☆ENGLISH ONLY☆コミュのLearning Chinese after Japanese

I am an American college student learning Japanese. So far I have taken a years worth of classes with two more to go. After I get pretty good I would like to learn Chinese. How difficult would that be? I know there are big differences between chinese and japanese( pitch tone, not alphabet, etc.), but then again there are some similarities(kanji).

Is there anyone who learned both Chinese and Japanese? About how long did it take to have astrong command on both languages? How difficult is it? And what is the most useful Chinese to learn? Cantonese or Mandarin? I forgot which one is more popular.

Also, how does chinese work without an alphabet?

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[2] mixiユーザー 05月05日 03:47

you can find lots differences of Kanji. but I would like to recomend you learn the meaning of each Kanji. ofcource the grammer is totally different. however, it's much easier for english speakers to learn it than for Japanese. that's why Chinese are better at English than Japanese.
I really envy you!

[3] mixiユーザー 05月05日 03:58

Hey wassup ??
I can speak Cantonese (perfect), English (90% almost perfect), Japanese (level 2) and Mandarin (80%- though i still need to brush up the accent perfectly)!!! I find the most difficult one is Japanese, well first of all maybe I am from Hong Kong so I already knew how to speak a bit of mandarin. To be honest, Japanese has a ranges of forms and tenses in every sentences and thats the difficult part of it and I still find it puzzling me!
Basically chinese is a lot more simple and straight forward and there are no tenses or keigo, masukei etc.....at all so all you have to learn is Kanji but then there are billions of Chinese kanji that you have to learn and they all sound different. We all use Kanji in Hong kong and even in taiwan and china!!! They are not like a English or romaji where you learn them like Alphabets. Anyway, there are so many Americans in china who can speak fluent mandarin, I mean FLUENT FLUENT mandarin...seriously...I dunno how the heck they can talk better than my grand parents. I am sure you will too!!! SO WORK HARD!!!
Hope this kinda helps you out!

[4] mixiユーザー 05月05日 04:15

Chinese is definitely different from Japanese, and though the meanings of characters (kanji / hanzi) are often similar or the same, the grammar and modern usage are very different.

Like SUPERSONIC said, Chinese grammar is a bit more straightforward than Japanese and is similar to English (subject - verb - object). Probably the most difficult thing to learn in Chinese (besides memorizing a lot of characters) is learning to master pronounciation and tones. If you don't say things "the right way" in Chinese, the meaning can be quite different than what you intended.

Also... Chinese dialects. There's a lot, and though the written language is generally universal, the spoken language isn't. Mandarin is by far the easiest to learn and is widespread in the mainland and Taiwan. If you want a challenge... try learning Cantonese. Even other Chinese speakers complain that Cantonese is difficult to understand. haha.

My own mastery of Cantonese is pretty bad even though both my parents spoke it fluently. I just didn't get enough practice in as a kid and I've lost a lot of it. I studied Japanese in high school; Mandarin in college.

[5] mixiユーザー 05月05日 04:29

After I get pretty good I would like to learn Chinese. How difficult would that be?

"You're going to need to know at least 5,000 characters which is about 2x more than Japanese kanji."

I know there are big differences between chinese and japanese( pitch tone, not alphabet, etc.), but then again there are some similarities(kanji).

"There will be some similarities but Chinese words with same kanji will have different meanings as Japanese kanji is based on the classical Chinese meanings. Start learning Mandarin as there are more students and native speakers for that dialect. Plus it only has 4 tones"

Is there anyone who learned both Chinese and Japanese? About how long did it take to have astrong command on both languages? How difficult is it? And what is the most useful Chinese to learn? Cantonese or Mandarin? I forgot which one is more popular.

"Knowing some kanji beforehand will be somewhat helpful, but not really. Mandarin is more useful as a business language while Cantonese is ok for watching movies or in Chinatown"

Also, how does chinese work without an alphabet?

"It doesn't. You will need to learn the character and memorise the readings. The upside is there is only one reading regardless of context or word order unlike Japanese"

[6] mixiユーザー 05月05日 04:45

Hi!
I'm German, and I learned both Japanese and Chinese,
starting with Chinese,
but I stayed in Japan longer so my Japanese overtook my Chinese.
actually it makes more sense to first study chinese, cause you can guess the Japanese reading if you know the chinese reading of a character, but it's more difficult the other way round. like, several different kinds of pronunciation in chinese become one kind of pronunciation in Japanese.

as for the similarities:
at the beginning it won't help so much (like 10 or 20 percent?), only that you'll be able to remember kanji very fast although everyone else around you is dying. in the end it will help very very much. if you want to get really good in both languages (like jlpt 1kyuu level), then it will seem like you're not learning two, but one and a half language.

you mean how does the grammar work without an alphabet?
they have special grammar characters, don't worry :-)
and they don't change words as much as we do...

hope this helped :-)

[7] mixiユーザー 05月05日 05:26

I'm currently studying both Japanese and Mandarin... I've heard people say that you should learn either one of them first before going for the other. I have no idea why it would be a bad thing to learn both at the same time since Mandarin and Japanese aren't especially confusing, at least so far.

