Learn Chinese Or Japanese

should i learn chinese or japanese?

should i learn japanese or chinese? which one is harder? which one would be of more use? i am learning latin now. everyone thinks i sold learn like spanish or french. i would probably always be messing the two languages up, and also it seems cool to learn chinese or japanese. i was thinking about chinese. but i heard japanese is a lot easier than chinese. opinions? thanks.

Chinese and Japanese are very different languages and they present different problems and advantages.

First off, both languages present 2 major problems: 1) vocabulary takes a long time to acquire because there is no similarity with English, 2) both languages use characters that take a long time to learn.

Chinese, well, Mandarin Chinese because “Chinese” per se is not a language, is not a particularly difficult language to learn in terms of grammar, but pronunciation will be very difficult. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but if you aren’t the slightest bit interested in pronunciation, it will present an important obstacle.

Japanese, on the other hand, is very easy to pronounce. Really. But the grammar is quite another story. Ideas are expressed in very different ways and there are a lot of subtilties.

As for characters, Japanese uses fewer because it also uses 2 other writing systems called syllabaries. While this should, on paper, make it simpler, Japanese characters can have several different readings, which means that one character can have various pronunciations depending on context. In Chinese, a character has one pronunciation only.

Culturally, it’s up to you. While you will probably find a lot more Chinese speakers in your area, Japanese people are also a very interesting people and when they go abroad, they usually work very hard at studying English, so finding a language partner might be easier.

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