Great! Ask any linguist and they'll tell you there are three critical languages to know in this century: Chinese, English, and Spanish (alphabetical order there!). Learning Chinese isn't just a great idea because of the crazy long and rich history and culture of the place, or the 900 million speakers of Mandarin in China. There are Chinese speakers in practically every single country in the world. It is truly a world language. 

But Chinese is really hard, right?  Actually... not so much. Did you know, for example, that Chinese grammar is almost exactly the same as English? And... (drum roll) verbs do not change form for gender, tense, or- any reason at all! A huge relief for anyone who has tried to learn a European language, where memorizing verb conjugations is one of the big hurdles. Of course, there are the tones. But I promise you that after a bit of practice they'll seem quite natural.  And then the characters- but you can gradually ease into those while learning to speak. And besides, Chinese characters are fascinating and fun. They're part of the reason Chinese is so cool and different.

Look around this page for more suggestions and links...