If you are going to work in animation/CG professionally, I'd suggest 3ds Max. 

Max will be more difficult to learn but it is a program that has wide adoption in the pro world. Max is more difficult to use than Carrara because it is designed for the pro world which means everything is programmable/customizable. And, all that variation and ability has to be learned and can even seem cumbersome at times. By comparison, Carrara has a much friendlier interface and makes some animation abilities, especially animating DAZ characters, insanely easy, but...

While Carrara is fantastic to use and is a software I've used professionaly, it is not a 'professional' software. What do I mean by that? Autodesk, Maxon, LW, Luxology etc., their software IS their product. For DAZ, content is their product and the company has purchased and maintains software to make using their content easier. So, there is not wide professional adoption of Carrara, nor is their predictable support and development cycles as is the case with the pro-grade software. DAZ's hit-and-miss dev cycle and support abilities make most pro pipelines stay away from adopting Carrara as an additional software. 

A couple of years ago, DAZ hired me to demo Carrara at SIGGRAPH. I was showing some other animation pro's how Carrara handles animating a helicopter and how easy it is use the Carrara tool set. They commented what I did in a couple of minutes would have taken 20 minutes in Max. But, stuff done in Carrara can't be ported to other render engines or exported consistently into something like FBX with predictable results on the other end. So, they walked away, wishing they could use Carrara in the work-place but knew it was never going to happen. 

Hat's off to DAZ though. They have done some incredible work with their character series and  Carrara's abilities. Carrara really does own the hobby/semi-pro market. Blender is so cool but doesn't have integration with content like Carrara does. For the price, I don't think there is another software that is as capable and as integrated with content and file import abilities as Carrara. In my studio, it still is a CG Swiss Army Knife.