Chinese or Japanese

Student Lounge College Life
21

@juillet

I do not see how this is possible. The English alphabet allows a reader to memorize 26 characters and then be able to read the entire language. (although not perfectly because not everything is written phonetically) Memorizing 2,136 Joyo Kanji requires much more effort. Not to mention learning the varies combinations. Alphabet also has other advantages such as the ability to read root words; Ease of being able to look up a word in dictionary. etc.

From a 100% practical point of view, an alphabet is clearly a superior writing system.

English has no verb conjugations like the other European Indo-European languages. ( I might be wrong here but I am pretty sure about this)

Likewise it has no noun declinations.

Being able to conjugate verbs and decline nouns like a native German or Russian speaker is incredibly hard for a English speaker. A Chinese speaker with no shared indo-european grammar would find it even more difficult.

Amount of memorization required
Lack or root verbs or pronunciation ability
etc.

Yes it is possible to objectively rate the difficult of learning a language.

Also I am sure there is a Confucist or Daoist proverb about choosing ones battles wisely.

One of my friends attends USC and met with the Apple recruiter. They said they were only looking for students who could speak Mandarin, Cantonese and English fluently. With the recent increase in intl chinese students, a typical non-heritage or non-native-speaker just does not stand a chance in the job market.

22

You’re wrong :slight_smile: Off the top of my head, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish have no verb conjugations. English, with limited exceptions, has a different verb conjugation for 3rd person singular.

OP, your decision should be based upon how you want to use the language in the future. Neither will be easy. If you have an interest in the culture/film/music/cuisine, etc. of either Japan or China, choose that one. Ideally, once you’ve made your choice, it will be most beneficial to do some immersion learning in the country. Best of luck.

23

I’m skiing in japan now. I know only the Kanji characters for “Tokyo” and for “exit”. For the other 2,134 characters I just take a photo w my smartphone and use Google translator. I’m getting by just fine.

24

Good luck, as it doesn’t sound like you really wanted an opinion here anyway. If you can afford to try it, go for it.

I am American, but have lived in Asia for the past 15 years and can still only order a few dishes in restaurants and tell a taxi driver the address I want to go to and when to turn right or left, despite some effort on my part to learn more of the languages–they are very hard. My almost 18 y.o. daughter who has lived in Asia since age 3 and studied languages in school can speak, read and write Japanese fluently and is working on Chinese, but she uses the languages in her everyday life. Her symbol reading ability in Japanese is still in a late elementary school level, and even lower in Chinese. As many who have responded to your post noted–these are really challenging languages.

25

In a business setting, if you don’t have native fluency, everyone will switch to English. This is what I have observed consistently in all the countries I have lived/worked.

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@‌GMTplus7

well that is not learning the language and you won’t have World Lens during written examinations.

27

@bomerr, today I just need the arrow that points to the ski lift.

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@GMTplus7‌

Currently, everyone switches to English because it is the global business language. Because China is most likely to become the most powerful economy in the future, over time, Chinese will become the accepted business language. Even presently, if you know English, learning Chinese is more valuable than learning any other language. Generally, IMO from Chinese culture, Chinese people appreciate your effort to speak Chinese, even if you do not speak it well (as opposed to France, from my experience only).

@bomerr‌

I’m not sure why you think Chinese is a relatively less useful language. China has the second largest economy and is likely to become the largest. Even if OP forgets it through non-use over time, it would be easier for him to pick up should s/he want to.

EDIT: Also, while I would personally agree English is an easier language to learn than Chinese or Japanese, I do know that many Chinese people struggle with English. Just because English seems logical and easy to learn to you does not mean it is the same for everyone else.

29

Didn’t they say the same about japanese in the 80’s?

China is indeed going to become the largest economy in the world, but only bcs it has the most people. Per capita, china is poor. And China is still lacking in soft influence. Multinational corporations might want to assemble their gadgets in china or try to sell KFC chicken to a billion eaters, but even expats don’t like living there.

