<p>Hi parents (especally tokenadult),</p>
<p>I am going to college next year and I'd like to take one of these two languages. However, I am unsure which will be more useful for me. I want to join a hedge fund as a quantitative trader after graduation, and they primarily deal with Japan and have offices in Tokyo. But with the growing power of China, learning Chinese might be useful in many situations, too.</p>
<p>Any thoughts?</p>
<p>Both are good choices. Japanese is probably the "safer" choice, Chinese the higher upside if things work out.</p>
<p>The Japanese are generally more proficient in English than the Chinese at this point, so learning Chinese can theoretically net you more benefits. Of course, there's a big chance you'll give up either language in frustration.</p>
<p>Mandarin Chinese. You will find Chinese everywhere in this world in all professions. You will find Japanese only in Japan and if outside of Japan only as business people. Many of the sushi houses are own and run by emigrated Koreans.</p>
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The Japanese are generally more proficient in English than the Chinese at this point.
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<p>That really isn't true at all. Even in America, the Chinese are usually much more proficient in English than the Japanese. Just because the Japanese have incorporated English into their educational system more than the Chinese have is really irrelevant. Ask anyone who's worked under the JET program just how good the Japanese educational system is with respect to English. You'll rarely encounter a Japanese person who is very skilled at English, even in America (unless they were raised in America).</p>
<p>It's not a point of how good the Japanese are at English, but rather that the Chinese are worse. Just recently I've traveled in China and I did not find a single English passage in China that wasn't full of glaring grammatical errors, even in popular tourist areas and four/five star hotels. I can't imagine how Japan is gonna get worse than this. At the very least most Japanese have received better English education than most Chinese.</p>
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Just recently I've traveled in China and I did not find a single English passage in China that wasn't full of glaring grammatical errors, even in popular tourist areas and four/five star hotels.
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<p><a href="http://www.engrish.com%5B/url%5D">www.engrish.com</a></p>
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It's not a point of how good the Japanese are at English, but rather that the Chinese are worse.
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<p>If they're both about equally non-proficient, then there is no advantage to either language in this aspect. It doesn't matter if the Chinese are a slight bit worse. When I went to California and stayed with various Japanese families, their extremely broken English was so bad that I couldn't understand it, and we just decided that we'd speak Japanese the entire time (of course, this wasn't the same with the younger generations who were brought up in the U.S.). The Japanese also have much more of a pronunciation issue than the Chinese, so even if they're more knowledgeable of the language, understanding them is hell.</p>
<p>Beyond who is the best or worse at English (I'm chinese and we all are terrible even those raised here), the OP should study Japanese because the China Bubble will end very soon when people became aware that is damaging every country's economy and health.</p>
<p>Chinese! It's just cooler ;) OP, if you have any specific questions about studying Chinese, I can try and help. </p>
<p>As for the China bubble, it's certainly going to slow down, but it's not going to burst any time soon. Besides, if 'bubbles' are all we should base our studies on, we should all be learning Brazilian Portugeuse and/or Hindi.</p>
<p>Decades ago Xerox did a chart of number of speakers of each major language times the per-capita income of speakers of that language. So a language got an economic score based on both having lots of speakers and on those speakers being rich. I think (check the data yourself for today) that even after all of China's recent economic growth, and Japan's stagnation during the 1990s, that Japanese still has a higher score on that basis. You can do a LOT more business in a slow-growing Japan than in a fast-growing China if Japan is still significantly richer, as it is. I don't have a particular bias on this issue, as I have studied both Chinese (my college major subject) and Japanese (the first language I ever spoke to my wife).</p>
<p>From what I've been led to understand, Japanese is a lot easier to learn. Reading and writing Chinese at advanced levels still requires memorizing pictures/symbols that apply individually to each particular word. This is an extremely challenging endeavor, possibly more challenging than you may wish it to be. It is much easier to read/write Japanese.</p>
<p>"Reading and writing Chinese at advanced levels still requires memorizing pictures/symbols that apply individually to each particular word." </p>
<p>I think actually the same is true in Japanese. As the flashcard maker for my S who is self studying Japanese this summer it seems for many words there are 3 different ways of writing the word: Hiragana, Katakana and then there are picture symbols for some words too. Maybe Chinese uses more of the picture/symbols? I don't know the answer as all I do is type in Japanese.</p>
<p>My daughter, fluent in Japanese, decided she wanted to learn Chinese as well, so she started taking it as a freshman. She has now visited China a few times and did a study abroad there as well. She's good at languages and has done well, but she also puts in a ton of hours studying. Certainly, going there for an extended period of time has helped a lot, too. She did feel that having studied Japanese for so many years, starting at an early age, helped her in learning Mandarin. The higher up she gets in the courses, too, the smaller the classes start to get(!); again, she loves it and does well, but it seems to be a lot (a lot) of work. She told me that during the academic year, she puts in--on average--3 hours a day just studying Chinese (which doesn't include the course/recitation hours).</p>
<p>Learning literacy in EITHER Japanese or Chinese consumes lots of time, and also for native speakers of those languages. (One of the reasons the school year and school hours are longer in countries with those languages than they are here in the United States is that achieving literacy is more time-consuming.) John DeFrancis wrote an article, "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese," that I found helpful when I began my study of Chinese. That article is one of the very first issues of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, which should be available in any good academic library. Many of the same issues apply in learning Japanese, although Japan does make more use of syllabic sound-indicating writing than does any Chinese-speaking country. Other than the Japanese adoption of the Chinese writing system, by the way, which results in many Chinese loanwords in Japanese, the two languages are not cognate.</p>
<p>i took japanese and now im planning to either major/minor in chinese because i think it will be a good asset to my economics major since i want to go into business
japanese also incorporates kanji which is their version of the chinese characters
although pronunciations might not be similar, they almost usually mean the same thing in chinese
so i guess both has its benefits</p>
<p>Anyway English is the language of business, so not to speak Chinese nor Japanese won't influence your carreer, except if you plan to live in one of the two countries.
