..not necessarily. Mandarin is simple...and you can get around and communicate your needs and wants sooner than with any other language. I find Arabic a rather hard language to learn.

I'm Chinese, speaks native Mandarin, moved to Australia 12 years ago, so I already speak 2 of the most popular languages in the world But late this year I'll move to Zurich, so I'm going to learn a language that only a few million people speak. So I'm in the exact opposite situation to BUGFROMHELL ;-)

Still.... German is the first in number in Europe, there are just so many languages and independent states to make them official here

But you'll have to deal with a dialect of it on top of the standard language. GOod luck with it and keep up your Chinese, I know enough Chinese people who forget rare hanzi because they don't read mandarin regularly enough

OK, I have to say that I'm now a bit disappointed by some users in this thread - if you don't know about something, like that country called China, then don't judge it like you are well informed and/or you can foresee future. Really. I grew up there, I left for overseas severals years after university, it's been 12 years, and I've seen sooooo many naive and biased opinions about China since then, to the extent that I've mostly stopped trying to communicate with people on this topic.

All right. Enough rant. Now back to the topic of Chinese language. I'm certainly biased and I only speak Chinese & English, even though I've tried Spanish, French & Japanese for couple of weeks to months at different stage of my life - just bear in your mind I'm biased - I think Chinese is quite a accomplished language with no obvious flaws, due to the fact that it has evolved continuously for thousands of years, rather than being invented by a bunch of scholars and put to use in the last 200 years or so. Yes I'm talking about Japanese And Korean. And Vietnamese.

Learning to read/write, remember the characters & words, is a hard job, but it's the same in learning any foreign language. English has letters, letters form words, words form sentences. Chinese has strokes, strokes form characters, characters form sentences. See? Easy peasy.

Oh, btw, Cantonese is the local dialect of Canton province. It's not a separate language. Anyone who tells you Mandarin & Cantonese are two different languages are....well, not well informed.

Now to the juicy part - pronunciation. I now speaks English with a fairly obvious Autralian accent, and can sometimes fool people with a fake British accent, but I know native speakers can still tell. Just like I can almost always tell if someone's speaking Mandarin natively. To learn a different tongue, you sometimes have to pretty much forget your mother tongue altogether and re-learn how the muscles should move. Chinese is very different to any European language in term of pronunciation, mostly because you'll need to use a different set of muscles to make sound. Lots of practice is needed to master it, but well, just like your mother tongue, when you practice enough, you will get there

All I can say now is that Mandarin pronunciation focuses on the very front of your mouth - lips and tip of tongue. Whilst European languages mostly use deeper parts of the throat. When you get to the point of understanding what I mean, congratulations, you will soon be speaking flawless Mandarin

Oh, and I didn't forget what this thread is about Learn Chinese, of course. Apart from all the material benefits you may gain by learning the most populous language in the world, it also opens the door to thousands of years of literacy, history, art, music, cuisine, architecture, well, everything. Here you go, my very biased two AUD cents

Hi Faltrad, nice to meet you here Thanks for the advice. Yes I do still read lots of Chinese language contents, just to keep up with things back there - everything is moving so fast. I'm starting to forget about words and characters, which is a bit scary, for example I once forgot how to say timetable - 时刻表 - in Chinese when calling a friend in China, and man, that was embarrassing Well hopefully I won't forget too much. Cheers.

I am sure you will be able to offer language exchange Chinese for German in Zürich, that will help answering the question of this thread for somebody.

A bit of care is necessary: opinions diverge about Madarin/Catonese. If you don't think they are two different languages, it's fine, but do not just say others are not well informed, they have good reasons to make a distinction between the two. And in any case: keep politics out of language conversations, which is often the case (not only in China).

If you are a good calligrapher and come to Basel, we have to meet

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Es wird nichts ausgelassen, um mich hier herauszuekeln. Ein Lehrbuch. False accusations and attacks continue. There is no stopping righteous people when they are wrong.

This is common. Try asking people in China about other countries; especially those (the vast majority) who have never travelled. Same as everywhere - people guess what they don't know.

As for calligraphy ... I studied it briefly in Beijing but, well, let's just say I'm not an artistically gifted person. Even my English handwriting is a mess, let alone trying to write traditional Chinese characters with a paint brush.

And, as Faltrad says, best not to bring politics into language learning. Even the definitions of language vs dialect get complex.

Everybody sucks at calligraphy the first ten years, the Chinese too. There is no "briefly" in calligraphy, it's either life or crap.
Link between calligraphy and topic: for some people, the writing makes it impossible to learn chinese ever, for others, it's the discovery of a whole new visual memory field one can be good at, even if it's still real work. It's a different skill and westerners don't use it in western languages that much, so we can't know if we are good at it before trying. Thai writing is alphabetical, but I am not sure it's more simple than Chinese hanzi in any way...

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Es wird nichts ausgelassen, um mich hier herauszuekeln. Ein Lehrbuch. False accusations and attacks continue. There is no stopping righteous people when they are wrong.