I heard somewhere that chinese was a very difficult language to learn or the most difficult, anyway, what impresses me the most is the number of character someone must learn in order to write/read in chinese, I heard it was around 5000+ which is an astromical number. Also is it possible that there are less syntax in chinese, because it would seem extremely difficult to learn the syntax with all the other stuff... Also, do you have to speak chinese in order to work in relation with the chinese ambassy or it doesn't matter either you speak french/english or chinese.