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Chinese or Japanese: which is easier? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Victor Berrjod Diglot Groupie Norway no.vvb.no/ Joined 5055 days ago 62 posts - 110 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 49 of 73 16 June 2013 at 10:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the obvious answer, without considering any linguistic background, is Mandarin. But I will argue that it's only marginally so.
Linguistic reasons As a child learning his native language, tones are not an issue at all, and although there is a three-way distinction in sibilants in Mandarin with only two in Japanese, they are no harder to learn than the Japanese liquid sound. For a foreign language learner, the difficulty will depend heavily on previous experience with the relevant sounds (or with the acquisition of new sounds in general). From a grammatical point of view, the fact that Mandarin is unbelievably straightforward has been pointed out many times already, for good reason. But Japanese syntax is also very straightforward. The word order is cross-linguistically less common, but it's still very consistent. Morphology is easy in both, with no irregularity because of the lack of inflection in Mandarin, and a handful exceptions in Japanese inflection. That said, Japanese has inflection. Word formation is very simple in both languages. Cultural reasons Those are the main reason for me to consider Mandarin easier, but there are also cultural reasons. Speaking in Japanese requires more conscious knowledge about where people stand in the social hierarchy, and the use of appropriately polite speech is necessary in order to be considered educated. That is usually not a problem, but when starting to work with costumers, many (if not most) people need to make a conscious effort to learn the appropriate language for that specific type of interaction. Another important cultural reason is the writing systems, of course. The two types of kana are easily learned, but the Chinese characters, as much as I like them myself, are not very practical. Because of the lack of spaces, the different sets of symbols do play a valuable role in breaking up the text, but when it comes down to it, we see from the example of Korean that replacing the kanji with spaces would make writing much easier overall. The writing system does take a long time to learn for Mandarin too, but it's much more suited to write it, since all the words are Chinese (except for chinesified loan words). Japanese and Korean both contain a lot of Chinese loan words, especially in formal registers (I've seen estimates ranging from 66-80% of the vocabulary in both of them), and since even Mandarin (or for that matter, Cantonese or other Chinese varieties) has a lot of homophobes, the (nearly) toneless languages that borrowed from them have even more. Because of this, the characters do have an advantage in disambiguation, which is similar to spelling in English. In fact, Chinese characters and English spelling have a lot in common. Their main advantage is semantic information contained in writing but not speech. However, most of the time it's not needed at all. If Mandarin was written in Pinyin, nobody would mistake "wèn" for anything other than "問", because there are no common homophones, and the context would make it abundantly clear which one was meant. Similarly, having an irregular spelling of words like "island" doesn't add any value, since it doesn't help in distinguishing it from anything. Characters would still be very useful for disambiguating Chinese loan words if the Japanese decided to write entirely in kana, even if it were just in parentheses, like in Korean – and in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, I am under the impression that hanja are not even used in parentheses, so it's not absolutely necessary either. The same could be said about the English spelling of "sew" and "sow". Nobody would get them mixed up if they were both spelled like they're pronounced. EDIT: I should also add that the much higher amount of multiple possible readings obviously makes Japanese harder to read than it would be if only the Chinese words were written in kanji (like in Korean hanja writing). There would still be multiple reading, but not nearly as many as before. Edited by Victor Berrjod on 16 June 2013 at 10:37am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Itadakimasu Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4135 days ago 31 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 50 of 73 22 June 2013 at 4:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Japanese is undoubtedly harder for English speakers.. For some simple grammar reasons alone.
