Social Harder to learn Japanese or Chinese ?

[Your Account]

anyone here speaks Japanese or Chinese as their second language ?
Which one is harder to learn , eg if you are native english speaker ?

 

[Darkavius]

I don't speak either fluently but Chinese is way harder than Japanese. Japanese has 3 different "alphabets", Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji. Hiragana and Katagana are easy to learn. Japanese is not a tonal language. Japanese is a syllable language. Chinese is a tonal language and someone can correct me if I am wrong but one word can mean 3 different things depending on its tone, and that's not including the Kanji you would have to learn for Chinese writing.

 

[ShinkanPo]

This interests me too.

Two of my favorite cultures

 

[zapataxiv]

I speak mandarin as my second language and I studied Japanese in college

honestly they both have things that can appeal and ease the learning process for English learners, while they both have some pretty difficult parts.

I think it is easier to get to a basic getting around level in Chinese

but it might be harder to master depending on your criteria as tones can be a pretty troublesome thing to navigate

my tones are garbage but I can kick the shit with random joes in the middle of nowhere in china

fun times have been had that way
once I drank goat blood moon shine and got invited to a club under a supermarket in he middle of a small mountain village

we got drunk and bonded over singing linkin park karaoke lol

 

[Your Account]

please dont drink animal blood anymore that doesnt make sense at all

 

[Sonny Qc]

Cognates is very difficult from English to Japanese
Way easier fromt French to Japanese

Grammar is complete opposite

It's a pronunciation thingy.

Read on this a few years ago,
can't remember why.

 

[zapataxiv]

please dont drink animal blood anymore that doesnt make sense at all

wasn't so bad looked like wine tasted like gasoline

 

[I Am Legion]

I am fluent in Kung Fu. That is the language that all understand as universally superior.

 

[crabmeat]

My mother learned Nihongo during the occupation. She said it was easy compared to Mandarin or Cantonese.

 

[ObsoleteSoul]

I don't speak them, but, I have studied them from a low-level. Always seemed like Mandarin would be the harder of the two to master. While Mandarin follows our same structure(SVO), the tonal aspect of it seems to be a bigger hurdle than Japanese, which is not, excluding pitch changing. Also, the rote memorization needed to learn how to read Mandarin is a gigantic hurdle in itself, and being able to read a language helps a lot.

 

[pugilistico]

one word can mean 3 different things depending on its tone

I think it might be 5 but I don't speak Mandarin.

I felt like speaking wise, Japanese is easier to pick up. I studied a bit and could get to some level of basic conversation rather quickly. I was able to understand some things when I visited Tokyo, compare that to Spanish which I had been studying for way longer and I would barely catch anything when native speakers speak. Pronunciation is easy. But reading it is another animal.

From what I know, Chinese is difficult because of the tones, but the grammar is easy because it's a lot more flexible with it's rules. A friend who was studying Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin told me Chinese basically felt like it had no grammar so you could just put words together and it would make sense. The characters would be a bitch to learn but you also have that with Kanji in Japanese as well.

The easiest language I've ever encountered was bahasa (Malaysian or Indonesian). Really simple grammar rules, roman letters, and words are very similar to european languages because it's derived from Dutch.

 

[Flower2dPeople]

As a 1/3 chinese shookorogist, Japanese is easier.