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Chinese vs Japanese language study

Anatoli

先輩
27 Jun 2006
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Did some of the users here try both languages? I have been learning both Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese for quite some time and outside the proper environment. I haven't reached more than intermediate in both as they are both hard languages.

I want to ask a stupid question, which language is easier for you and why?

Both languages belong to the group of 4 languages requiring quite a lot of time to become functional, let alone fluent (the other two are Korean and Arabic).

In my opinion, if you overcome the first hurdles of the tones and initials in Chinese, then learning to speak becomes easier compared to Japanese. In Japanese, however, you can quite often fall onto hiragana only writing, avoiding embarrassing lack of knowledge of unknown kanji. You can't do that with Chinese and reading a significant text requires a good knowledge of characters.

The second obstacle can be overcome by using online pop-up dictionaries if you read an electronic text or if you have texts with pinyin (not recommended for practicing reading Chinese characters).

The Japanese grammar is not so hard for me but I know it causes pain to many learners much more than the Chinese grammar.

Anyway, please share your opinion. I know it's hard to make it unbiased. Please keep to the point, it's not about the motivation but about linguistic problems.
 
Haha, I can't answer you this question, for Chinese is my native language, I can't tell which one is difficult . I tried to study Japanese before, and found it is not easy . Since there are many Chinese characters in Japanese, I thought it will be easy for learning Japanese, But it turned out to be no. The Characters are in traditional Chinese characters, and different with what I use in daily life. It is not easy to remember all of them.
 
That proves that Chinese characters are objectively hard even for Chinese. If you have characters you don't know, it turns out not easy.

Since for me both Chinese and Japanese are foreign, of course I found that having less characters to learn is easy but the readings are so unpredictable, especially in names and rare words.
 
I find Japanese very easy to speak than Chinese because, Japanese grammatical syntaxes are little similar to my mother tongue Tamil! Chinese grammar is quite confusing and not straight forward! But I enjoy writing the Traditional Chinese Characters and writing it relieves me from stress!
 
I began with Japanese as a first learning language so I never really compared it to any others. However recently I began learning Chinese and found the grammar much easier to apply than in Japanese. It is similar in logic to English itself, whereas an Italian might for instance find learning Japanese comparatively easier. Both languages are disadvantaged by the lack of knowledge of the Chinese characters, but of course in the case of reading Chinese, it is more difficult to grasp the purpose of each individual hanzi if you have not learnt at least a few hundred! I enjoy both though :D
 
Did some of the users here try both languages? I have been learning both Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese for quite some time and outside the proper environment. I haven't reached more than intermediate in both as they are both hard languages.
I want to ask a stupid question, which language is easier for you and why?
Both languages belong to the group of 4 languages requiring quite a lot of time to become functional, let alone fluent (the other two are Korean and Arabic).
In my opinion, if you overcome the first hurdles of the tones and initials in Chinese, then learning to speak becomes easier compared to Japanese. In Japanese, however, you can quite often fall onto hiragana only writing, avoiding embarrassing lack of knowledge of unknown kanji. You can't do that with Chinese and reading a significant text requires a good knowledge of characters.
The second obstacle can be overcome by using online pop-up dictionaries if you read an electronic text or if you have texts with pinyin (not recommended for practicing reading Chinese characters).
The Japanese grammar is not so hard for me but I know it causes pain to many learners much more than the Chinese grammar.
Anyway, please share your opinion. I know it's hard to make it unbiased. Please keep to the point, it's not about the motivation but about linguistic problems.

:D I am a bit confused as how Chinese and Japanese are part of these difficult four languages to learn along with Korean and Arabic?

Wouldn't the hardest languages actually be Sanskrit, Tibetan, Latin, and Ancient Greek?

That proves that Chinese characters are objectively hard even for Chinese. If you have characters you don't know, it turns out not easy.

Since for me both Chinese and Japanese are foreign, of course I found that having less characters to learn is easy but the readings are so unpredictable, especially in names and rare words.

I also think those Chinese people who are accustomed to the simplified version will still have a huge leg up over us who grew up with no kanji whatsoever. I am thankful that kanji tends to pop up while typing Japanese because if I had to write with a pen and pencil, I would not be very good at writing kanji at all.
 
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Chinese is easy in term of speaking. I've know people who are not able to write and read a complete sentence in Chinese but has a decent Chinese speaking skill.

At the beginning, Chinese is extremely hard becuase you have to memorize hundreds of 'kanji' in order to do some practical things. On the other hands, it only takes you four to six weeks to memorize hiragana and katakana table and start applying it in kid's books, manga and anime.

I love Japanese culture and perceive that Japanese are doing a good job to reserve their unique culture than Chinese. If you travel to both Beijing and Kyoto, you'll understand what I mean.
 
