<p>Pros and cons of each? I'm hearing Japanese is an easier language to learn and somewhat more fun than Chinese (Mandarin). Anyone care to shed some light on how useful and rewarding each of these languages maybe?</p>
<p>Japanese is actually considered somewhat more difficult than Chinese by the Foreign Service Institute:</p>
<p>[Language</a> Learning Difficulty for English Speakers](<a href=“http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html]Language”>http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html)</p>
<p>Both are challenging but rewarding languages to learn. Your choice of which language to learn may depend more on whether you are more interested in Chinese or Japanese culture, history, politics, etc. than on the relatively small differences in language acquisition difficulty.</p>
<p>Overall, I truly believe learning chinese (mandarin) is going to give you an slight edge over japanese language</p>
<p>Way, way more people speak Mandarin.</p>
<p>As a Chinese person I find Chinese to be extremely hard. Even though I speak Cantonese, I still haven’t fully mastered Mandarin. I think that Chinese would be better due to China’s economic rise but that’s just my opinion.</p>
<p>Japanese will give you serious headaches. Don’t go into it thinking it’s an easy version of Chinese. You have less characters to memorize, yes, but they can have an ungodly number of readings that you have to figure out based on context, and dictionaries are TERRIBLE at indicating when you use which reading. Chinese is much simpler grammatically and each character has one reading, but there are a lot more of them, and the tones can give people issues. I wouldn’t say either one is easy.</p>