<p>Should i learn korean or japanese at berkeley? i have no knowledge of either language.
I also thought about taking chinese to master it. I already know how to speak and read in Cantonese/Mandarin. Should i take more chinese to get better at it? or should i start a new language? </p>
<p>so korean or japanese or chinese?</p>
<p>major : computer science</p>
<p>You should get better at Chinese. Unless you devote a ton of time to a new language, it’s unlikely you’ll get to a point where it’s useful.</p>
<p>If you just wanna learn a new language for your personal interest, learning Japanese is gonna be so fun. But for your future career or resume, Chinese is more useful than any other second language.</p>
<p>Learn Japanese (or Korean) and brush up on Chinese in your own time. If you want to learn a foreign language for practical reasons, Japanese has many more speakers than Korean and Japan is far more influential in the world than Korea. Japanese grammar can be convoluted and is very complex, so a classroom setting is a good place to set up a strong foundation. If your choice between Japanese and Korean comes down to personal interest, learning Korean seems to cause less headaches. </p>
<p>If you already speak Cantonese and Mandarin AND can read in Chinese, you can fortify your Chinese skills in much more practical ways than taking classes at Berkeley. Join fobby student organizations and talk to international students. Regularly conversing in Chinese will increase your vocabulary, making you a better speaker and have a more solid foundation for learning new characters (you’ll end up knowing a lot of Chinese words but not necessarily the characters for them, so learning those characters just becomes matching the character to a sound) Read Chinese language news instead of English language news . . . maybe just a glance over the homepage of a Chinese newspaper every morning and look up a few characters that you may not be familiar with.</p>
<p>I’m already have a pretty strong Chinese vocabulary. I can speak/read/watch cantonese/mandarin dramas and newspapers with no problem. the only thing i cant do is write it. i know how to type characters (but not a lot), but i forgot how to write by hand most of the characters. </p>
<p>so i guess japanese is the language for me to learn.</p>
<p>i’m also thinking about taking a language class. are they really easy? or is that just what people, who are fluent in them already, say? i’m not really fluent in any foreign languages, but i’m interested in learning mandarin or japanese or even hindi.</p>
<p>@Insertname:
I’d also looove to learn Hindi and/or Mandarin, but I’ve heard the opposite: I’ve heard (from people who aren’t fluent in the language they’re taking) that the languages at Berkeley are hella hard/intense</p>
<p>If you can read well then typing shouldn’t be a problem with a bit of practice, because typing Chinese is basically reading. Writing just takes practice. It’s hard, but really the only way to remember the characters well enough to be able to draw it out out of visual memory is to practice writing.</p>
<p>Korean is the prettiest sounding Asian language and suits in music so much better than Chinese (sorry but it’s very annoying) or Japanese. </p>
<p>[??? ??? (Bbiribbom Bberibbom) (Dance Ver.) - ???(COED School) [FHD MV] - YouTube](<a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube)</p>
<p>[Super</a> Junior(???) _ No Other(? ?? ?? ? ??) _ MusicVideo - YouTube](<a href=“SUPER JUNIOR 슈퍼주니어 '너 같은 사람 또 없어 (No Other)' MV - YouTube”>SUPER JUNIOR 슈퍼주니어 '너 같은 사람 또 없어 (No Other)' MV - YouTube)</p>
<p>[KARA</a> - STEP - YouTube](<a href=“KARA - STEP M/V - YouTube”>KARA - STEP M/V - YouTube)</p>
<p>^^^ Super Junior?</p>
<p>Nice! Lemon Cat approves. :D</p>
<p>Prettiest sounding language is subjective.</p>
<p>A lot of Japanese people think that Korean vowels sound like throwing up.</p>
<p>Japanese and Korean are Altaic languages and are very similar in grammer and vocabulary. If you know one it is not too difficult to learn to speak the other. Chinese, on the other hand, is a Sinitic language putting it in a different language family and the spoken language bears no resemblence at all to Japanese or Korean. However, when the Japanese developed their writing system about 1500 years ago they adopted Chinese characters and although they have different pronunciations they still generally mean the same thing in both Japanese and Chinese. If you can read Chinese it will make learning to read Japanese easier for you and you can devote more time to the spoken language rather than spending an enormous amount of time learning Chinese characters or “kanji” as they are known in Japanese like I had to do.</p>
<p>Japanese and Korean are both heavily disputed as Altaic languages. They are however both agglutinative and have similar grammar.</p>
<p>Japanese and Korean vocabulary, however, both borrow heavily from Chinese. Nearly half of Japanese and Korean words are Chinese in origin.</p>
<p>I’ve only taken one semesters worth of Japanese here, but I can tell you that the staff is pretty great. 
I plan on getting back into the language eventually, perhaps after I’ve mastered Arabic…</p>
<p>never mind</p>