I took German, too, for the last three years before university, and then at university for a year; I can actually speak and understand some German, and definitely read it, but I feel it would be a great embarrassment if I didn't with that background, since for my university course we had to read a different German work of fiction each week of the academic year! It also helps that I already know two Germanic languages -- Swedish and (at least in theory) English -- so that often enough I can understand things in German without actually ever having learnt the word.

The extra problem with trying to learn Chinese, apart from it being such a different language both in type and script, is of course that you would have to choose which dialect you wanted to learn; I understand from my Chinese colleagues that the different dialects are wildly different and knowing one does not lead to understanding others.