Pros and cons of learning to speak Mandarin vs. Japanese?
I’m thinking of learning either Mandarin or Japanese for my second language. Technically, I have some background in Spanish, but I really dislike it, so I’d like to learn something completely different and I’m very interested in doing study abroad in either China or Japan. Obviously my first language is English. I was wondering if you could give me some pros and cons to the languages themselves — I have heard that Japanese is harder to learn for English speakers? But I also heard that both have a very rigid grammatical structure and don’t have the complicated verb conjugations that you have to deal with in Spanish. Anyway… thoughts?
Tagged with: china • english speakers • first language • grammatical structure • japan • languages • mandarin • pros and cons • second language • verb conjugations
Filed under: Mandarin Written and Spoken
the Japanese sentence structure is SOV (subject-object-verb, with verb at the end), which is different from English and Chinese (SVO), that’s why probably you have heard Japanese is harder to learn for English speaker. Japanese is indeed complicated in its verb conjugations, I don’t know Spanish so I am not sure if Spanish or Japanese is more complicated.
For Mandarin Chinese, the hard part is its tonal nature. It is usually hard for English learners to distinguish (and speak) its 4 tones. Try listening to the tones and see if you find it difficult:
https://www.sayjack.com/learn/chinese/pinyin/
Both Japanese and Chinese have a lot of characters, for Japanese, about 2000, for Chinese, at least 3000, to memorize. Consider if you can memorize (the meanings and the pronunciations of) 5 characters a day you will need at least 2 years to be able to be proficient in reading their texts.
You can have a preview of the characters here:
Chinese: https://www.sayjack.com/learn/chinese/
Japanese: https://www.sayjack.com/learn/japanese/
Anyway good luck!
I’m an American born Chinese and English is my first language. I actually took Mandarin and Japanese at the same time.
Chinese is a tonal language which makes it harder to pronounce. The tones make a difference in terms of meaning.
Japanese is easier to pronounce for English speakers sincethere are no tones ( only inflections like when asking a question). You also have to use formal language withe strangers and elders – some may get offended it you don’t.
You don’t say if you plan on learning to read and write because that is also very difficult. Chinese only uses characters while Japanese has 3 forms- hiragana (basic "alphabet"), katakana (used for foreign and loan words) and Chinese characters or kanji. The kanji are not all the same as in Chinese – some have a different meaning and some are written differently.
I agree that the fact that Mandarin has tones makes it MUCH more difficult to speak and understand than Japanese. I have "dabbled" a little in each language, and if I were going to choose the easier of the two, I would choose Japanese.
However, NEITHER ONE is easy, especially when you get to the written form. Essentially, although Japanese can be written phonetically using hiragana (a syllabary for Japanese words) and katakana (a related but slightly different syllabary for foreign words), past about the fourth grade, you have to know kanji (which is the use of Chinese characters with, as the other poster mentioned, don’t always have the same meaning as in Chinese).
The other thing to consider is future usefulness. Japanese is really only going to be useful in Japan, a wonderful country but small. Mandarin, on the other hand, will probably be increasingly useful in the future, and there are a lot more people who speak it over a much larger country (and it extends into surrounding countries such as Taiwan and Singapore). (There are lots of ethnic groups in China who speak Mandarin as a second language, by the way.)