Which one harder to learn Chinese or Japanese?

Question

Im learning Chinese Mandarin,I find the words odd and the 4 tones irritatingly hard!I find Japanese to be easier as of the words and stuff.Does Japanese have four tones like Chinese and a tone per word or did they reject copying China's linguistic error?

chapanese is like Kambun text Chinese and Japanese combined!

Answer 1

Dear jh-koryo,

It's hard to say. Here's the pros and cons for both. First Chinese:

Chinese is a tonal language, which means that intonation is as important as pronunciation in conveying meaning - this is a very rare occurrence and apart from Chinese, very few languages in the world have this particular aspect. It is very hard for a non-Chinese to lose the habit of using intonation for emotional purposes. For example, the second tone in Mandarin is a raised pitch, which sounds almost exactly like when you ask a question in a Western language. If you get the tones wrong, you end up saying something completely different.

Chinese is also one of the very few languages in the world that does not use an alphabet. This means that, while most Western languages write by using a combination of 26 symbols that actually represent sounds, Chinese is written with symbols that give you absolutely no clue as to how a word is pronounced - you just have to learn each one individually by heart, and there are at least 10,000 in everyday use. Oh, and there are also two separate writing systems in existence (traditional and simplified), and if you really want to get along in the Chinese world, you really need to learn both.

However, Chinese grammar is much easier than in any Western language. It is very flexible and unsystematic. There are no genders, numbers, inflections, declensions, conjugations, articles or any of these usual complications. Syntax is much more straightforward. However, that in itself can be tricky to get used to, because Chinese just does not have the structural rigidity of Western languages and it takes some time to get used to not trying to make perfectly ordered sentences all the time.

Finally, the sheer number of different ways that you can speak Chinese is staggering. Native Mandarin speakers can sound as different between each other (depending on where they're from) as a New Zealander and a Scot. And even without that, some 500 million Chinese speak other dialects anyway, which can actually be as different from Mandarin as German is to English. There are at least five large dialect groups.

Japanese is much easier to pronounce. Most sounds in Japanese can be easily replicated by English speakers, and there are no tones to fight with. Also, the Japanese language is much more unified than Chinese and it is very rare for a native Japanese speaker not to understand another Japanese. One problem, however, might be that many Japanese words are very long and similar-sounding for English language standards, and this can make for some tricky memorisation.

Japanese writing is also easier in a way, because it does make use of the alphabetical system. But the Japanese writing system is still no piece of cake, mind you. Japanese uses not one alphabet, but two (one for native words and one for foreign words), AND Chinese characters on top of that. Also, the Chinese characters can be pronounced in four or five different ways depending on context and their position in a sentence. The good news, however, is that the Japanese "only" use about 2,000 of them in everyday life.

Japanese grammar is much more difficult than Chinese, and I estimate that it is pretty much as hard as that of an average Western language, if you allow for all the unfamiliar patterns. Word order and sentence structure in Japanese are quite radically different from most Western languages, for instance, and there are countless irregularities. The honourific forms are an extra difficulty - in Japanese the grammar changes substantially depending on your social status and that of the person you're speaking to, and this is a feature which is not used at all in English (and only minimally in many other Western languages).

Hope this helped,

Answer 2

I cannot answer you because I only know Chinese which truly has four tones which most learners find difficult.

I just want to point out that every language has some parts of it easier to learn and some harder, as compared with other languages. For example, in comparing English and French, it is definitely easier to master tenses in English because there are a lot more French tenses. But speaking of the use of prepositions, French is like ABC. In comparing English and Chinese, Chinese has the difficult tones but it does not have the troubling tenses (Chinese do not indicate tenses with the verbs).

It is wrong to attribute difficulties in learning a language to "linguistic errors". There's no errors, Chinese have been using it for thousands of years and feel very much at ease using it.

Troubling? Maybe. Difficult? Definitely. Error? No.

Answer 3

Japanese is easier.

#You can read everything in Hiragana and Katagana as soon as you memorise all of those letters; not like Chinese, you know one character then you read one character.
#There are lots of words in Japanese are directly translated from English; チョコレト(chocolate), コンヒュウタ(computer) are some examples.
#There is no tone thing in Japanese(and, by the way, there are actually 5 tones in Chinese). Japanese is kind of similar with English, you stress in some places in the words and sentences. It might be a little bit hard for you to speaking in the exact same way with the Japanese people, but, don not worry, people will understand you.

#The only thing that I think may be a little bit challenge for you might be the grammar. In Chinese, the grammar is easy; but in Japanese, the grammar is a bit more complicated than that.
#The ability of knowing/writing in Chinese is still required if you want to go further in Japanese studying, Japanese people do write in Kanji, which is Chinese characters.

Japanese IS a way more easier to learn, in any way!

Answer 4

I think grammatically it may be more difficult for a native english speaker than chinese - english and chinese are to an extent both analytical languages - whereas japanese is synthetic. You will have a good head start on reading and writing though - providing you have been taught traditional and not simple forms of the kanji (sorry, can't remember the chinese word for them) Pronunciation is a lot simpler for japanese too I think.

Answer 5

Weishide gave a very good breakdown of the two languages.

I've studied both, but only mastered Chinese.
The only thing I would add from my experience is that Japanese is easier to learn initially, due to the easier pronounciation. However, once you get to an 'intermediate' level, Japanese grammar (usually the hardest part of a language) gets more and more complicated, and thus harder to 'master.'

Chinese on the other hand is difficult initially, mostly due to the tones/pronounciation. But from what I've seen (from my own experience and other Western classmates learning it), once you get to the 'intermediate' level, you've pretty much learned 90% of the language - from there on out, its mostly just memorizing more vocabulary.

Answer 6

I should think Japanese would be easier. I've never learnt it though, I am Chinese, so I guess Chinese is easier for me. But if you think Mandarin speak, try Cantonese, I'm a native speaker of Cantonese, there are six to nine sounds for each word, and you'll be learning traditional Chinese, not the simplified version! I picked it up, so it's not too hard for me, but quite complaining!

Answer 7

Japanese does not use tones like Chinese. Chinese uses over 50,000 Chinese characters, but Japanese uses only about 10,000 or so. The average Japanese person gets by fine with about 2,000 Chinese characters. That is good enough to read just about any newspaper or magazine.

However, Japanese makes use of four writing systems: Chinese characters; hiragana (ひらがな) for verb, adjective, adverb endings and subject/object markers, question marks, explanations; katakana (カタカナ) for loan words in Japanese (such as パン (pan: bread) ); and English.

Purely on a printed language and pronunciation basis, I would say that Japanese is easier to learn than Chinese. However, the same Chinese character has only one meaning in Chinese while it may have a multitude of meanings and pronunciations in Japanese. Also, Japanese uses reverse word order from English while Chinese word order is close to that used in English. Once you learn the rules however, Japanese is a surprisingly regulated language. The important thing to remember when learning Japanese though is to not try to compare it with English. If you try to analyze in English terms, you'll go crazy! (I tried this myself when I studied Japanese in college.) Once I took my professor's word as "gospel", it suddenly became much easier to learn!

Answer 8

I think Chinese is harder to learn than Japanese..because of the pronounciation,Chinese is more difficult to pronounce than Japanese.

Answer 9

i have learned from my school teachers that Chinese is definitely harder to learn then Japanese because there are thousands and thousands of different characters and the meaning to one character could change depending upon what is in front or behind it. so diffently Chinese is harder to master than Japanese.

Answer 10

Japanese isn't nearly as tonal-dependent as Chinese. Not to mention with Japanese, if you don't know the kanji for a word, you can write it in hiragana.