Chinese and Latin languages Chinese with its complicated systems of characters and tone is quite hard for learners to master it. I don't think people who has learned several languages like some Latin languages can be called a true master of languages,for English,Dutch... as a sub-language of Germanic language and French ,Spanish as sub-language of romance language are from the same origin with some common language features which is a little bit easy for students under the same ''family' of Latin language to acquire such knowledge.I would give praise to people who have a good command of Chinese or any other Asian languages and some languages of Latin family. Ancient China is so powerful that it has had a huge impact on other parts of Asia and their languages. Korean ,Japanese and Vietnamese borrowed a lot of words from Chinese. I hope you may choose to learn Chinese first and then learn others. Characters are originally embedded in Chinese system.Although they are borrowed by some other language ,they manifest its power and cultural aspects most in Chinese rather other languages. I've heard that people in Japan are difficult for them to remember and write down. do you know why? because Characters are created to mean something by their shapes and structure. Undoubtedly,the cultural aspects and the correspondence between meaning and their shapes are missing when they start to learn and memorize.