<p>That prognostication was written prior to the current economic crisis.</p>
<p>It’s fairly interesting, for anyone who is fairly interested:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.chicagobooth.edu/alumni/clubs/pakistan/docs/next11dream-march%20’07-goldmansachs.pdf[/url]”>http://www.chicagobooth.edu/alumni/clubs/pakistan/docs/next11dream-march%20’07-goldmansachs.pdf</a></p>
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<p>Actually, I was replying to the person before me, who apparently deleted his/her post, asking about pronunciation of Chinese words.</p>
<p>See what happens when you assume?</p>
<p>I honestly don’t think Japanese is as hard as Chinese.</p>
<p>There are pros and cons to both languages.</p>
<p>Chinese has easy to learn grammar, but hard pronunciation and very difficult characters to memorize.</p>
<p>Japanese grammar is a lot more complicated, but because of the hiragana and katakana systems, which you learn long before and kanji is implemented, the characters end up a lot simpler to learn and the pronunciation is super easy. </p>
<p>Japanese, unlike Chinese, it not a tonal language. That alone makes it easy to speak. </p>
<p>And for everyone saying “only take Japanese if you like anime/manga”…Japanese culture is a lot more than just anime. :|</p>
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Don’t mock me for being blind. :mad:</p>
<p>Learn Japanese if you’re just doing it for fun. If you wanna be economic, learn Mandarin.</p>
<p>If you are interested in in learning a language but you’re scared or ruining your GPA just study it by yourself. I’ve been studying Japanese by myself for 1,5 years and I can speak/understand/read/write better than most of my friends who have taken it for 2 years in College. Personally I think that learning a language in a classroom environment is a waste of time/units except if you need it for your foreign language requirement.</p>
<p>I have studies both and would definatly say Chinese as it is much more usefula nd more people speak it. Having said that I found Japanese beautiful and slightly easier. But I still think Chinese is where you should start.</p>
<p>If you take Japanese, be prepared to be stereotyped as an anime-obsessed freak. I have two years of Japanese, but have no interest in anime/manga whatsoever. It’s really frustrating to be stereotyped like that!</p>
<p>As far as the language itself, Japanese grammar is complicated but it’s also very systematic, so it shouldn’t be too hard to learn new grammatical constructions. Also, there are only 46 hiragana and 46 katakana, and they are phonetic, not ideographic, which makes them pretty easy to learn. As for the kanji, they can be difficult, but try to memorize them based on meaning, NOT pronunciation–you’ll retain them much better that way.</p>
<p>Japanese classes here at my university are much, much harder than the Chinese classes, and there is no curve. I hear similar things from friends at other universities. That is the classes, not the language itself. Japanese culture is very strict and things must be done very properly and neatly.</p>
<p>Japanese culture is vastly deeper than just it’s current popular culture- don’t be fooled. </p>
<p>Japanese can also be just as practical- think about it this way. There are likely tens of thousands of students rushing to learn mandarin here in the US alone. There is also a massive native speaker population in the US. </p>
<p>Compare to Japanese: few people opt to learn it here anymore, compared to other languages, and the economy is hugely intertwined with the US. Few native Japanese in the US. Also, last I checked it was still Japanese companies that were crushing the auto industry, even if Japan’s economy is weak. People think in far too nationalistic, 20th century terms. The world is flat people- global scarcity of a skill is valuable!</p>
<p>Take Japanese, imo, but be ready for a real beating on your GPA.</p>
<p>がんばって！</p>
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<p>Nobody said that Japanese culture is limited to anime. Rather, if you’re deciding for cultural reasons, there are really not that many reasons to choose Japanese culture over Chinese culture unless you are particularly concerned with modern pop culture.</p>
<p>I disagree with several of the comments made.</p>
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<p>The way I see it, that Japanese uses two syllabaries actually makes it harder than Chinese because you have to learn two new systems in addition to kanji / hanzi. So, for Chinese, you only need to know the hanzi, whereas for Japanese, you need to know kanji, hiragana, and katakana.</p>
<p>One could argue that the kanji needed for Japanese fluency is less than the hanzi needed for Chinese fluency. I counter by pointing out that most hanzi only have one or two readings, but most kanji have multiple (ie. three or more) readings. For example, the character for “bright” (明) is read as “ming” in Chinese, but depending on the context, it could be “mei,” “myo,” “min,” or a few others. Is that really easier?</p>
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<p>No, it is most certainly NOT incompatible with other languages. Japanese is very difficult for English speakers to learn but quite easy for Chinese speakers. The languages belong to different families, but they share several thousands of common characters. Literate Chinese basically already know the kanji; they just don’t know how to say it. The writing system is not foreign to them, but it is foreign to those literate in English.</p>
