Should I learn Chinese or German?

En español

When you decide to learn a language, you may find yourself in a situation where you want to learn two languages, but do not know to choose one over the other. 
I have come up with an educated solution to this problem by creating a table with properties of a language. For those who are deciding between Chinese (Zhōngwén) and German (Deutsch) you're in luck. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincrosbie/4712869739/

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	Chinese	German	What is the better choice?
Countries	Officially: PRC, ROC and  Singapore. Widely understood: Malaysia and Hong Kong but also spoken worldwide.	Officially: Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy, Belgium.	Either, both spoken in many places.
Number of Native Speakers	Around 1.2 billion people  (2005)	Around 98 million people (2005)	Chinese
Pronunciation	Tones, most sounds don’t exist in English	Quite easy to pronounce, except for ü, ch and ch in the middle of a word.	German
Grammar	No flexion, very easy syntax	Gender, many word endings, verbs at end of phrase	Chinese
Vocabulary	Words are normally made up of one - two syllables	Long analytical vocabulary (words can be build upon themselves)	Chinese
Language Group	Sino-Tibetan	Germanic (along with English, Dutch, Swedish and other languages)	German
Writing System	No relationship to sound of the word. Made up of characters.	Very phonetic due to spelling reform. Nouns are written in capitals so you can recognise them easily, which speeds up reading.	German
Tally	3 Chinese	3 German	1 Either

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh/4179921545/in/photostream/

Overall, it comes down to whether you want to travel or are on a business trip to Europe or Asia. If you want an easy language to read and write, learn German, if you want a language with easy grammar, learn Chinese. If you still can’t decide, you can always flip a coin.

Danke / 谢谢