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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Voltman Newbie Australia Joined 5091 days ago 39 posts - 44 votes | Message 1 of 3 10 August 2011 at 3:32pm | IP Logged |
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Does learning Japanese significantly help with learning Mandardin Chinese?
What does everyone think? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 3 10 August 2011 at 3:53pm | IP Logged |
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My impression is that learning Mandarin helps with Japanese more than the other way around.
First, Mandarin requires you to become intensely immersed in characters, which will be useful for Japanese later. If you learn Japanese first, you will learn some characters, but you might not learn as much about radicals, etc. In any case, this wasn't addressed when I was learning Japanese. Second, Japanese characters often have many pronunciations, typically a native Japanese one and a Chinese one. If you already learned a character/word in Mandarin, it becomes easier to remember the phonetically simplified Japanese version (it will sound similar but will be not the same), whereas learning the Japanese first will not help very much when learning it in Mandarin. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 3 of 3 10 August 2011 at 5:05pm | IP Logged |
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Japanese has given me a good crutch for learning Mandarin. I was able to jump right into deciphering the written language from day one. I hear that most students of Mandarin don't even try to read a newspaper until they've studied the language for 2 or 3 years. I was doing it from the start (albeit with heavy use of a dictionary). Whatever advantages you get in the spoken language will come indirectly via better access to the written language, not through similarities between spoken Mandarin and spoken Japanese (there are almost none).
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