<p>Hanzi is certainly not perfect, but it is far from “the most god-awful writing system ever invented.” People familiar with the Wubizixing input method can routinely type over 150 characters per minute because you basically only need a maximum of four keyboard strokes per character.</p>
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<p>Although Japanese is not Sino-Tibetan, a majority of Japanese vocabulary still has Chinese origins. English is a Germanic language, but its vocabulary is mostly French-influenced, which is a Romance language. It’s basically the same thing here: Japanese is Altaic but has mostly Chinese-influenced vocabulary.</p>
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<p>Japanese pronunciation is, more or less, easier than Chinese pronunciation. However, the syllabaries don’t make it easier to learn kanji. Ultimately, you still have to remember the character, and that can be done without the use of any syllabaries. Just ask any of the billion or so literate Chinese. I don’t think there’s any evidence that the syllabaries aid in memorization of kanji. There is a reason why there are ten amateur Naruto translators for every amateur Berserk translator…</p>
<p>^^I comend you for knowing your stuff. :D</p>
<p>^^Ditto Fabrizio has it nailed.</p>
<p>All this just goes to back up my point, which is Chinese is easier :P</p>
<p>Sigh. i am signing up for chinese this fall with no experience or knowledge whatsoever. this THREAD just made my head spin.</p>
<p>If i were at your position i would go for Japanese.</p>
<p>I have been studying Japanese for about 3 years now to relative fluency.
You are going to forget it all if you don’t use it (especially kanji). As a biology major, latin is your best bet.</p>
<p>I took both Japanese and Chinese in college, and Japanese was much, much harder. But that was because our Japanese department is ridiculously hard.</p>
<p>It all boils down to your strengths: The hardest part of Chinese is pronounciation and recognizing tones and the characters are not really hard to learn, it just requires lots and lots of repetitive memorization. The grammar is easy once you get a hang of it and there virtually is none - no verb tenses, no past/present/future tenses, etc. The hardest part of Japanese is the grammar - there are many, many technicalities that you have to account for, as each verb has like 100000 conjugations on top of differentiating from polite vs. colloquial vs. written speech/writing. Pronouciation is easy - pretty much like Spanish minus the extra letters in the Spanish alphabet. Prepare for lots of memorization on top of intense grammar.</p>
<p>I love Japanese, but I had to drop it after my first year because it was taking up too much of my time - on average, I’ll spend more time on any of my other classes combined. I switched into Chinese to fulfill my language requirements and it was a completely different experience - the teachers didn’t care if you slacked off, I skipped class constantly and consistently received "A"s because all I really had to do was memorize vocab + set phrases. As opposed to Japanese in which I would have been ecstatic to earn a “B.” But then, that’s really a matter of how the departments conduct their classes at my university and not really a reflection on the language itself.</p>
<p>It really depends on what you want to do later. If you learned chinese, you could probably get a job almost anywhere as many businesses and even the government is in need of chinese speakers. But truthfully, it all comes down to which one you prefer. I would assume both of them are equally useful and fun to learn.</p>
<p>As someone who can speak both Mandarin Chinese and Japanese (studied both throughout high school and college in various courses), I think you should probably go with Chinese. I find that I use it a lot more often.</p>
<p>Also, Japanese is a LOT harder than Chinese is in terms of reading/pronunciation. Characters typically take on totally different sounds depending on their combination. Memorizing hiragana and katakana isn’t a big deal, but Japanese kanji is beastly with the kunyomi and onyomi forms (the latter of which, surprise-surprise, derives from Chinese pronunciation).</p>
<p>Chinese hanzi does take some memorization, but it honestly isn’t as bad. With a given hanzi, you memorize its meaning, pronunciation, and tone. Eventually it all sort of melds together into one memory chunk, and this tends to take a bit longer to do with Japanese, since there are so many different ways to pronounce a given kanji. Japanese kanji also tend to have “traditional” elements to the characters themselves, which are naturally more complicated than the “simplified” radicals of Simplified Chinese hanzi.</p>
<p>If you have an excellent capacity for memorization, either one should be fine. In terms of career aids, Chinese would definitely have an edge over Japan for obvious reasons. And, the previous posts are right in that the Chinese Government/Universities/Companies are offering great contracts to foreign Mandarin speakers. It’s great for everything from health care-related careers to business and economics. China needs experienced individuals to develop, especially scientists and financiers.</p>