:D I am a bit confused as how Chinese and ...
Wouldn't the hardest languages actually be Sanskrit, Tibetan, Latin, and Ancient Greek?

I also think those Chinese people who are accustomed to the simplified version will still have a huge leg up over us who grew up with no kanji whatsoever. I am thankful that kanji tends to pop up while typing Japanese because if I had to write with a pen and pencil, I would not be very good at writing kanji at all.

1. What's so hard about the Indo-European languages you listed? If you're not familiar with them it doesn't make them terribly difficult. Even grammatically complicated languages are not considered too complicated by education institutions because becoming functional in a language doesn't necessarily mean "not making any grammatical mistakes". You be right about Tibetan, though, especially taken into account the limited, almost non-existent resources. Resources for Sanskrit are limited as well but it's not a mainstream language, so to make a good assessment, it has to be taught in a number of Universities.

2. Forgetting how to write by hand is not unique for Japanese. Chinese input, especially based on pinyin makes you forget how to write by hand. The pinyin input (phonetical) has become the most common in mainland China, although you can also draw the characters you don't know pinyin for. It takes longer to type this way but the older generation and people who struggle with pinyin use alternative inputs. There's also "fuzzy" pinyin - based approximated pronunciation, allowing to enter Chinese words for people who don't know the exact pinyin.
 
Chinese is easy in term of speaking. I've know people who are not able to write and read a complete sentence in Chinese but has a decent Chinese speaking skill.

At the beginning, Chinese is extremely hard becuase you have to memorize hundreds of 'kanji' in order to do some practical things. On the other hands, it only takes you four to six weeks to memorize hiragana and katakana table and start applying it in kid's books, manga and anime.

I love Japanese culture and perceive that Japanese are doing a good job to reserve their unique culture than Chinese. If you travel to both Beijing and Kyoto, you'll understand what I mean.

1. Japanese pronunciation makes it easy to pick up how to speak in Japanese. I know many people who picked up some Japanese from listening to conversation, songs and movies. Even though the Japanese grammar is much harder than Chinese, the grammar becomes natural if you memorise whole phrases.

2. You're right, Kana makes the first steps in Japanese much easier. However, relying on Hiragana and Katakana only doesn't allow to start reading books though and Kanji becomes just a hurdle, which people are unable to overcome. If you are exposed to Chinese Hanzi ALL THE TIME, you don't have to look for words written in Kana. I find that books in Kana alone or books with Furigana make Japanese kids lazy to learn more Kanji. Chinese kids start relying on Hanzi after about year two at school. Chinese also has much les characters with multiple readings. Note that in Japanese texts many complex words are often written in Kana or Furigana is provided. Yu hardly find Chinese texts where Pinyin (or Bopomofo in Taiwan) is given in brackets to help you pronounce a rare word.

3. I don't fully agree, especially about the language. Unlike Japanese or Korean, Chinese vocabulary doesn't absorb a huge number of foreign words and many borrowing disappear after a while, since Chinese doesn't have an efficient way of transcribing foreign words like Katakana. Culturally yes, Japanese maybe more conservative, and even after heavy Americanisation, there are many cultrural features that never changed. It seems that China, despite being formally a Communist country, is even more open to Western influences than Japan and South Korea but China is not homegenous, Shanghai will be very different from remote areas, even other large cities. Modern lifestyle has penetrated much more in Japan than in China. Also, Kyoto is very different from Tokyo.
 
1. Japanese pronunciation makes it easy to pick up how to speak in Japanese. I know many people who picked up some Japanese from listening to conversation, songs and movies. Even though the Japanese grammar is much harder than Chinese, the grammar becomes natural if you memorise whole phrases.

2. You're right, Kana makes the first steps in Japanese much easier. However, relying on Hiragana and Katakana only doesn't allow to start reading books though and Kanji becomes just a hurdle, which people are unable to overcome. If you are exposed to Chinese Hanzi ALL THE TIME, you don't have to look for words written in Kana. I find that books in Kana alone or books with Furigana make Japanese kids lazy to learn more Kanji. Chinese kids start relying on Hanzi after about year two at school. Chinese also has much les characters with multiple readings. Note that in Japanese texts many complex words are often written in Kana or Furigana is provided. Yu hardly find Chinese texts where Pinyin (or Bopomofo in Taiwan) is given in brackets to help you pronounce a rare word.

3. I don't fully agree, especially about the language. Unlike Japanese or Korean, Chinese vocabulary doesn't absorb a huge number of foreign words and many borrowing disappear after a while, since Chinese doesn't have an efficient way of transcribing foreign words like Katakana. Culturally yes, Japanese maybe more conservative, and even after heavy Americanisation, there are many cultrural features that never changed. It seems that China, despite being formally a Communist country, is even more open to Western influences than Japan and South Korea but China is not homegenous, Shanghai will be very different from remote areas, even other large cities. Modern lifestyle has penetrated much more in Japan than in China. Also, Kyoto is very different from Tokyo.