The online learning Chinese community is growing faster than its Japanese counterpart (ex: <a href="http://www.chinese-tools.com/club%5B/url%5D">http://www.chinese-tools.com/club</a> ), maybe it'll be easier to get motivation...</p>
<p>" "Reading and writing Chinese at advanced levels still requires memorizing pictures/symbols that apply individually to each particular word." </p>
<p>I think actually the same is true in Japanese. As the flashcard maker for my S who is self studying Japanese this summer it seems for many words there are 3 different ways of writing the word: Hiragana, Katakana and then there are picture symbols for some words too. Maybe Chinese uses more of the picture/symbols? I don't know the answer as all I do is type in Japanese. "</p>
<p>Maybe someone who isknowledgeagble can pitch in here. The sole basis of my statement was, I was discussing with a student of Japanese at D2s new school how tough a time D1 was having in reading/writing Chinese, at the advanced levels, for these reasons. And this student said that with Japanese it was not so much necessary, these days, to learn the non-phoenetic symbols. Or the picture symbols are not as prevalent. Or something like that.</p>
<p>But much of what she said could have been lost in my translation. Even in English.</p>
<p>What's actually most crucial in reading either language is understanding COMPOUNDS of Chinese characters. That is the point made by John DeFrancis in his "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese" article. He gives many examples, all of which apply to Chinese, but many of which are directly relevant to Chinese-character compounds still in use in current Japanese. </p>
<p>After World War II, the Japanese government artificially limited the number of distinct Chinese characters in use in official publications to a subset of all the Chinese characters found in previous Japanese writings. In principle, the Japanese language could be written with sole use of either of the two kana syllabic writing systems, and indeed one of those has long been used in telegraphy in Japan. But still today, Japanese learners have to learn many hundreds of Chinese written characters, with all of their Japanese ("kun") and Sino-Japanese ("ON") readings, and have to learn thousands upon thousands of Sino-Japanese compound words. That's not the work of a moment. </p>
<p>Chinese too could be written entirely in sound-indicating writing systems, either the zhuyin fuhao ("bo po mo fo") writing system used for instructional purposes in Taiwan or the hanyu pinyin Roman alphabet writing system used for similar purposes in China, Singapore, and other places. But most publications in the Chinese-speaking world for readers older than elementary students are still published solely in Chinese characters, and any reader of Chinese has to learn thousands of written Chinese characters and tens of thousands of Chinese compound words. </p>
<p>The most authoritative source for the nature of writing systems around the world is </p>
<p>The</a> World's Writing Systems edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. </p>
<p>The discussion of east Asian writing in that book is by the leading world specialists, and is very informative.</p>
<p>So, if I understand you:</p>
<p>Does a modern reader of Chinese need to learn MORE of these picture-symbol chinese characters than a reader of Japanese does? Because the Japanese government limited the use of these symbols but the Chinese didn't?</p>
<p>And is proportionally more written Japanese today in sound-indicating form than is the case with written Chinese? For adults, in both cases.</p>
<p>Can one get along better in Japanese writing in the sound-indicating forms only, whereas this is not equally the case in Chinese?</p>
<p>Or is it essentially the same deal in both cases?</p>
<p>In other words, which is harder to learn to read/write at an adult level, for an adult English-speaker who knows neither?</p>
<p>What's harder for an English speaker who starts out knowing neither language also depends on the grammatical structure of each language, its phonology, and the sources of its vocabulary. In my humble opinion, to reach a given level of proficiency in Japanese is harder for a native speaker of English than to reach the same level of proficiency in Chinese. But in Taiwan, where the learners are mostly native speakers of one form of Chinese (Sinitic language) or another, Japanese is considered the "easy" language, easier than English, because those learners have already invested a lot of time in gaining transferable knowledge of the writing system, and they ignore the issues of phonology and grammar. Moreover, there is a lot of EXPOSURE to Japanese in Taiwan (because of the prewar occupation and continuing cultural contacts, including cable TV), so the environment in Taiwan is very favorable to easing the learning of Japanese. </p>
<p>Following your question marks, my answers are </p>
<p>yes </p>
<p>yes </p>
<p>yes </p>
<p>yes </p>
<p>The two languages present different situations with respect to reading and writing. </p>
<p>Japanese is probably the harder language to master for a monolingual native speaker of English.</p>