What language to teach....

I can vouch for Italian: hey, we get around everywhere in the world

 

I found pinyin indispensable for learning Mandarin. I agree with Mize that learning Hanzi was invaluable, and that's why I took courses that actually taught reading/writing Chinese characters. Many Mandarin classes teach what I'd call "tourist Chinese", you know, enough phrases to get you through a 2 week vacation.

But for me, language is holistic, and you need to read, write, listen, and speak.

However, written chinese being a "silent" language, there's no way in the world I could learn new Chinese words without Pinyin. Now when I encounter a new character I don't know, I just look up the pinyin for it, and I can pronounce it. (I noticed many Mandarin schools around here start with the bopomofo character system, so as to not confuse kids learning English alphabet with two differing sets of sounds)


One of the difficulties I have with listening to Mandarin speakers is the huge range of diversity in accents they have. I learned Mandarin from a Beijing speaker. Now, when I hear speakers from Sichuan, Hunan, and Shanghai, I find it difficult sometimes to adjust, I guess it's like trying to understand English spoken by someone with a Cockney accent.

A typical example is that Beijingese speakers have these "R" sounds, like
是 (shi) sounds like "Sher" or the "Shir" sound in "Shirt", but my wife, who is Shanghainese pronounces it more like "She", and so does my 2 year old son,
yet I still find myself saying to him “是不是爸爸的车车?" that comes out like "ShiR bu ShiR baba de che che" Can't shake that damn beijingnese R now. Same problem with Nar, Dianr, Liaotianr, Wanr, etc.

 

Rosetta Stone Mandarin would be perfect for a toddler...

 

Heh... funny thing is, unless you want your child to be in politics, I think they're better off learning less-heavily accented Mandarin. I've only lived in southern China, so everyone here thinks the Beijing accent is hiLARious! XD Regardless, from what I've seen, most Mandarin speakers in cosmopolitan places are used to hearing all kinds of messed up Mandarin accents. After all, it's techinically a second langauge to 90% of Chinese! I agree, it's hard as heck to listen to a new accent, but they understand me ok (given the sorry state of my Chinese!).

For me, pinyin is also invaluable, but only in certain situations. When I need a quick vocab word I need pinyn so I can pronounce it and listen for it ASAP. But when I sit down to study I always write characters by hand, because I find that after a dozen or so repetitions I have the character (and its sound and meaning) pretty well-memorized. Comparatively, I probably forget over 50% of the new words I learn quickly in conversation. It's always worth noting that pinyin pronunciation is not 100% accurate, but its a damn fine way to learn, IMO. Never tried bopomofo...

 

in business sense i would say chinese but why not japanese too

 

combined chinesse and japanese learning could be nice in the process of learning the kanji ?