[throwawayperson]

That's totally true, people can learn it out of pure love.

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.