Did I mention that I'm fluent in Chinese Mandarin? Perhaps you should be too someday:

About 1.200.000.000 people speak Chinese, that is a fifth of the worlds population. China is huge so many dialects have evolved and apart from written communication someone from North China won't understand a South Chinese inhabitant. That's why there is a standard oral language, called Mandarin (Putonghua) which about 880.000.000 are capable of. If you plan on going to this country, this is the language to learn. :-)

In the close future the Chinese language will advance to one of the most important international foreign languages. This century is going to be significantly influenced by the development of the Asian-Pacific region as there is an economic boom expected over the next two decades. The World Bank forecasts that China will be the most powerful economic power worldwide in 2020 (unless the American government threatened of losing power, finds a ridiculous reason to throw some bombs on China to avoid that... whatever, I lose the plot).

What does that mean for the Internet? Probably around 2007 the majority of webpages will be in Chinese and a very big part of the outer-Chinese population won't understand shit. No worries though, English won't lose it's popularity, it's the primary international language and will stay it. Also most Chinese webpages have an English translation of their content and that will remain in the future.

Nevertheless, if above said woke your interest (or worries) read on.
A good start to learn another language are numbers. While China has for many uses adopted the Arabic numeral system familiar around the world, it also still uses its native Chinese character number system. This native number system we will glance at now.

Chinese is a symbol language, all text consists of those small rectangular shaped signs that are made of many small lines in all directions and make up a syllable. Writing or rather painting those symbols itself is a science. :-) The traditional thousand years old symbols were rather complex and it wasn't too long ago that the Chinese Government decided to simplify them to make them more efficient and I think people are pretty glad about that. So here they are:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10

(Zero can be drawn with a simple circle)

Go and learn them, perhaps it will turn out to be useful. You could for instance cipher your daily food shopping list, or your cash machine code, .. you get the idea, so have fun and a nice day! :-)