Out of Chinese and Japanese which one is easier to learn?

Answer 1

I would say Japanese, marignally.

Japanese and Chinese are both very different from English and most other Western European languages. They say that Chinese grammar is "simpler" than Japanese grammar but that does not really help when the ways of expressing things are still very different and beyond the experience of most westerners. In addition, there are between 4 - 12 tones to cope with in Chinese (depending on the variety of Chinese learnt, and a writing system which appears to defy logic.

Japanese is a highly inflected language (i.e. lots of "endings" to learn) and the structure is, again, different from most Western languages; however: Japanese does not have "tones", and the grammar rules are fairly consistent and regular, if somewhat complex for a Westerner. In addition, unlike Chinese, Japanese has a huge quantity of vocubulary borrowed from English. Lastly, although the Japanese writing system incorporates elements of Chinese in fairly large measure, it does at least have logical writing systems of its own which makes learning to read and write the language marginally easier.

Answer 2

Different people have different aptitudes- if you have a good ear for tones, Chinese should be easy, it's grammar is similar to English. Japanese word order is different, but it's pretty easy to pronounce.

For the writing systems, Traditional Chinese is well known to have thousands, but Simplified Chinese script cuts down the number of characters you have to learn to be literate. Japanese Kanji are quite difficult, and there are two other scripts as well, Katakana and Hiragana. Those last two are quite quick to learn, but it does add to the complexity a bit.

Another interesting point regarding writing systems is that, while Chinese characters are supposed to number in the tens of thousands, and there are only about 2000 required Japanese characters, Chinese characters (so I heard) have one meaning and one meaning only, whereas the Japanese ones may have four or five different pronunciations, and may also combine with other characters to create compounds with different meanings again. It's tricksy stuff either way.

So, it must be said that, whilst either language is tricky to learn, especially for Europeans, maybe I agree a little with the people saying Japanese is a bit easier than Chinese, just on the point of pronunciation. I can never get my ear around those tones...

Answer 3

Japanese is easier, though they are both based on the same written language. Japanese has a phonetic written language that makes learning to communicate easier than learning Chinese. The Chinese have only the written language that is conceptual, and must be read in context in order to be understood. Japanese also has this written language, but you learn it later, after you have mastered the spoken and phonetic written language. It sounds much more complex than it is. It's fun to learn, that's what counts.

Answer 4

Knowing people who speak both, even native Chinese, the concensus is Japanese is a bit easier for most. For one thing, there doesn't seem to be the accent on tones in the spoken language that Chinese has, and the kanji (written word) is also easier to handle.

Answer 5

From my Chinese friends, I know that there a several different regional languages with sub dialects within those in China.

And with Japan being such a smaller more concentrated country area wise, then I can only assume that Japanese would be easier.

Answer 6

Both difficult, but in different aspects.
What's easy about Chinese: grammar, lack of verb conjugation
What's easy about Japanese: limited alphabets
What's difficult about Chinese: Chinese characters, tones, getting grips with the spelling system
What's difficult about Japanese: Everything is in the verb endings. Different forms of verbs.

Answer 7

Japanese, since it doesn't have the difficult tonal sounds of Chinese. Also, you can survive in Japan if you learn hiragana and katakana, but in Chinese your must learn the characters (more are used in Chinese than in Japanese), so in my opinion Chinese is more difficult to learn.

Answer 8

do you want to learn speaking/ and/or writing?

speaking - mandarin is easier (probably because its my mother tongue)
writing - japanese is easier
both - probably japanese.

however, mandarin seems like the most widely used asian language in the world today. if you are learning it out of interest i'd suggest mandarin is easier to learn for ordinary conversational use.

Answer 9

japanese. i think to learn either of these languages you should already speak another language because japanese is so different to english, you need to be able to relate it to another language that also differs completely (i'm not on about the vocab, i'm on about the lettering and word order etc).

Answer 10

Neither, I was stuck between the two when I was at uni. I ended up going for Japanese as it seemed to be more popular in business. I think it was the right choice x