one hand, a bigger population might mean more potential business prospects; on the other hand, a declining population might mean more availability of jobs (and indeed, the need for immigration is a huge, controversial topic in contemporary Japanese politics).</p>
<p>Chinese are very nationalistic and will never see you as a fellow “countrymen”, no matter how long you live in China. The Japanese aren’t nearly as nationalistic; however, they’re very culturally unified and isolated, and, again, you’ll always be an outsider, even if you were born in Japan and lived there your whole life (I’m assuming you’re ethnically neither Chinese nor Japanese).</p>
<p>Culturally, Chinese has a very impressive ancient culture, though, of course, thanks to the Cultural Revolution and all that jazz, 20th century Chinese culture is very lacking and 21st-century Chinese culture is mainly derivative. Meanwhile, Japan’s history has continuously been very rich, and it obviously has quite an appeal worldwide. But most of the younger Japanese do not care for ancient Japanese culture, nor even 20th century Japanese icons.</p>
<p>So…noticing a trend? The two languages will lead to different albeit “equivalent” prospects. However, you should know that both languages are extremely difficult for an adult learner, and you will <em>never</em> acquire native fluency.</p>
<p>If you’re doing this for business reasons, you really would be better off just applying these hours and hours to something universally applicable, like accounting/engineering/finance/whatever, rather than focusing on something with only limited regional value. If you nonetheless want to learn an Asian language with good business potential, you may want to consider Vietnamese, which is easier than the latter two, and Vietnam is not nearly as “impacted” as China and Japan (aka, it’s best times are ahead, not behind). Also, Vietnam has a <em>very</em> young population (basically the exact opposite of Japan), so make of that what you will.</p>
<p>As you can see, there is no real clear-cut “better choice”. I find Japanese more culturally enriching (literature, cuisine, film, etc), Chinese more pragmatic (let’s face it, 1/5th of the world’s population is Chinese - you can’t beat those numbers), and Vietnamese particularly pleasant (I happen to love the Vietnamese language, plus Vietnam is a fairly pro-American country [unlike China, who mainly see us as their enemies], and if you’re a guy, the girls aren’t quite as spoiled ^_^).</p>
<p>As for myself, after hours and hours of researching and examining all sorts of different languages, I eventually decided it’d just be more productive to pursue non-linguistic endeavors that are universally applicable. But your choice is up to you. :)</p>