As it happens I learned conversational Mandarin way back when. Lived overseas for a few years and all that. There are two things you need to recognize about your idea of doing business in China:
There are lots of ethnic Chinese who are already fluent in both English and one or two dialects of Chinese, having grown up with both. Many of them consider their other occupational training to be the big thing, that’s how strong they are academically. Unless your other skills are truly great, adding the language isn’t going to make you that competitive.
Manadrin isn’t a latin-based language, and it is among the most difficult for English speakers to learn. It’s supposedly harder than Japanese or Russian. After 5 years of study you’ll still be behind the curve on vocabulary and you’ll only have rudimentary reading and writing skills.
Doing business overseas means travelling a lot, and we’re not talking about taking the red-eye out to the east coast. Unless you want to live out of a suitcase or relocate you may find that international business travel gets old fast.
If you’re talking about job skills make sure you’re considering the lifestyles that go with your target occupation. Once you do that you’ll soon see that after a certain point the money isn’t the thing.
If the money is the thing then its usually better to own a small business than to be the employee or manager of of a big one.