Chinese will never supplant english as THE accepted business language, bcs:

  1. english is already entrenched as the int’l business language
  2. chinese is awkward to read/write
  3. it’s a tonal language

Chinese people appreciate non-asian races learning a few token phrases in chinese, no matter how unintelligibly mangled-- it’s like watching a trained seal ride a unicycle. Ive seen the chinese gush appreciation in business meetings in china. But they do not extend that same patience to speakers w asian faces.

30

OP asked “Chinese or Japanese” and people are responding with…

  1. Asian languages are TOO HARD, take Language X, Y, or Z instead! (even though OP didn’t ask for opinions about any other languages: FYI they did not mention Spanish in the original post for a reason)
  2. There’s no point in learning foreign languages, English will forever be the one and only lingua franca and everyone else should just learn English! (y’know at one point in time, everyone was saying that French would be the lingua franca, and look at what’s happened now)

I’m pretty sure that OP made this thread for opinions on learning Japanese or Chinese, NOT for people to dissuade them from pursuing a language that they’re interested in. No where in the original post did OP ask for opinions on Spanish and no where did OP say “Tell me why learning Chinese/Japanese is pointless/a waste of time/etc!”

@NorthernMom61‌ Wait, you just said that your daughter can speak, read, and write Japanese “fluently”, yet you say she can only read at a late-elementary school level. In that sense, she wouldn’t be able to read Japanese fluently.

31

You are pretty sure that English is not like other languages that have verb conjugations?

Maybe Chinese is more your thing if you do not want to remember numerous verb conjugations.

32

:slight_smile: That’s because, presumably, you are coming from the standpoint of a native English speaker! I’ve had friends who were native Chinese speakers as well as of other languages, and they said they found English difficult to learn because despite what English speakers might think - the alphabet doesn’t really help you pronounce everything. For example - the word “enough.” There’s nothing in the phonetic alphabet that prepares you to pronounce that word!

Of course English has verb conjugation. Conjugation simply means the derived forms of a verb based on a variety of surrounding linguistic factors, like gender, tense, number, etc. Like the verb “to be” - saying “he was” is the past tense and that’s a form of verb conjugation, as are the variations “they were”, “I was”, “she was,” etc. English also has noun declension - a simple example is the difference between books and *book/i. A slightly more complex example would be he and *him/i or child and children.

I meant linguistically, as in linguistics experts have not come to that conclusion - most of them agree that the difficulty of a language learning is subject based upon the native language of the target and other factors. But even still everything you listed was subjective. Like memorization: If you already know Japanese and recognize many Chinese characters, learning Chinese will be easier for you than if you come into a Chinese class knowing no characters. (Even better, if you already know Vietnamese - Vietnamese borrows a lot of vocabulary from Chinese). If you speak a language that has inflection, learning another one with inflection will be easier than if you don’t. Conversely, if you already know a Romance language, learning another one will be easier. You alluded to that earlier when you said that learning Spanish would make it easier to learn Italian or French.

In addition, some people find memorization easier than phonetics, so memorizing the kanji/hanzi you need to use on a regular basis is easier for them, not to mention that some cultures have more of a tradition/heritage of memorization within schools (particularly Southeast Asian educational systems that rely on drilling). Obviously some English native speakers find it possible to do so!

33

@kmaya13, In Japanese she can read hiragana and katakana (Japanese phonetic alphabets so to speak) at a high high school level, but she has not learned Kanji (Japanese picture writing so to speak) at an equivalent level yet. She has only learned about 1000 of the 2000 required Kanji that most native Japanese learn by high school graduation. Though as someone mentioned earlier, many native Japanese are no longer learning Kanji to the basic high school levels anymore. She has exhausted the offerings in Japanese at her current school.

34

@NorthernMom61, I have a 16 yo daughter with similar levels of fluency in japanese and chinese. Please private message me if you think she would be interested in a pen pal with similar interests. We are starting to look into colleges with East Asian Studies majors and love any advice you might have.

35

I am in the third year, upper-division level of Japanese right now, and it’s pretty hard grammar-wise. Note how I said upper-division level. The lower division is pretty easy as long as you study well. However, kanji is easy for me. I took a semester of Mandarin back in community college, but I don’t have the time or enough units left to take it at university (we’re not allowed to go past 225 units and I’m already near that limit). Pronunciation was easy for me since I’m Vietnamese and Vietnamese is another tonal language.

