The ROI of learning Chinese is very low, be careful.
Why is that? Living in England, there weren’t many German-speaking people around so I didn’t get much out of it. Even when I went to Germany, they all spoke English better than I spoke German so we mostly ended up conversing in English.
Chinese on the other hand... there are lots of Chinese speakers in most places, and they’re mostly very happy, relieved and even excited to speak Chinese with you. If you ever go to China, speaking Chinese opens you up to a whole host of new experiences. Few people confidently speak English there so you can get a lot of practice very quickly.
I do agree that ROI on reading/writing is low, and it’s mostly due to the insane difficulty of memorizing characters. My suggestion: learn how to read and type simplified Chinese. Don’t bother with writing (which interestingly is much harder than typing on a pinyin keyboard), or traditional Chinese (there are tools which convert back and forth between the two of you need
I personally find traditional Chinese characters easier to learn to read than simplified characters. Simplified characters are definitely much easier to write but that's not very useful in modern times. Plus learning traditional Chinese characters helps with Japanese.
The reason that traditional Chinese characters are easier for me to learn is that it keeps components that hints toward the meaning that are left out of the simplified version.
For example, hear is 聽 (traditional) and 听 (simplified). The traditional character has 耳 which means ear, the new simplified character has 口 (mouth) and 斤 (axe). That's not necessarily the best example since some of the other components of the traditional character are a bit weird in a character related to hearing but I do feel that it's easier to derive the meaning from the traditional character.
Likewise, I prefer 愛 (love) to have the heart component 心.
But realisticlly, Mandarin is very hard to learn, we learn it here in China everyday until the last day of highschool, the everyday classes of Chinese language is no less than any other major course, that's serious time investment even for native speakers, yet still many college students are basicly asses with it.
I'd say the information within it's language world is low quality, large parts of it were translated poorly from English, no where near the English one since it's the world language, so you basicly were reduced to using it for everyday conversation, if you realy want, I suggest you don't invest more than that.
And I oppose teaching it in foreign middle schools aside for Chinese American, it's good to dabble in for some basics though.
this roi is pretty good
also have huge respect for the chinese ultra realist world view though i dont agree with it
a story like the three body problem is basically impossible from anywhere else
chinese is also devastatingly succinct on a whole another level and much appreciated