Japanese or Chinese?
 

Hey i was wondering, which you would recommend learning first, i realise its going to take time, however i do want to learn both languages, do you think by learning one first it may help when learning the other.


Will.

In our 1st lesson our teacher told us "Dont ever think that learning Jp makes learning Chinese any easier"

They are from different language families but I guess they share some kanji characters?

chinese cuz then japanese will be easier trust me..i know both languages cuzof my parents

That is soooo true. Depending on what chinese you're going to learn though. I heard that mandarin chinese is harder then cantonese chinese.

I know cantonese and I'm learning japanese right now and japanese is SO MUCH DARN EASIER. Theres no sounds that you have to make and the writing system you can just use syllables then learn kanji after you've master the basics!

Nihongo....
 

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.

I suppose it depends where you are in life and to what level you want to learn.. if you are at school, have time and opportunity, I would pick Chinese first.

The reason is because after High School/College/Uni you might wanna go live in one of those countries to help you learn faster, and living in a foreign country is the best way to learn any language. So with that in mind, you should know, that living and working (as an English teacher say) in Japan, is probably gonna have more benefits than doing the same in China, I mean I'm sure there are great opportunities for work in China, but (and this might be a little biased) I just think there are more here.

Also I should mention that it's not a good idea to try and learn both languages simultaneously, especially in the early stages. IMHO you should wait until you can pass (or nearly pass) the highest level of the first languages' proficiency test before starting the next.

I prefer to learn Japanese first, since they have an alphabet kinda thing, but for Chinese there's a different character for each word and that annoys me ~_~

I agree, in japanese you may not be able to read every text, because of canji but if you now lets say hiragana you can write every single japanese word.
But i just cant understand the kun, on and general meaning of a kanji, in a sentence never know wich one to use

Chinese first~~~~~~
right now I'm really good at Chinese, and my Chinese does help me understand Japanese alot, but just on getting the meaning of non kanji Japanese characters.