I don’t think you know what you’re talking about here since Chinese is the second most spoken language in the world by over a billion speakers. Also, China is a big country. The number of Chinese students who come to the U.S. does not even make up half of the population–there are many Chinese who have never stepped outside their country at all, much like how there are a number of Americans who’ve never traveled outside the U.S.

Wrong. I personally know people who’ve studied the language in that amount of time or less, and were able to reach near-native level. It all depends on how much you’ve studied, whether you’ve made the effort to assimilate the language into your everyday life, etc. A person who absorbs themselves in the Japanese language every day (watching Japanese media, talking to Japanese friends, etc) is going to achieve fluency a lot faster than say, someone who studies the language only 15-20 minutes a day and rarely makes use of what they’ve learned outside the classroom. Actually living in the country where the language you’re learning is spoken is also going to make you fluent in that language a lot faster.

As for English being the easiest to learn, it is not. You may think it is because you’re a native English speaker, but have you ever talked to anyone whose first language isn’t English? Unless their first language is similar or related to English, many of them will say that English is a hard language for them to learn and master.

@PolarMama: Off the top of my head, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCI, UC Davis, Yale, Harvard, Brown, University of Hawaii, and Cornell are some universities with an East Asian Studies program. I was formerly an East Asian Studies major (I go to UC Davis), but I recently switched to Japanese because I decided I’d rather major in Japanese and minor in EAS. The EAS major here at UC Davis is rather small, though, so it’s hard finding other people who are in the same major. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had people ask me, “what’s that?” when I told them my major was East Asian Studies. Of the UCs, UC Berkeley and UCLA have the strongest EAS program from what I’ve heard.

36

@juillet

English isn’t the best example of a language with a really great phonetic alphabet. Languages with recent spelling reforms such as Spanish or Russian would be much better picks. Regardless even seeing “enough” gives a person a good idea of where to go: e is either eh or ee; n is always pronounced n; o is either o or a; it’s just the gh that gives real trouble. That is still a lot better than seeing a symbol and having no idea where to start.

Plurals are a very weak form of noun declinations and very easy to learn. True noun declination based on the position in the sentence only exists in a few personal pronouns and is all but dead elsewhere. In fact this issue causes plenty of native English speakers grief in learning who v whom, a dying pronoun declination.

@juillet
@‌sweetlacecharm
Even if you know Vietnamese, you would still find learning any language with an alphabet easier to read and write than Chinese.

With that said, if you know Japanese or Vietnamese then I would say there is enough shared similarity through loan words , tonal language (Vietnamese) or writing system (Japanese) where learning Chinese actually makes sense. I don’t believe that is a the case for the Spanish speaker OP.

Most people do not go around trying to learn various languages and ranking their difficulty. So of course a lot of people will say English is hard because it is not their native language. Even when learning that person’s own language is objectively much more difficult.

37

“Regardless even seeing “enough” gives a person a good idea of where to go: e is either eh or ee; n is always pronounced n;** o is either o or a; it’s just the gh that gives real trouble.** That is still a lot better than seeing a symbol and having no idea where to start.”

Really bad example, bomerr, because here the “o” isn’t pronounced as o or a, it’s pronounced as a short u.

“Ou” can be pronounced

  1. “oo” as in you or
  2. “ow” as in about or
  3. “oh” as in though or
  4. “ooh” as in would or
  5. “uh” as in enough.

Others have already corrected you on the verb conjugation (I run, you run, she runs – and of course many of the most common verbs in English have irregular conjugation - I am, you are, he is).

38

Oops I forgot

  1. “aw” as in thought

I have to imagine there are words in English in which “ou” is pronounced “ee” (as in the French oui) but none are coming to mind, but I think 6 ways proves my point - I can certainly understand a non-native English speaker being befuddled by that word.

39

English may be difficult to fully master, but even in “pidgin English” the critical meaning can be conveyed. Contrast that w pidgin mardarin w/o the correct tones: the meaning is unintelligible.

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Though you might think English spelling and pronunciation is not that tough to learn, if you think it through, it may take more to get a thorough knowledge of it.

(Please note the pronunciation of the words of the form “t_ough” in the above sentence.)