Mandarin Chinese or Japanese?

Question

Which one should I learn?

Are they easier than learning European languages?

Which one is easier?

Are they similar?

If I learn one will the other one be easier to learn?

I want to learn one of these languages because I predict I will need them in the future

Please don't be bias if you already know one of these languages

And any info on the languages would be appreciated too

Answer 1

you can only judge the difficulty of learning a certain language based on the languages you already know. for instance, if you speak on english then it will be easier to learn german and other european languages than asian languages because english and other european languages are more similar. in short, the more similar the languages the easier they are to learn.

as for mandarin chinese and japanese, if you start out with chinese it will be easier to pick up japanese later. there are far more characters to memorize when you learn chinese so it will be really difficult in the beginning but it will help a lot if you start out with chinese first! trust me i've done that :D

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Answer 2

Chinese -- > Mandarin

something is easier, something is harder

Chinese is easier

no they are not

as far as they are different, you question looks like "if i learn German, will it be easier for me to learn Spanish?"

Answer 3

Chinese is better.

Answer 4

European languages are easier by far (if your a Westerner).  

Besides having an interest or wanting to travel in either Japan or China:

The advantages of learning Japanese include being able to play video games and read mangas before they are translated.  

The main advantage of learning Chinese - would be that you'd have a lot more job opportunities as China's influence grows day by day.  I'm already in Taiwan learning Chinese now - I have been doing so for the past 4 years and can vouch that it's no walk in the park to learn.

Answer 5

Out of the three, I would really suggest you to learn Mandarin (Putonghua) first. This is only because in the years to come, Mandarin is going to be used more commonly.

Learning how to speak Mandarin isn't that tough, provided that you have the enviroment around you. But I guess that goes with every language.

Chinese on the other hand is a tougher language. Many people assume that once they learn Chinese, learning Mandarin would be a piece of cake, and vice versa but that's not the case!  

And, since I have no idea about Japanese, I'l keep it quiet! LOL! But it is somewhat similar to Chinese!

Answer 6

Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are similar when it comes to some of the uses of their characters (or Kanji in Japanese)  but the way you write the characters and Kanji are different.  personally i think it is easier to learn Chinese first.  i'm sixteen and i took Mandarin in School last year and i'm on to my second year.  it was quite easy, i had an A average for that class the entire year.   but if you learn one of them it is easy to learn the other, that's what i think.

Answer 7

chinese and japanese are pretty similar with some of the characters meaning teh same things.

learn chinese first, then learn japanese

Answer 8

This is a hard one to answer because I dont' know your current language skills and interests.  It's like asking if Spanish or English is easier to a French...    They're similar, yet different.

In your case, I would suggest Japanese.  since you don't have any background.

Reasons:

>  both have similar grammatical structures, but Japanese' are more flexible to a point.  there are NO definite word orders, only certain rules... which have exceptions too.

>  You'll need to learn more than 5,000 chinese characters (plus 4 tones) for each word inorder to be somewhat proficient in Chinese (Mandarin) while you only need about 1,000 in Japanese to be really good (they only have around 1,500.  Plus, if you can say the word, you can write it due to their 3 different systems of communication.

>  However, Japanese is easier to learn than Chiense.

> if you do learn Chinese first, you'll understand Japanese grammatically way faster since it's based of the Chiense.  (of course you'll know most, if not all the Kanjis)

>Plus, many Japanese words and phrases are actually phonetic copies of foreign words, so if you know English etc, it'll be likely you will be able to guess at the word if you know how to pronounce it.

good luck

Answer 9

The 3 most difficult languages to learn to read and write are.

1. Chinese...because of the chinese script.

2. Japanese.....because they use lots of chinese characters, plus their own complicated characters.

3. English...because the spelling is crazy.

In addition for an English speaker Chinese grammar is easy, but Japanese grammar is harder.

Chinese is a very easy language to learn for conversation as the grammar is very easy.

Chinese is hard for Europeans to learn to pronounce, Japanese is easy, but is a little difficult.

For English speakers the easiest languages to learn are Spanish and Italian. German is hard in terms of grammar and French, the pronunciation is the most difficult.

But learning any language is not really hard, but it just takes a long time.

You should choose a country you want to visit, a culture you care about and a language you might want to to use for work.