What language to learn? (little gift inside)

German if you wanna go for bragging rights. Due to some mad stunts in our educational system, your grammar is bound to surpass native speakers. I´ve heard horror stories of french youth's grammar too (due to abbreviations in text messaging, i.e. dsl instead of desolee), but could´nt judge how bad it really is.

Spanish if you wanna have fun - Una cerveza fria por favore!

I'd say pick french or spanish. At a certrain level it gets easier to learm the other one (same family).

Personally I'd start with french because

• that's the way I did it in school and I never had to learn any vocabulary for spanish
• grammar rules are pretty consistent in french
• for me it's way easier to pronounce than spanish (my mother language is german)
• Also: I used to live close to France and I feel culturally more connected to them so that's another (personal) reason.

Ultimately the choice is up to you. They are all nice languages which you can use in many places or just for the fun of learning them.

Obviously, learn the one you find the most appealing.
Trying to guess which one will be more useful to you is... well, not very useful. :)
I studied French for like, almost 15 years, majored in it even, and never actually used it in a conversation since I graduated from university 14 years ago. I can still read it well enough but I forgot how to say anything except basic phrases.
Studied Japanese after that and it hasn't been of much use to me either, although I met the love of my life at the course so I guess it was a good choice after all. :)

Other advantage you will have by learning spanish is that it will be easier for you to learn italian and portuguese after doing so if you want. They are pretty similar.

You could toss a few of the languages you are most interested in learning into a hat, and then pick one at random. If you find that you don't enjoy it (or are having too hard of a time learning it), you could always pick a different one out of the hat!

in the modern world a person who speaks 3 main languages will be in demand:
English (international language)
Chinese (80% of the world's production is located in China)
Russian (this language is understood throughout the former USSR + countries where a large number of emigrated from the USSR, for example, Israel)

As someone from Germany, I would advise against learning our language - it just has too many exceptions on top of a hard grammar. Also you should have no problem touring through all the countries where they speak German as long as your English is decent. In regards to the previous point, Spanish probably helps you out the most.

French ! French ! French !
Because you don't want your gf angry at you !
;-)

Learn Japanese, it has cool Chinese symbols known as Kanji aswell as its own alphabet known as Hira-gana and also another alphabet for foreign words known as Kata-kana
You only have to learn about 2000 Kanji symbols, the so called "Jōyō kanji". You will encounter other kanjis too in JRPG's etc but only like 10% of the time.
Since you know english already you have a great advantage when reading the kata-kana words because they are mostly of english origin, just with a slightly different pronunciation.
And if you know mandarin you should be familiar with most of the kanji already, in other words, you're off to a flying start.

I agree with Urthemiel, you do need to have a solid goal (or something at the very least in mind) when learning a language.

You can't just ask random people on the internet on what to learn (you need to have actual interest/motivation or whatever in the language).

I love all of them. Although I love german, I think spanish and french are the better options. Spanish will be even more helpful to learn other languages.
But I'm sure you won't regret your choice, regardless of which one you pick :)

French here. First, saying french don't like to speak english is a bit wrong, it's more because many french just don't know how to speak correct english. Heck, they even don't know how to speak (for some) and write (a lot more, trust me) correct french.

French is really hard to learn. It's not the hardest on earth of course (i've heard Hungarian is one of the hardest). On comparison, spanish is much much easier (although similar to french), if you master french, you could probably learn spanish quite easily. Spanish is spoken a lot more worldwide (at least on america) but french is more common on Africa. Spanish and french share a lot of thing, i guess it can help to learn spanish and then go for french.

Lastly, they are a lot of good french movies, especially comedy. Once you know it, you would discover a whole new world of cinema.

As a french, i consider it much easier to learn english, than learning french. English is quite simple, french has a lot of rule and you just can't do nothing else than learning the rule.

Whatever you will use, either spoken or listening. So Spanish sounds most appropriate.

Go with Spanish though I'm biased since I'm Hispanic and I still have nightmares from French class.:/.