Chinese or Japanese?

The ultimate question!... In order to answer this question you need to know first what you need the language for.
If you are learning for fun, unable to put much time or effort, or going to Japan, then Japanese is the answer for you. If you are not, then let's face it! Chinese is being spoken by 1.3 billion people! That's ten times the population of Japan. China is expected to replace Japan world's second largest economy in few some years... Besides that not so many Chinese schools can afford an American tutor for their kids, unlike rich Japan which is spending ¥767 on language learning a year! Which would mean somehow that less and less people in Japan are going to face problems speaking or understanding English, while Chinese are still so far away from this.
Still there are few things that you actually have to know, that would make Japanese easier to learn:


1- Chinese have 4 tones, if you have no idea what tones mean let me give you an example... Think how different you would stress the word 'comment' in the next next two sentences:

- I commented on his article.

- I made a comment about his article.

 The word "comment" changed from a verb to a noun when we stressed it differently. The first sentence was a verb, the second was a noun. So, can you imagine if there are four ways to stress 'comment'? for example CoMMenT, COmment, coMMent and commENT, the first one means a dog, the second one means a cat the third one means a chair and the last one means girl? This is how hard the Chinese tones are, you have to be so careful how you say a word, and you even have to pay so much attention, at least in the first few years, to know what is what.

2- Japanese got three ways of writing, one of them is Kanji, which already is the Chinese symbols, and two others called Hiragana and Katakana, which are actually relatively easy, since they only consist of 46 basic symbols each (Kanji got thousands of symbols). Those Hiragana and Katakana symbols function so closely to the way Latin (English) characters function, so you can actually build words the same way you do do in English using basic phonetic intuition. Unlike Chinese which require you to learn thousands of symbols to be able to write down what is on your mind.

Hopefully you can make up your mind now, I honestly could not finish my Chinese learning process due to lack of time and will. But still I would encourage anyone who wants to choose to pick up the great language Chinese, if they have enough time and self-discipline.