When you start learning Mandarin, Japanese will help you just a little bit. Fundamentally both of the languages are very different from each other, Mandarin being the easier one. The only obstacle is the four tones that are a real b**ch.

In Mandarin and Japanese, some of the kanji (called hanzi in Mandarin) are the same when it comes to meaning and onyomi (like in the case of 男, which is conveniently "nan" in Mandarin). Be careful when you're learning hanzi, though, because in some cases the stroke order differs from the Japanese, like in the radicals "田" and "王". In both characters the middle horizontal line is drawn before the vertical line, not after, as in Japanese.

I think you'll find learning Mandarin rewarding. And it's a lot of fun once you get into it!

[8] mixiユーザー 05月05日 06:26

Thanks for all the advice everyone.

ドクター・ハウス , you said you are learning them both at the same time? I can't even imagine doing that. Is that the main concentration of your studies?
So are you saying it is best to learn them a the same time so it doesn't get confusing when you make the transition later. Ill buy a small introduction book over the summer and see if its possible or not for me to take on two languages, plus my other classes.

[9] mixiユーザー 05月05日 08:02

>Also, how does chinese work without an alphabet?

similar to japanese roman characters, chinese also has a mean to express the character/pronounciation/whatever you call it. it's called pin yin. i don't think every chinese citizens would know how to use it since there are other ways to express chinese without using kanji, but i assume good amount of people use that to input in mandarin on computer at least. if you learn chinese in the states, most likely you'll use pin yin to identify pronounciation.

for me, knowing japanese helped good amount in understanding written chinese, since both language share same characters. but then, i'm a chinese descendent and already knew basic grammar from taiwanese (a dialect of chinese), so it might be a little different...

i wouldn't learn two languages at same time though, especially when they are a little similar. for me, i already know taiwanese but not to the point that i'm fluent, then i learned mandarin, so those two languages are mixed up now. when i speak in chinese, i'm using both taiwanese and mandarin in one sentence without realizing it x.X (my level of taiwanese/mandarin is somewhere that i can understand daily conversation good enough, but not to speak much since i don't practice it...)

[10] mixiユーザー 05月05日 09:20

Compare Chinese to Latin or ancient Greek and Japanese to some modern European language e.g. French or English. You'll probably get the answer by yourself.

The Mainland Chinese have their own system of Romanization whileas the Taiwanese use some phonetic characters somewhat similar to Katakana. I personally think the Taiwanese system is better because you can learn the sounds more accurately but on the other hand, memorizing all the characters is a pain in the ass .

[11] mixiユーザー 05月05日 09:58

I think as soon as I learn the standard 2,000 kanji characters, ill start on Mandarin. That means i have like 1900 to go. After learning all of those I should be at a point where I won't forget any japanese move on to Chinese.

Are most japanese people bi- or tri-lingual?

[12] mixiユーザー 05月05日 12:46

I doubt it. But many of my friends speak Spanish or Portuguese. For many of them Japanese is their second language.

[13] mixiユーザー 05月05日 13:13

You can write Japanese in pure Kanji in theory with the exception of Japanese particles such as wa, no or wo.

[14] mixiユーザー 05月05日 13:38

I'm a Japanese but don't know a bit about Chinese and don't want to learn at all, because it sounds, looks so difficult.

You know 手紙 is a letter, but in Chinese 手紙 means toilet paper. That's about all i know. Of course there must be many similarities in kanji. Good luck on your study.

[15] mixiユーザー 05月06日 01:27

Kimathi, I'm learning both of them more as a hobby, i.e. in my free time, not as my main subjects. I'm used to learning multiple languages at the same time, in middle school I studied English and Swedish as compulsory subjects and French and German as electives. In high school I dropped the two latter languages since I got interested in Japanese (and then Mandarin).

If you want to go for Mandarin while you're still studying Japanese, then I don't see any problems in that. However, if you wish to become fluent in Japanese in a relatively short period (~four, five years), the amount of time you spend on learning Mandarin is naturally out of the amount of time you can spend on learning Japanese.

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