[hatsuto11]

In fact, the topic of this thread is very confusing and difficult to answer. or to be more precise, it cannot be answered since there isn't a SPECIFIC reply. I think that you shouldn't learn a language only to exploit for your career. Learning a far eastern language should be fun for you! Actually, both China and Japan have a lot of English speakers and I don't think they really need another one! But what it is most important is to choose the language you like more. There's not use studying Mandarin as long as you don't like it for example. Plus, I think that learning a new language will not be useless anyway, you may need it once and you can learn it only as a hobby. Personally, I prefer Japanese which I consider more 'comfortable' to hear than Chinese. Furthermore, I guess that the current of the 'Chinese vanishing' is faster than that of the chinese! What i mean is that the Japanese people are usually more conservative to their culture and language. Moreover, it is dozens times more difficult to a japanese person to learn English as it is to a chinese person due to the grammatical similarities between chinese and english, while japanese is considered a non-relative language. And I think that a japanese person needs a lot of time to start thinking and forming their phrases like a western since their language works completely differently! Try to compare the Japanese sentence pattern with the English one and you can obviously realize the huge difference. Therefore, i think that studying japanese may be more profitable (especially for working as a translator) but bear in mind it will take much more time because japanese is honestly more difficult and sophisticated.