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Mandarin? Japanese? Characters or Speech? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 19 26 May 2014 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hi everyone I'm looking for some advice.
I'm thinking about starting to study an Asian language. I want to learn both Mandarin & Japanese, I have no preference as regards to which one I should do first, but I don't have time to do 2 at once, and still keep going with my other studies. So the advice I'm looking for here is would learning one before the other give me any benefit when I start the second? In otherwords does knowing Chinese help you learn Japanese, or vice versa? Another question is; should I learn to speak first or memorise the characters first? The reason I'm asking this question is because for the next year or so I'm only going to spend 1 hour a day on the Asian language, because I really want to get my French & Italian up to a point where I feel more fluent. And finally, is this just a distraction I don't need? The pull of a new and shiny language I should ignore until I have accomplished my goals in the Romance languages? Any advice or opinions on any of these questions would be gratefully received. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4706 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 2 of 19 26 May 2014 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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1 - From what I've heard, yes, but not much. Learning the characters for one will definitely help you when learning the other, but many of them changed a lot with time, so don't expect it to be only flowers.
2 - I'd say speaking, but you have to set your own goal. The characters are important only if you want to read in Japanese. I chat every single day with several Japanese people and they type with me in Hiragana and Katakana (the sillabaries), given that I don't know Kanji (the Chinese characters) yet. Also, I can have 1 hour lessons spoken in Japanese on Italki, but I can't read almost anything from Japan (except media with furigana on top - furigana is the reading of the Kanji written in Hiragana). Meaning: if you wanna chat with Japanese people, be it text or voice, you don't really need the Kanji that much. If you wanna read manga, it depends... some of them have furigana on top of the Kanji, but most don't, so learning the Kanji would be good. As for Chinese, there's pinyin, but I'm not sure if Chinese people know how to write in it. Still, Benny Lewis managed to have several chats with Chinese people during his trip without knowing any Hanzi (character), so it really depends on your goal for the language. 3 - It depends... I tend to do that a lot.... I started with Japanese before getting my French to B2, which might not have been a great decision, but I'm loving Japanese so I don't regret it. Edited by fabriciocarraro on 26 May 2014 at 5:10pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5950 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 19 26 May 2014 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Since you're a native English speaker and are talking about only 1 hr a day to study a language that is considered among the most difficult for English speakers, I'd go with the AJATT approach and learn the Kanji/Hanzi as foundational building blocks to later build on....this assumes that the characters are not intimidating for you. Of course, you might just want to delay until there's more time to devote to Japanese/Chinese.
Good luck! Edited by Snowflake on 26 May 2014 at 10:37pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5973 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 4 of 19 26 May 2014 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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1 - I doubt it really matters which one you learn first in terms of efficiency. You'll get a discount on Chinese characters and some vocabulary whichever one you start with, but it won't be the same level of discount that you'd get moving from, say, one Romance language to another.
2 - Learn speaking and writing at the same time. You can cover the fundamentals without learning writing at all, but in the case of Japanese, if you learn kana right away it will give you access to a wider range of learning materials. Chinese characters can be learned incrementally while you get to grips with the rest of the language. They help with vocabulary building and, as with vocabulary learning in general, there is no need to digest it all at once. 3 - If you do it properly it will take a long time compared to a Romance language. Only you have the answer to whether you can find that time or not. In the mean time, there's no harm in trying a language on to see how it fits! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4435 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 19 27 May 2014 at 7:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Besides a few loan words, Chinese & Japanese are totally different languages with completely different
