<p>Prestige brings up interesting points - simplified characters are used in PRC - not in Taiwan and Hong Kong (and Cantonese, not Mandarin is spoken in HK). Most US programs have been teaching only simplified but some (as the one my daughter is in) are emphasizing the traditional and familiarizing with the simplified. D prefers learning traditional because the structure of the language remains intact (simplified characters were introduced to boost literacy rates during the Mao era). I have read that there is some regret over using simplified characters because of what has been lost - so who knows which writing system will ultimately prevail. D also really, really loves the simple grammar - said she wished English had been so straightforward lol.</p>
<p>To make it simple :), I would say that Chinese is difficult because you have to memorize characters (but if you know principles and you are young and have a good memory 
it is not SO difficult) and tones (pronunciation). Grammar is very simple. Japanese has really difficult grammar (due to construction of sentences, it is similar to Korean) and you have to memorize characters. The pronunciation is easy though. In Korean main difficulties are grammar and pronunciation (Korean has a LOT of homonyms and homophones, in spoken language this makes understanding pretty difficult too) but alphabet is very easy. So, if to choose a language by its simpleness it doesn’t matter which one to learn - Japanese, Chinese or Korean - because they are all very hard (for westerners). As for Spanish, aren’t there the same arguments against it? (Spanish is a mother-tongue for zillions; it is easy to learn, so many people speak Spanish fluently, what other advantages do you have to be more competitive?..) It all depends on purpose. Again, if OP would like to stay in US and try to develop a career there, then Spanish will be more practical to learn. If there is a dream to pursue a career abroad, then Chinese will be very helpful.
By the way, my H’s major is Chinese, my major is Korean and, of course, we both advised our D1 to choose Chinese (not as a major but just to start to learn it) but we have been living in Asia (two different countries) for more than 10 years already and know how important the language is even if you don’t work with it… anyway, she decided to continue her Spanish Her reasons were that 1) Chinese was too difficult and 2) she had no talents in languages (even though she is practically bi-lingual and Spanish is her 3rd language). We never insisted on our way but, as a result, we are not sure now that it was a right decision ;)</p>
<p>The answer depends primarily on OP’s objective in jobs and desired locations. If he/she wants to be a CEO of a US-based company, then no additional language skill is required. It may be helpful, but not required. If you want to be a lawyer in CA and FL dealing with immigration issues or handling general legal cases, then Spannish is helpful, as the Spanish-speaking population is going to increase dramatically over the next 10 years in US overall, and in CA and FL in particular. That is a plain fact of life. If you want to be a patent lawyer dealing with international IP protection and/or be specialized in International business in general, then Chinese, Korean, Japanese would be useful. The highest growth projected are the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). If you want to be dealing with M&As’ for international clients in the next 5-10 years, Chinese, Korean, Japanese would be helpful. </p>
<p>Take-home-message: Decide what you wish to do and the decision is really simple.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>I think Portuguese is a very interesting third language for those who learned Spanish. Reading it wouldn’t be all that difficult but pronunciation is quite different. With Spanish, Portuguese and English, you basically have the Americas covered.</p>
<p>Curious I started looking - according the Japanese government to be a “good reader” you need to know 1945 Kanji. (Elementary school kids learn about 1000 and Wikipedia says a well educated person knows about 3500.) [How</a> many kanji are there?](<a href=“http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/how-many-kanji.html]How”>How many kanji are there?) </p>
<p>Chinese dictionaries can have over 100,000 characters, but most of them never get used. I remember an old boyfriend explaining how you looked up a character in a Chinese dictionary. It involved roots and counting strokes and sounded impossible! Wikipedia says you need 2000 for “basic literacy”, but most educated people will read 3000-5000.</p>
<p>For comparison with English a high school grad will know about 12,000 words and a college grad about 15,000 with no issues about being able to read them.</p>
<p>If you’re already reasonably fluent in spanish, I’d give Mandarin Chinese a shot in college to see if you can pick it up. </p>
<p>However, it will be hard to tell if someone whose mother-tongue is a Western-based language really has a knack for it until they’ve devoted at least 2-3 uninterrupted years of it in college. </p>
<p>Ultimately, the decision is up to you. Good luck. </p>
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<p>I’m not sure the wikipedia quote is correct if they’re talking about traditional characters. Sounds more true with simplified characters…but only knowing simplified characters will severely limit your career/social opportunities even in the PRC. </p>
<p>Especially among the newly middle-upper-class elite where the use of traditional Chinese characters has been used as a marker to show how much more “educated” and “refined” they are compared to those who only know simplified. </p>
