[kawaiineko]

To me, Japanese is easier. I avoid learning Chinese at all costs because it's said to be one of the world's most difficult languages to learn. This is because Chinese is extremely tonal with pronunciation and they have all the characters (this means the written and spoken aspects of the language are BOTH difficult). You pronounce one word wrong, and you're likely to change the meaning of what you say.

With Japanese, it balances out. The writing systems are extremely difficult to learn (there are three of them, and their language has many homophones). Plus with the writing system that is used most heavily (kanji) there are so many characters to learn and two different readings used; kun and on. Reason there are two different writing systems is to differentiate between Chinese and Japanese; most characters from Japanese are derived from the Japanese language. With the kun reading (I think) it's based on you spell the word by using the phonetics of hiragana (ex:umi; you would spell it using the character in hiragana for "u" and the character in hiragana for "mi"). However even though their systems of writing are difficult to learn, their pronunciation is sooo much easier to learn. If you know anything about Spanish pronunciation, Japanese pronunciation is said to be similar to their pronunciation.