In your opinion what language will you take?
I’m moving towards chinese, since is the future language in our generation!
FYi: I need a foreign requirment credit. I’m in a community college now!!
I would recommend Mandarin Chinese because it has the most native speakers. Japanese is much more limited and the world and it would probably serve you much better if you spoke to business partners in Mandarin.
Spanish or maybe French. If you are looking to transfer then you want the Easy A classes. Chinese is much more difficult then any European Language. Japanese is easier–prouncination specifically–but still more work.
Plus I doubt Chinese will ever be the future language with so many Chinese students coming over to America to learn English.
What about Simplified or Traditional? Does Japanese have a bigger advantage?
Oh and guys I’m from peru. I know Spanish but forgot it. I understand Spanish just can’t speak it. It’s my dream to either talk chinese or Japanese
Chinese is a very useful language if going into business, government, or similar work. There’s so many people that speak it, it’s a valuable skill for employers. On the other hand, learning Japanese could be useful for personal reasons because so much media content comes from them. My friend started taking Japanese so she could understand manga and anime without having to relying on subtitles. I don’t think you could go wrong with either one, but they are more difficult to learn than latin based languages
Traditional is old Chinese still written in Taiwan.
Simplified is the (supposedly) easier reformed language that the mainland govt of China adopted.
@NASA2014
If you haven’t had any formal education in Spanish (usually high school tho) then take Spanish. As a heritage speaker you’ll breeze through learning the language. It’ll be a fraction of the difficulty compared to learning a truly foreign language. If you get proficient enough in Spanish then you’ll find the other latin languages such as French and Italian easy to learn. You could even apply as a major to those foreign languages.
Why bother struggling to be mediocre in Chinese or Japanese when you could get near-native in Spanish?
@bomerr i spoke Spanish when I was in Peru, but when I arrived to USA I forgot it.
@NASA2014
If you can still understand (some of) it then you haven’t really forgotten it. That little difference will make it exponentially more easy to learn.
When you start learning a different language you will see that is it very difficult to reach a native-like level. After 1 or 2 years of seriously studying Spanish you could be near-native. With Japanese and especially Chinese you could easily study the language for 5 years and not even be at the same proficiency level.
@bomerr I dont mind learning Japanese or Chinese in five years. I could probably relearned Spanish in 6 months since my parents still talk to me in Spanish.
@NASA2014
The honest truth is you will probably give up learning Japanese or Chinese after you reach novice tourist level. To reach native level requires exponentially more work and is 100% impossible to achieve without immersion in the culture (like how your parents speak to you).
I would advise taking elementary through intermediate Spanish. That is 4 courses and like ~20 units required to transfer. A whopping 1/4-1/3rd of all the units you need and they will be all As. Since you’ll breeze through Spanish, you will be able to concentrate on other important subjects like Math or English.
Take Spanish. Unless u have a chinese or Japanese speaking significant other or else u get total immersion by living in those countries, your speaking & reading ability won’t ever develop enough to be worth the trouble.
Even Nicholas Kristoff who is married to a Chinese woman and has biracial children says Mandarin isn’t worth the effort. Study Spanish; you’ll have something to show for for effort.
@bomerr I don’t give up for no reason. It took me seven times to pass the NY regents for biology. If it takes more than five year so be it. I will be still in school getting my masters in Meteorology.
That doesn’t bode well for your chances of learning Chinese or Japanese. Learning languages is already mostly based on memorization ability; much like learning biology. Chinese is the absolute worst tho because you have to memorize 1000s of different symbols.
Giving up and trying are two halfs of the same coin. Both are equally valid choices. Remember that. Btw that is probably some chinese dao philosophy right there.
Let’s see where it takes me. I will let you guys know how I’m doing!! Elementary Chinese 1 and 2 are the only courses offer in my community college
FYI. NYT Nicholas Kristoff:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/opinion/30kristof.html?hp&_r=0
Even the Chinese in China are forgetting how to write characters:
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21613300-some-chinese-forget-how-write-bad-characters
When the people who have to use the language every day have trouble remembering it, it doesn’t bode well for the proficiency of infrequent users.
English is the hardest language in the world. Not one in the world has mastered English it’s just to hard.
English is one of the most easy languages to learn. It’s the simplest of all the European Languages (French, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, etc) It contains an alphabet which makes learning to read relatively easy. Pronunciation while difficult to master [which is true for all languages] doesn’t require mastery of tones / infliction so even people with heavily thick accents can be understood.
The biggest issue with English is that a lot of words are not pronounced the same as they are spelled.
Chinese is the hardest language for a European speaker to learn.
Idk where you are getting your info but it’s hella wrong.
The Defense Language Institute lists Chinese (Mandarin) as a category IV language, along with Arabic (Modern Standard, Levantine, or Iraqi), Korean, Japanese, and Pashto. Category IV languages are taught in 64 week courses, compared to 26 week courses for category I languages like Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Of course, these learning periods are for students who initially start knowing English.
http://www.dliflc.edu/languagesatdli.html
Course offerings at regular colleges may also show a larger number of courses or credits of language (as opposed to literature and culture) courses in the language learning sequence for the “harder” languages like Chinese.
At many colleges, there may be special versions of the language courses for heritage speakers.
Actually, I’m not quite sure where you are getting your information from, @bomerr. Language learning difficulty is at least partially subjective, because it depends in part on exposure, motivation, and other factors. For example, English might be very difficult to learn for a Chinese or Japanese native, precisely because we do have an alphabet (when they are used to the characters) and because the language is quite different. On the other hand, I found Japanese easier to learn than French. I found Japanese grammatical structure simpler and more intuitive - but an even better reason is that I’m an avid manga/anime fan and had been exposed to the sounds, hiragana and kanji for years and so when I started learning it, I recognized some and had better pronunciation. I was also more motivated to learn Japanese.
I’m also curious about your grouping of languages. Languages, linguistically, are typically grouped by their evolution. Italian, French, and Spanish are Romance languages; Polish and Russian are Slavic languages and German is a Germanic language - as is English. They’re all part of the Indo-European language family, but so are Punjabi, Hindi, Greek, Persian, and Pashto. I wouldn’t say that English is objectively the simplest of all the Indo-European languages; I found German and Dutch to be much simpler, quite frankly, because English is Germanic but also borrows conventions from Romance languages and Hellenic (Greek) languages (whereas German and Dutch don’t typically have that problem). Some of my language teachers have actually told me that English has acquired a reputation of being notoriously difficult to learn, because so many of our language and grammar rules have exceptions due to the diverse evolution of the language.
There is no linguistic agreement on the “hardest” language to learn for either everyone or any particular group of native speakers.
But even if there was…it doesn’t sit well with me to shy away from something simply because it’s difficult. That’s why we have a shortage of speakers today - Chinese (specifically Mandarin and Cantonese) are considered languages that are critical to national security, and [we pay people to go abroad and learn them](Languages List - Critical Language Scholarship Program). Yes, native fluency may be difficult to achieve without an immersion experience - but who’s to say that OP won’t have one? S/he could study abroad in China or Japan or take an international internship or teaching fellowship there post-college, like the JET Programme. And maybe you do stop when get to functional tourist level. So what? IF you are interested in it…that’s what matters.
In that, OP, I admire your fortitude - you want to learn Chinese or Japanese despite the (perceived) difficulty level. I think Chinese (Mandarin specifically) is a more practical choice particularly if you are interested in business, but if I were making the choice I would choose Japanese because of the reasons I stated earlier in my post.