<p>Heard from my father, Chinese language instructors, and educated Chinese folks in my father’s generation that the average person would need at least 20,000 traditional characters to be able to function at the high school level(Reading newspapers, books, conducting daily business). </p>
<p>Educated Chinese with college/graduate educations would be expected to know much more than that…especially the literary/journalistic folks who sometimes get into ****ing matches over how many characters they know beyond the minimum 20,000.</p>
<p>“only knowing simplified characters will severely limit your career/social opportunities even in the PRC.”</p>
<p>cobrat - I have never heard this before - I thought that the younger generation doesnt even learn traditional characters anymore and that it will become obsolete unless you are in Taiwan. </p>
<p>I am curious about this because my son who is continuing his Mandarin in college at Indiana Univeristy has encountered Taiwanese professors who include traditional characters on the exams - expecting the kids to know them. Arguing the point has gotten them nowhere and my son is so frustrated that after he satisfies his minor requirement this semester he will no longer study Mandarin.</p>
<p>Just a note regarding Portuguese: my son is reasonably fluent in Spanish (albeit a bit rusty since he hasn’t taken a Spanish course since his freshman year), based solely on five years of studying it in school before college. (He has a much better facility with languages than I ever did, that’s for sure. Maybe he gets it from my mother, who was fluent in German, English, French, and Hebrew, and also studied Latin for many years.) </p>
<p>In any event, he has a good friend whose mother and mother’s family are Brazilian. He’s been at her house on a number of occasions when relatives are present and most of the conversation has been in Portuguese, and tells me that after having heard it spoken enough, he’s able to understand most of the conversation despite never having studied Portuguese at all. Conversely, his friend, who is fluent in Portuguese, is able to get the gist of Spanish (both written and spoken) despite never having studied it. So it seems that there’s more similarity in the languages than most people think. I suppose that neither of them would have much trouble learning Galician, since that’s essentially in between Spanish and Portuguese. </p>
<p>For my son, who’s an art history major whose field is not East Asian art, Chinese would be useless. So it all depends. Right now, he’s in his fifth month of learning German, and is already fluent on a basic conversational level, despite the fact that he considers it much more difficult in many ways than Spanish, given the complicated grammatical rules and the inside-out sentence structure from an English speaker’s viewpoint. (On the other hand, there are no irregular verbs, it seems.) I’m sure that the three months he just spent in Vienna helped a lot, especially given the amount of extra time he spent studying German on his own, and the efforts he made while exploring Vienna, and Austria in general, to speak exclusively in German when interacting with people. (He’d never brag about how good he is, but I can do it for him: he got together over winter break with a high school friend who studied German for years, went to “German camp,” and is minoring in German, and she told him that his spoken German is already better than hers.)</p>
<p>For him, being fluent in German in the near future (in reading and speaking more than writing) is pretty much a necessity, given that he hopes to study in Germany (hopefully Berlin) this coming summer, and plans to write his B.A. thesis on an early-20th century German artist, for whom most of the source materials are in German. He’s also considering applying for a Fulbright to study in Germany after he graduates, even if it’s only one of the assistant-teaching grants. (His advisor is strongly encouraging him to do so.) </p>
<p>At some point, though, if he wants to go for a Ph.D. in art history (he isn’t 100% sure yet, although he’s leaning towards not going straight into a Ph.D. program because so many people have told him that most of the Ph.D. dropouts are those who came straight from college rather than those who did something else for a year or two, until they were absolutely sure that this is what they wanted), he’ll have to learn French. He thinks a French for Reading course should suffice, and hopefully his facility in Spanish will help. He also thinks that once he knows Spanish and French, Italian – which he’d also like to learn – should be a breeze. Which is consistent with what I’ve heard.</p>
<p>Plus, he’d like to study Yiddish someday. (Eastern Yiddish, of course. Too bad nobody teaches Western Yiddish [jüdisch-deutsch] anymore – the language of my mother’s ancestors. That’s really a dead language, and has been so since the late 19th century; my mother’s grandparents who lived in rural Baden still spoke it a little.) Again, German should help with that; he already sort of knows the Hebrew alphabet. </p>
<p>He and I talk about languages and language study a lot, since it’s such a great interest for him and many of his friends. It seems to him that for an English speaker, it really shouldn’t be impossible to learn any of the Romance or Germanic languages. Nobody’s saying they’re easy, but the similarities to English are obvious. None of those languages should seem fundamentally and essentially “foreign” to English. Contrast that to the Slavic languages, which are much more difficult according to his friends who study them. And learning Hungarian is supposed to be phenomenally difficult. Unless maybe you’re Finnish. But the East Asian languages? A different universe; his friends who study them spend enormous amounts of time doing so, and after years of study hardly seem more fluent than he is in German after only five months of study. I have no doubt that he would be able to get by just fine if he decided to live and work in Germany within the next few years (assuming I ever get around to getting dual German citizenship for the two of us, as I have the legal right to do). I can only imagine how much harder that would be, and how much longer it would take, for a native English speaker who wanted to do the same in China or Japan.</p>
