I don't know what I thought really... I think I had no specific expectations. Ended up following my friend to Chengdu rather ex tempore for my first venture into China and Chinese language. But I feel it isn't that hard at least at the level I reached due to Chinese not having (IINM) e.g. verb conjugations, grammatical gender or articles. More so just need to learn and memorize words and specific phrases/signifiers which you then put one after another to form a sentence. Speaking/pronounciation I picked up quite well. Writing and reading the characters though adds to the difficulty.
Cantonese I've never studied. I like the way it sounds.
In Finland people tend to know at least three languages, but often some other on top of that. Finnish and Swedish are both official languages and part of the curriculum at elementary school, but there's a neverending discussion about Swedish... ca. 6% of Finns speak Swedish as their mother tongue (my father was bilingual; they spoke both Finnish and Swedish at home when he was growing up), but the general public don't necessarily end up learning it that well since if you don't live in the Swedish speaking regions you might never need to actually use it. People living near the eastern border e.g. have questioned whether learning Russian would be more beneficial for them. But Swedish has nevertheless remained part of the Finnish identity to some extent (as said, an official language). English is the leading lingua franca around the world and Finns (like most) also tend to learn it quite well, not only in school but also from being exposed to it in various media. Back in the day there was a decision on whether to start dubbing foreign films or use subtitles, and the latter won, just barely AFAIK. A good decision however that has allowed generations to learn foreign languages from tv and films (pre internet/Youtube era; these days it's a little different since you can find all kinds of material online 24/7). I suppose also being a small/fringe nation, the people in charge thought learning other languages was essential.
Myself, I also studied French in high school for one year. To this day I regret stopping. I still don't quite know why, but I think I was just lacking focus at that point and didn't get along that well with the teacher either. It's not that I was truly bad at it at that point (I always somewhat enjoyed language studies). Tried to also learn Spanish in university but that didn't work out either. German I learned for 9 years in the elementary school and high school. Level is decent. If I'd rank them it would be Finnish, English, German, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese. The thing though with languages is that you need to reach quite a high level to really benefit from them work/careerwise/monetarily. But nevertheless you'll also likely learn something about the culture of said language which I'd say in itself is also educational and perhaps gives you some new perspective. Best way to learn for sure would be to get to live in a country where the language is spoken, so you can pick up something everyday and have plenty of opportunities to apply the language/what you've learned.
