>>1546>I don't get iranian though, why not learn arabic instead? It's far more common in Middle East and perhaps even North Africa. Namely because it's more accessible to Indo-European-speakers, whereas Arabic is far harder to learn for a native Indo-European speaker, also at that, it's more scarcely spoken than Arabic is (though still largely distributed from Turkey to China, and still with a large literary history) making it far more "in-demand" so to speak. They're also similar to Sanskrit/Indo-Aryan languages, which are extremely important as well, so if you already know them it's an easy gateway to Iranian ones, and if you already know an Iranian one, it can help with learning Sanskrit; plus if you do want to learn Arabic, then learning an Iranian language too would probably help with that.
>That's pretty much the point of any language, but what information can you extract from the modern chinese sources? Should I learn chinese just so I can read how nothing happened on Tiananmen square? My point is that the chinese communist party makes most if not all information sources dubious and untrustworthy, so learning that specific language doesn't have much benefits.Chinese isn't just spoken in the PRC, and besides, that's already the case for most English sources as well whenever talking about any "terrorist attack", "lone-wolf shooting", "disaster", etc.
There's a lot of information today locked up in Chinese; specifically a lot of information about Mao Zedong's family (I can't remember the exact source now, it was all in Chinese), which could be important.