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<p>Not according to the Chinese undergrad/grad students I’ve met. One requirement in their academic-track high schools is to learn a year or so of classical Chinese on top of their regular academic requirements so they can read and study some Chinese literary/political works. Moreover, if you want to read any official documents or published materials before 1949, you will need to have a decent command of traditional characters to do so. </p>
<p>Since those works are all written using traditional characters, I’d doubt they’ve stopped completely teaching traditional characters in China. Main issue is their learning of traditional characters is very hit/miss because their school system teaches them simplified first and then traditional…which makes learning the latter a ginormous struggle. </p>
<p>As several Chinese language instructors I’ve had lamented, it would have been much better for them to teach traditional characters first and then simplified as they did in most Chinese language programs in US colleges as it is easier to learn simplified characters once you have some traditional characters down.</p>
<p>On simplified vs. traditional Chinese: The difference is not as great as you might think. One can pick up rather quickly from one to another. I learned simplified first and then pick up the traditional by reading novels. That was when I was in 4th grade. May be it is easier for kids to learn?
In terms of usefulness, I would say it also depends on what you want to do. In Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore or any other place outside of mainland, Traditional is used. Simplified is used primarily in Mainland.</p>
<p>Chinese but try working in HK or Taiwan rather than mainland China</p>
<p>Definitely I vote for Spanish. The US is becoming “brown” (read: Hispanic) and over the next 50 years fluency in Spanish may be a necessity. If you intend to live in the USA, learn Spanish.</p>
<p>The Chinese themselves are voting with their feet: they are learning English, truly one of the world’s easiest languages to pick up. If you have traveled anywhere in Asia, someone with perhaps 20 or 30 words of English can actually have a “conversation” – indeed what separates the guides in Nepal (who earn $10 day) from the porters (who earn $1) is just 20 words of spoken English.</p>
<p>If one insists on learning Chinese, the best way is to go on a two year mission in Taiwan with the Mormons. The best non-native speakers I have met have all been Mormons.</p>
<p>“That was when I was in 4th grade. May be it is easier for kids to learn?”</p>
<p>According to my developmental psychology course it should be easier for them to get the accents right,at least, past a certain age your ability to learn to make different sounds gets curtailed.</p>
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<p>I’ve been following this discussion with some interest (first language English, second Chinese, did German in high school and now doing college Spanish) but haven’t had much to add, except this: Singapore uses Simplified. There are still some slight linguistic differences between Singaporean Chinese and Standard Chinese though.</p>
<p><a href=“On%20the%20other%20hand,%20there%20are%20no%20irregular%20verbs,%20it%20seems.”>quote=DonnaL</a>
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<p>Oh, there are plenty. Occasionally one feels that in German, there are more exceptions to the rule than adherents.</p>
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<p>That doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Those 2000 or 3000-5000 words will be individual characters, which all mean something - but Chinese parts of speech are rarely a single character. An elevator, for example, is a “dian ti” - two characters - “dian” means electric and “ti” means stairs (and I just wiki-ed this, and it turns out the mainland Chinese use a different term - “shen jiang ji” meaning, word for word, rise-fall machine). An escalator, on the other hand, is a “dian dong fu ti”, meaning electric moving assisting stairs. A computer is a “dian nao”, electric brain, and a telephone is a “dian hua”, electric speech. So while you perhaps need 2000 for basic literacy, learning the words alone will not be sufficient. If you count the multi-character parts of speech that are necessary to achieve basic literacy as “words”, I’m sure you’ll get something closer to or higher than the number required for English.</p>
<p>(Also, America in Chinese, “mei guo”, word for word means beautiful country ;))</p>
<p>I guess I’d just like to add that Singaporean students do 10 to 11 years (1st to 10th or 11th grade) of their mother tongue, which for many of us is Chinese. We start at a young age, study it for many years, and have many more opportunities to use the language if we wish. The level of proficiency expected after 10 years easily outstrips a typical fourth semester college Mandarin Chinese class (perhaps even the sixth-semester course that seems typical, but I haven’t been able to find a sixth-semester Chinese language syllabus), and yet a good many Singaporean students would not consider themselves sufficiently proficient for much more than Facebook profile bragging rights. It truly is not an easy language, even for those who grow up with it.</p>