One of the disadvantages of Chinese is it has too many dialects which make the language is nearly impossible to master. In brief, if you learn Mandarin, you can read book but you can't communicate with Shanghai or Guanzdong people.
 
One of the disadvantages of Chinese is it has too many dialects which make the language is nearly impossible to master. In brief, if you learn Mandarin, you can read book but you can't communicate with Shanghai or Guanzdong people.
You can't learn all languages. The solution is obvious. Just learn Mandarin - it's the formal language, language of media and entertainment. Shanghai and Guangdong people can speak it too and use it in many situations. I had no problem using Mandarin in Shanghai or Guangzhou, even in Hong Kong to some extent. Due to migration and promotion of Mandarin, many young people from non-Mandarin areas speak Mandarin quite well, many with no accent at all. Foreigners are almost expected just to speak Mandarin, not a local dialect. The effect of Mandarin being spread is noticeable in Chinese communities outside China as well.
 
One of the disadvantages of Chinese is it has too many dialects which make the language is nearly impossible to master. In brief, if you learn Mandarin, you can read book but you can't communicate with Shanghai or Guanzdong people.

Typical Vietnamese, you need to stop talking crap. First you said that the Chinese are not preserving their culture based on the comparison of Beijing and Kyoto. Err.. Beijing is an international city, the capital of China, while Kyoto is the culture capital of Japan. Why don't you compare Beijing to Tokyo?

Second you said that learning Mandarin will not you communicate with people in Shanghai, seriously have you even been to China? Stop spread false information as if they are facts.
 
In Chinese it is easier to achieve "babyspeak" level with a limited vocabulary. But Chinese has a heck of a lot of homonyms, setting aside tones, tons of idioms, tons of literary and historical references in the language, plus the need to learn 4000 characters. IMO, although learning functional Japanese may take a little more time than Chinese, becoming fluent in Japanese is easier to achieve than in Chinese.
 
I speak Japanese, and I presently live in China and am learning Chinese. Quite frankly, I find Japanese a lot easier than Chinese. The big problem for me in Chinese is the tones. I have found that, if you don't say it just right, if your tones are off just a little, Chinese people have a hard time understanding what you say. Also, when words are grouped together and pronounced together, the pronunication of the tones change but the way of writing the tones with diacritical marks (tone marks) does not. For example 谢 谢 (thank you) is written as xie (fourth tone) xie (neutral tone) in Pinyin, which I find confusing. The pronunciation of a syllable often changes due to the other syllables around it (谢 谢 being a good example), the diacritical marks for that syllable often do not, and there is no way to use diacritical marks to show that the pronunciation of the syllable has changed, so diacritical marks in Chinese can be quite misleading. Also, there is no way to write out the difference between how some syllables are pronounced, so you often cannot tell how a word is pronounced, even if a person writes the word out in Pinyin using diacritical marks (see the example of 泡 泡 糖 below). Also, Pinyin signs on Chinese roads and on Chinese businesses do not include diacritical marks, which makes everything just that more difficult.

Here is another example. The word for bubble gum is 泡 泡 糖 pao (fourth tone) ​pao​ (fourth tone) tang​ (second tone). In my humble opinion, the word is pronounced differently than the three diacritical marks in the word would lead us to believe. (I have had to devise my own writing system, so I can actually write down how Chinese words and sentences are pronounced. Once I started using my own sytem of diacritical marks, things went a lot better for me, but my having to use this new system of mine makes things more difficult for me.)

Another example is 羽毛球, yu (third tone) mao (second tone) qiu (second tone), the word for badminton. For me at least, tone marks for these three syllables give me an idea of how the word is pronounced that is just wrong. Quite frankly, I don't think anyone can look at "yu (third tone) mao (second tone) qiu (second tone)" and get an idea of how the word is actually pronounced.

I have also found that Chinese people do not 'like' to discuss these 'problems' with tones, which just adds to all of these difficulties. It has been my experience that Chinese people usually insist a word is pronounced exactly as the diacritical marks suggest and do not give any allowance for the fact that, for example, a fourth-tone syllable will often change pronunciation depending on whether it is the first, second, or third syllable in a word or phrase. I find this aversion to such discussions to be quite irritating.

People always say, "Once you figure out how tones work in Chinese, Chinese will get easier for you." I have not found this to be the case.

Japanese has none of the these problems (hallelujah!) so for me Japanese is easier.
 