grammar rules. It's like learning German & Italian at the same time. They belong to totally different family of languages. From my personal experience although Chinese uses Pinyin phonetics but they would never replace the characters with an alphabetic substitute like Vietnamese, Japanese or Korean. A lot of second- generation Chinese in my part of the world learned to speak the mother-tongue fluently but had not learned to write a single character besides their given name. The Japanese language can be expressed completely with their own alphabet although they prefer to use some Chinese characters. I've noticed a lot of Japanese songs on videos for Karaoke singing come with subtitles in both alphabetic & Chinese characters. And usually over the Chinese characters you'd find 1 or several tiny alphabetic characters on top. You can follow an entire song by reading the Japanese alphabet without knowing a single Chinese character. The 2 languages are too far apart to say which is easier or which should you start with. Even the basic greetings such as the equivalent of "Hello" on the phone: 喂 (wéi) in Chinese もしもし (moshi moshi) in Japanese is many miles apart. Learning Chinese is going to help you progress in your Japanese which is written with some Chinese characters. However, you can learn both languages phonetically and independently without reading a single Chinese character. Chinese people are proud of their heritage and their characters and many were taught to learn by rogue memorization. Many tend to learn English the same way by remembering the sounds of entire words instead of putting them together phonetically by syllables. Take a simple Chinese introduction: Nǐhǎo, wǒ shì Yīngguórén. If you pronounce the above phrase correctly or close enough, a Chinese person would know that you said: "How are you? I'm English". The character equivalent would be: 你好, 我是英國人. Since each character have no indication how it is pronounced, I'll try to learn all the basic phrases phonetically and introduce the characters later. How do you master the characters? For someone like myself I can read a newspaper comfortably but do occasionally come across an unknown character. This is normal even for fluent Chinese-speakers. I have Chinese installed on my computer dictionary. It is 1 single dictionary that allow you to switch between languages with a click of a button. Every time I look up an English word, I'd click on Chinese to see the equivalent. After a while I learn to recognize many characters. When it comes to TV programming & movies, I watch a lot of Mandarin programs from Singapore since most contain both Chinese captions & English subtitles. Edited by shk00design on 27 May 2014 at 7:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6541 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 6 of 19 27 May 2014 at 8:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
one for which you have the greatest motivation to learn, if you have a preference.
neither. Learn pinyin and pronunciation first. After that, I recommend using the mnemonic technique taught by Heisig, not to systematically learn thousands of characters, but to learn the characters of the vocabulary as you encounter it during your well structured synergistic language learning plan.
start your Asian language.
what do you think of this guy's Cantonese? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4435 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 7 of 19 27 May 2014 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Despite being a tonal language, Mandarin Chinese can be learned easily without the characters because
the grammar rules are simpler and there is no subject-verb conjugation like European languages. Between Mandarin & Cantonese I find that most foreigners tend to have a much easier time with Mandarin pronunciation because it has fewer tones (just 4) while Cantonese has 9. Unless you live in Hong Kong since a young age (such as TVB actress Corinna Chamberlain with parents from Down Under), most foreigners tend to speak Cantonese with noticeable accent. Time is a big factor. Definitely focus on getting the languages you started already. Once you mastered them with confidence, you start learning Chinese & Japanese. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 8 of 19 27 May 2014 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Some great advice, thank you, thank you, thank you. I suppose the question I really want answered for both Chinese and Japanese:
Given the constraint of having only 1 hour per day to study for the next 20 months. Would I be better off spending my time concentrating on memorisation of script, or speaking (aka pimsluer/FSI/other) Just to expand a little on my situation. I'm doing the Super Challenge in French & Italian, and I hope to be C1 (at least) in them by the end of the 20 months of the challenge. So this is why I don't want to dedicate more than 1 hour a day to anything else, the super challenge is already a time-sink. I have an equal interest in Japanese and Chinese and fully intend to learn both eventually. I'll be 50 this year, and most people estimate 10+ years on Mandarin or Japanese, which is why I'm thinking if I'm going to do this I need to get started because 20 years is a long time, and I ain't getting any younger! Prof. Arguelles mentioned in a video that he only 'wrote' Chinese and didn't really speak it. I thought I could spend the next 20 months while doing the super challenge in Fr & It, just memorising as many traditional Chinese characters (or Japanese Kanjii) as possible in that time. Hense my previous question about learning characters. Is learning characters without speech an exercise in futility? Another option is to just spend the 20 months doing FSI or Pimsluer, repeatedly and concentrate on speech/pronunciation. I've decided to go ahead and give one hour to either Chinese or Japanese in some fashion, in blatant disregard for all the good advice telling me not too. (They are too shiny!!!) So in your opinion which of these would be the best option. 1) Spend 1 hour every day just learning script, aka memorise. 2) Spend 1 hour every day listening & repeating, aka Pimsluer 3) Split the hour equally between both. 4) Some other option you know and I don't because you're smarter and more experienced than me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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