Is there any point in learning Chinese for only two semesters?

[George_Bonanza]

I will be finished taking Russian classes by the end of junior year, and I was thinking of taking up another language. I think taking Chinese would be great, but I was just wondering if it was rather pointless to merely dip my foot in the vast ocean of the Chinese language, so to speak. Would I be better off taking an easier language (like Spanish) that I already have some knowledge of, and could presumably become more proficient with in just a year's worth of study. I feel like Chinese is a language that you have to dedicate a whole lot of time towards, and since I only have a year, I'm wondering if it's better to become an adequate Spanish speaker than a barely-intelligible Chinese one.

[old mark]

1. I hated to study languages

but had to take two semesters when I returned to college late in life
(in my mid 40's). I found it was very easy to learn given the conversational method asopposed to memorizing grammer and lists of words. I dreamed in Spanish after a week or so, and I retained enough to string together a few sentences nearly 15 years later. I think 2 semesters of one type of Chinese would be about useless.
Improving your Spanish might even be useful.
FWIW, I found Spanish to be very precise and logical.

mark

[zanne]

2. If you want to be all "sensible" and everything...

Take Spanish. If you want to be a little adventurous, go for the Chinese!

[rug]

3. You'll come back for more in a half semester.

[NewJeffCT]

4. Conversational Chinese is not all that difficult

the reading & writing is the difficult part.

Mandarin verbs do not have tense, so it's way easier than English in that regards.

[BreweryYardRat]

6. No tense? Interesting.

[DarkTirade]

5. I recommend watching Firefly.

:P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkPzsoOcMn0

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. A year of Chinese is a great beginning

You won't go as far as you could in Spanish---or even Russian.

However, you can definitely gain enough to be a tourist in China or Taiwan. I went to Taiwan on one year of Chinese, and it was extremely helpful. With a few basic sentence patterns and a romanized phrasebook, I was able to meet my basic needs.