From a pragmatic point of view Chinese would be much more useful, but there are a tons of good resources for that already, so dunno. Congratulations anyway. I've used Duolingo to refresh my German some time back.
Another thing with Chinese is that even though the writing system is universal the dialects very so much that someone from Hong Kong might not be able to understand someone from Beijing, Shenzhen, or Shanghai(not familiar with what dialects are spoken where). That said they're all fairly similar and can be picked up more easily once you already know one.
> I still wish Duolingo would make a course on Chinese :(
What kind of Chinese? Mandarin?
Linguistically Chinese is not a language, but a family of languages that is united by a (mostly) common writing system. The reason that these Chinese languages are called "dialects" is mostly political.
A language geek I know, who taught himself various Chinese dialects and in particular Cantonese up to a very high level told me that Mandarin, though referred to as the "official" Chinese language that is used in TV, it is in his opinion rather an artificial language (he compared it with Esperanto).
So when learning some of the Chinese languages he recommended that at least after some time learning the ropes (writing system, tones, common words), one should really consider for what purpose one is learning Chinese and learn the appropriate language of the respective province (he was really into electronics, so he continued his study in particular into Cantonese).
Honestly, when people say they want to learn Chinese, they usually mean Mandarin Chinese. If they don't, they'll probably refer to the specific dialect they'd like to learn. Also, without any Chinese exposure, learning anything other than Mandarin is harder since their are so fewer resources.
Calling Mandarin an artificial language is bogus, it is the native dialect around the Beijing area, and that is the reason it became the official dialect of Chinese. There are many people in China who only speak Mandarin.
Interesting. So it seems like if someone wanted to do business with, or work in, China (not HK) — learning Mandarin would definitely be the most useful?
Your story is really not representative of China, Mandarin is nothing like Esperanto. It's a real dialect and it became the official language of China a long time ago. People speak Mandarin everywhere now (except maybe HK).
I also use and enjoy Decipher Chinese. Another thing I would recommend is reading the books posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/chinesebookclub/. It's really difficult at first but I find that reading actual Chinese books (with frequent word lookups in Pleco) has helped me improve my Chinese rapidly.
(I don't get through the books in a month... I'm actually only 70% through the first one I picked up several months ago).
Actually another service I would recommend if you want to work on your listening comprehension is http://www.fluentu.com/. They take various clips (music videos / dramas / youtube shows) and subtitle them in a slick player (you can add vocab words straight from the videos).
The problem with actual book reading is that looking up words is too slow. I really wish there was an application like Decipher Chinese for longer texts, and also a bit better on the translations.
I have Du Chinese and I like it a little more than Decipher. I'm always excited when I get a notification for a newbie or elementary lesson. Chinese Skill and Hello Chinese are lesson quiz format and pretty interchangeable. Line Dictionary is cool cause you can draw in it. I also have Pleco for the Outliers dictionary which shows etymology, but it's still in development. HSK Magic is another one that looks decent, flash card style learning.
The closest thing I've found to Duolingo for Chinese is an app called ChineseSkill (Android and iOS). It's pretty good for the most part. My learning stack so to speak consists of HSK textbooks, Skritter, ChineseSkill and recently I've added ClozeMaster. This is all for Mandarin btw.
But at the same time japanese can be seen as very useful because:
- its a very important ally of the USA;
- introduce you to the ideographic writing system;
- be very similar to korean grammar (and particle system).