YES – VERY DEPRESSING, TELL YOUR GRANDCHILDREN TO LEARN MANDARIN.
Ironically, I’ve been studying Mandarin for the past 1 1/2 years. (I’ve also been studying Korean for perhaps 3-4 years.)
I’ll tell you a secret. Spoken Mandarin is not all that hard. It is a very straightforward and fairly simple language. Not like Korean which is unbelievably complicated.
But there are 2 things that are hard. The first is the tones. As a non-native speaker you have a hard time distinguishing the tones.
The other thing which is the killer is the written character system. There is no way around simply memorizing them, which takes years and years and years.
The irony? I suspect even the Chinese are losing the ability to write characters, even though they can of course read them. Everyone in China now has computers and smartphones. When you want to write something, you write it in pinyin (western alphabet with tone marks) and your computer/smartphone automatically translates it into Chinese characters.
Very enjoyable to speak another language.
I learned a bit of Vietnamese, two and a half years in country.
Returning to my unit and waiting for my ride out of Qiang Tri, dozing on a bench near the airport. An aggressive (they all are) sales girl selling Coke, nudges me and asks if I wanted a Coke?
I replied, “Toi cam ooh”(actual spelling unknown to me), I NOT THIRST.
She let out the happiest squeal I have ever heard.
She sat next to me and said”You have a Vietnamese wife!”
And many of her friends came by and she told the same.
They would not believe it and certain I had a Viet wife...
Very pleasant time, a peak experience.
I also lived in Taipei for a while and was fortunate that most of the younger people spoke very good English.
I do recall that some Vietnamese was similar to Chinese, animal names, and other nouns???
“Everyone in China now has computers and smartphones.”
In Taipei, the larger shops had digital cash registers and an abacus next to them. Ring up your purchase on the register, then show the calculation on the abacus.
The people were always nice.
I had heard that after hours in Taipei about one in every three or four people on the street were some form of police???
Never any problems.