1. First of all verbs come at the end of the sentence, and nouns are dispersed throughout the sentence. This means that if your trying to listen to something you basically have to hear the ENTIRE sentence, internalize it, and then respond back. Forget that you even have to know a large vocabulary to not get lost. Many conversations in Japanese use a lot of different words, I realized very soon that acquiring vocabulary is your main priority in this language. And many of these people aren't saying the verbs by their by the book definition. Their are at least 5 different ways you can say verbs and of course like many languages rules exist to make this even more difficult. 2. It is the direct opposite of English, in English it's obviously SVO where as Japanese is SOV. Making everyone sound pretty much like Yoda from Star Wars. I've talked to Japanese people as well and they can't fathom how English speakers use their verbs directly after their nouns. It's funny how being raised a certain way changes your mindset. This word order doesn't allow you to ever get comfortable in Japanese unless you've been exposed to it for a LONG time. You have to train yourself to recognize verbs at the end of sentences instead of the beginning. Meaning, as I said above you have to listen to the entire sentence hard. Doing active listening sessions of 10 minutes throughout the day is key to learning the language quicker. Passive listening isn't going to work. 3.Your effectively saying more words to achieve less content often. There are some situations in Japanese where you are able to say less for more, but these are far and few in between. The amount of syllables per sentence is staggering for English speakers. When I started and even now, I get tongue twisted or get particles wrong, because we are not used to words like "I" being 3 syllables of "WA-TA-SHI" and even words that don't have direct translations in Japanese being sometimes 4,5 and even 6 syllable combinations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Victor Berrjod Diglot Groupie Norway no.vvb.no/ Joined 5055 days ago 62 posts - 110 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 51 of 73 22 June 2013 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is an accurate observation. In Japanese, as in any language where you don't know all the words already (the vast majority of the world's languages), most of your effort will go into learning words and expressions. And even if I get many words for free, as in German or another European language, I still have to learn which ones they are. The simple fact that the number of words far surpasses the amount of grammatical rules you need to know makes vocabulary learning the biggest task in any unfamiliar language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Itadakimasu Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4135 days ago 31 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 52 of 73 22 June 2013 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes I agree. Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Chinese are in general hard vocabulary words for English learners to remember. We have lived our entire lives internalizing one set of vocab and hammering it into our brains day after day. And I'm not even referring to mainly nouns, but specifically verb conjugates and adverbs. These are hardest to memorize and wrap your head around. Learning nouns is easy, but learning words that don't directly have any context have to be internalized. This is because not only are you learning new words, but your learning the grammar with it. What's to stop every WA from sounding like a particle or vice versa. Every Ga, every To, every ka and so on. It all lumps together, you don't hear "words" in the beginning you just hear a barrage of syllables. This is/was the hardest part of Japanese to me. Edited by Itadakimasu on 22 June 2013 at 5:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6796 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 53 of 73 22 June 2013 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Itadakimasu, I don't think many of the "reasons" you gave have any real impact on the difficulty of Japanese. The fact that one of the words for 'I' has three syllables*, for example, does not make the language more difficult.
Of course learning any language requires you to learn a lot of vocabulary. Can you name one that doesn't? And native speakers of every language use the language in new and creative ways that aren't listed in dictionaries (especially not the dictionaries a learner generally uses). And you didn't give any reason why Japanese is harder than Chinese, only why you think it's hard. I don't know if one's objectively harder than the other or not, but I really don't think it matters. I do know that Chinese is hard, and even harder when you get into things like academic writing, some of which is almost straight-up 文言文/Literary Chinese (called 漢文 kanbun in Japanese). I've only just started Japanese, but the huge number of loanwords from Chinese and English does make it easier for me so far. I'm sure it will get more difficult as I go along, and I'm sure it would be much harder if I didn't already know Chinese. And that's kind of my point when I say it doesn't matter which is "harder." *Not really. It's three morae. With Japanese, you can't really talk about syllables with any accuracy, because for instance, sometimes わたし might sound like three syllables, and sometimes only two, depending on whether the final vowel is sounded. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Itadakimasu Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4135 days ago 31 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 54 of 73 22 June 2013 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
I wasn't comparing the two, I could give two (expletives) about the topic of this trollbait thread, in which by the way to poster didn't even bother to post on more than once(pretty much indicative of trollbaiting, state an extremely vague and odd question and then not discuss it). I said in the first sentence of my post that I was comparing Japanese and Chinese to speakers of English, not to each other. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6796 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 55 of 73 22 June 2013 at 6:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You didn't say anything about Chinese. You claim that Japanese is harder for English speakers, but don't say a word about Chinese to support your claim. All of your points except for the one about SOV structure hold just as true for Chinese, but there's plenty about Chinese grammar which still makes it difficult.
I don't think there's any need for fake profanity. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Itadakimasu Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4135 days ago 31 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 56 of 73 22 June 2013 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
The fake profanity was a joke. Hence "fake"...calm down. I haven't studied Chinese as indicates in my languages, so giving an opinion on it would be lying at best and bad information at worst. I don't care to debate the topic because as others have said it's a pointless topic that depends on the person. I was simply giving my opinion as to which I thought was harder to the English speaker based off knowledge of one language and the go arounds I've had with Mandarin in the past. I never mentioned Chinese in my post, so you bringing it up to me either indicates to me that you either misunderstood me and thought I was commenting on the topic, or are trying to start an argument. Regardless this isn't really worth arguing or debating about. As I said, topics like this are practically trollbait and nothing more. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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