Advice please: should I learn Chinese?

Excellent Chinese professors are coming right from China to Serbia to teach the language. The program is organized by the Chinese Embassy. The language course is totally free for a select few, for me too. I would like to ask you for advice - what do you think - should I apply?

I speak these: Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, English, Spanish, German

My hobby is language learning. I spend most of my freetime speaking/listening to a foreign language.

My initial plan was to take Portuguese after I pass advanced level Spanish in April 2012...I'm a bit afraid of Chinese. When I start a language my aim is always fluency and constant learning and improvement, so I won't start to learn and stop at some intermediate level...

Thoughts? Advice? Should I apply?

 

If you think you can handle it; chinese is pretty hard. or so I've heard. something about two words coming together to form a completely different meaning ughhh.

anyway I'm pretty impressed that you can speak all those languages!
do you find that once you have a language "down" you can generally speak it whenever you want, or do you need to use it every once in a while to stay fluent?

 

do you find that once you have a language "down" you can generally speak it whenever you want, or do you need to use it every once in a while to stay fluent?

That's a complex question. Basically one can completely forget even his mother tongue if he travels abroad and never comes back to the "old country". Many who knew nothing but their native language until the age of 25 emigrated to the USA/Australia, learned English there, and forgot their native tongue by the age of 65, except some basic words...

Basically you do not need much practice to be fit in a well learned language. I don't think you'll lose fluency, once attained, if you hear the language sometimes...but you might develop an accent after not speaking it for a couple of years.

 

Many who knew nothing but their native language until the age of 25 emigrated to the USA/Australia, learned English there, and forgot their native tongue by the age of 65, except some basic words...

Yeah I'd imagine 40 years of not speaking it would do that to you.

Anyways if you think you have the time necessary to learn it, then go for it. Also try to consider how much you'll use it (how useful it will be to you).

 

Thank you for the answers. The teachers will arrive in 10 days. I think I won't apply. I did some research and Chinese seems a relatively difficult language to learn. Moroever medical specialization comes soon which will most likely bog down learning... The best thing I could do is to learn Portuguese maybe fast after the Spanish exam, maybe that is achievable - but then I'll definetely put language learning on hold until I get my cardiologist diploma...Chinese would be a too big bite for me, so no...