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damn, I lost a post I was writing. I'll have to put in a suggestion for the site to prevent us from accidentally closing the window and losing what we've written. I'll try to rewrite:

I too started learning Chinese after getting somewhat comfortable in Japanese, and I've also found that the tones present a unique challenge. Since English is my native tongue, Chinese is the first tonal language I've tried to tackle, so although I'm used to stress and pitch accent, distinguishing phonemes by their tone is new to me. Native Chinese speakers don't quite understand this difficulty, since the difference between the tones is as clear as the difference between a [g] and [k] to us.

If you'd like to better understand the rules for the way that tones change in a language (and why Chinese people don't see these assimilations as truly changing), I suggest you read up on the phonetics and phonology of Chinese. It really helped me with Japanese, and gave a logical framework for what seemed like an arbitrary quirk.

Another culprit for this difficulty, I suspect, is pinyin. For those of us who grew up in languages that don't use accents and diacritics, these new elements become an additional level of information, and it's often the first thing we forget. We associate a character with the romanized pronunciation, and since the hanzi gives no indication which tone is used, if we forget the accent mark we're likely to mispronounce the word. For this reason, I would argue that Gwoyeu Romatzyh is a superior romanization technique for native English speakers, as it incorporates the tonal information into the spelling itself (no tones or numbers to indicate tones). This builds the tone into our visualization of the character's pronunciation, which means we're less likely to use the wrong tone when we say the word:
220pxGrguopng-1.jpg

from this wiki article on Chinese Romanizations

Tim Ferriss has had pretty good success with language acquisition, and has written quite a bit about it. HERE'S an article about picking up a passing familiarity with any language quickly, and HERE'S another one about learning a language more in-depth (but also pretty quickly).

Cheers
 
Hey guys, i know a little bit of mandarim and i have a friend that was learning with me that already knew japanese. From what he said... japanese is easier, mostly because of the characters. But this is a thing that you have to know when you start to stydy that languages... the most difficult for ocidentals is that we don't know exactly how to read, so we learn first the sounds in our spelling and then in their, what makes the things kind of worst, because sometimes seems you don't know a thing! But that depends on you! Try to figure out what are your knowledges till today, what can help you in each language and make your decision
 
I learn Japanese for school and people told me japanese is really hard. suppose to be one of the hardest languages in the world. oh thanks people for telling me that -_- but after learning japanese for a while it's really not hard at all. i mean, yes, it can get hard. especially with all the different words for different situations. but i think as nyouyaku said the hardest languages to learn would be latin, tibetan etc. but it also depends on what peoples preferences are too.
 
I think Chinese is more easier to learn in my opinion because the grammar is easy and more understandable for an English speaker. But with Japanese the grammar is in a opposite format. If you don't build a strong foundation in Japanese grammar with some background of some Kanji it is very difficult to learn. With Chinese the character does not change as much as the use of Japanese characters in my opinion.
 
It's nice that Chinese is more easier but I want to learn the most easiest language.
 
I think Chinese is more easier to learn in my opinion because the grammar is easy and more understandable for an English speaker. But with Japanese the grammar is in a opposite format. If you don't build a strong foundation in Japanese grammar with some background of some Kanji it is very difficult to learn. With Chinese the character does not change as much as the use of Japanese characters in my opinion.

Chinese grammar is not a problem. Chinese pronunciation is a damn big problem. People could self-study Japanese speaking at the beginning level. On the other hand, there is no way you can self-study Chinese speaking in any level.
 
I've done nothing but study Chinese on my own. I don't see why you think no one can to it.
 
I learn Japanese for school and people told me japanese is really hard. suppose to be one of the hardest languages in the world. oh thanks people for telling me that -_- but after learning japanese for a while it's really not hard at all. i mean, yes, it can get hard. especially with all the different words for different situations. but i think as nyouyaku said the hardest languages to learn would be latin, tibetan etc. but it also depends on what peoples preferences are too.

Where are you reading that Latin is one of the most difficult languages to learn? It's not; not even close. At least not for an English speaker, or a speaker of Western European languages. There are many reasons why, among them, (1) Familiar orthography, (2) Highly logical construction, (3) No need to worry about correct pronunciation, as it's not really a spoken language to any appreciable degree, (4) Highly familiar vocabulary, (5) Very flexible word order. There are more reasons but those are just a few. I've studied some Latin before, and it was nowhere near as difficult as some other languages.

I haven't studied Tibetan, so I can't comment on its difficulties; however, it does appear to be a difficult language.

I have studied Sanskrit, and while it's more difficult than Latin (due to the unfamiliar orthography, much less familiar vocabulary, larger number of cases, and the dreaded draconian sandhi rules), it's not one of the most difficult languages in the world. Not even close.
 
I'm not Chinese. I've studied Japanese before and some Spanish in high school. I'm not saying it's easy or that I'm great at it, but it can be done.
 
I'm Japanese teacher n now I'm learning a little Chinese... 😊 I think Chinese is easier than Japanese...n the philosophy of Chinese letter is more meaningfull... hehehe :D
 
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