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.

What's the main differences between japanese and chinese?

Im guessing the grammer structure. The Japannese uses supfixs, prefixs. Do Chinese use?

ok.. so my chinese lady was good in giving me the dictionary.. i like chinese food, and shes right around the corner, so i get to know the owner pretty well.. but i had a hard time finding out about the whole -fix thing altogether.. though i dont know much so im interested also i guess

well i think that you should learn chinese first but what kind of chinese do you want to learn? contonese or mandrain? i know both but contonese is much easier and now i'm trying to learn japanese and it's much easier for me becausesome of them are like chinese so yeah i think it's chinese!

i was just wondering since there are different dialects in chinese are there different ones in japanese

aww mann people are saying Chinese is harder.I wanted to learn that.
Never mind now.Lol i`ll try to learn japanese instead.

Well, before I was into Japan, I was into China, but since I was young, the whole concept of their language was kind of hard for me to get to.

However, I found out that Japanese is much easier for me. ^^ I tried taking up Chinese once more last year, and PHALED. xD So I'm just sticking with Japanese.

However, these people here are giving sound advice, and everyone's case IS different, so I say consider both and hopefully you can make a decision soon. :)

i think [mandarin] chinese will help you with ur japanese (that is if ur very devoted). the only reason i think this way is b/c i'm a native speaker of mandarin and i learn japanese a lot quicker than, say, the average american (no offense) who is equally as devoted cuz i have the advantage of knowing the definition of kanji so i can concentrate wholly on pronunciation. but, idk... maybe someone who is japanese native speaker can tell you the opposite... just choose the one you would be willing to be more devoted to, k? good luck =)

I recommend not going anywhere near the Chinese language.

As a speaker of a Eurasiatic language, Japanese will be MUCH easier.
If you must learn a non-Japanese Asian language, I would recommend Korean.