At least with French or German, you have a fighting chance to become relatively fluent within the years you are in college. To become fluent in Chinese will involve spending time in a Chinese-speaking environment or at least doing a lot more study on your own or preferably with tutors.

Between French and German, it depends on what you see yourself doing. Also consider that if you already speak Spanish, for example, French would be relatively simple to learn. Both French and German are, frankly, fairly ‘dead-end’ languages because they are spoken in a very limited number of countries, and especially in the case of German, many Germans speak pretty good English (with French you do have some African nationals who speak good French plus their native tribal language(s) but don’t speak English well).

Think about what you intend to do in the future specifically. It’s also possible that the experience of learning a language — any of the three — is more important at this stage than specifically which language you choose. Having that experience and knowing something about how YOU learn languages most efficiently (I’m assuming you do some exploration about this idea on your own during your studies too) will jump-start you in the future if you find you need to learn a specific language for a specific job opportunity.

Chinese is often touted as the ‘magic bullet’ to ‘get great jobs’ but it isn’t so. You will not get special consideration just for your Chinese unless you are dead fluent AND have other things to offer, like an MBA or other advanced degree, or great work experience. I make my living with Chinese, and I love it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to you in this particular situation for practical reasons. You’re competing with a whole bunch of American-born Chinese with fluent Chinese AND those advanced degrees. French and German — not so much.

If you are going to import and sell items I would suggest Mandarin – if you are into wines and upper class I would say French and if you like me have German background I would say German (also its not that hard to learn)

French is a romoantic language if you will learn it. But it will help a lot if you learned many language especially dealing with those people who doesn’t know how to speak english.

Once you are in US you should know how to speak english. It sucks when those hispanic don’t speak english while they are here in Florida.

Mandarin seems the obvious answer. China’s economy is on the cusp of major breakthrough.

But after that, what do you want to do, and what will you use your language for? Do you see yourself making the 19-hour flight to China? Do you see yourself comfortable travelling to a place where personal space and privacy are nothing like here?

A lot of the world speaks French (although honestly, I’d go Spanish myself, but I already know German) at least passingly. But French isn’t a huge language outside of France in the business world. Germany’s economy is on the upswing too.

Me personally, I’d do Spanish, then Mandarin.