I've been trying to learn Mandarin for awhile -- ploddingly so -- but still trying. And I hope that someday my Chinese-born daughter will learn too. Right now, we have the chance to enroll her in an immersion language school. The problem is that the only languages offered are Spanish and Japanese. I'm inclined to pick Japanese. I'm wondering if there's some benefit, even beyond the hanzi / kanji, to moving between Japanese and Mandarin. Are there some grammatical structures that would ease the learning process? I'm basically interested if people feel like learning Japanese provides a benefit for later attempting Mandarin.