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The Asian 3 - Japanese easiest? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5390 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 1 of 43 17 December 2009 at 10:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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The big Asian 3 (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) all have ratings of 5 cacti and so are each thought to be really difficult for a speaker of an unrelated language.
I personally am fluent in Japanese, have studied Korean to a basic level but havent had any experience at all with Chinese save a few phrases. I am under the impression that out of the 3 Japanese is the easiest. Maybe it is just because I am most familiar with this specific language. Or maybe it is slightly easier. I dont know. What are your opinions? Is japanese the easier of the three in your opinion? For me, Korean grammar is more awkward and complex than japanese grammar. As an example I give vowel harmony. Also very similar sounding conjugations which have different meanings as well as more levels of politeness. hangul seems like a blessing at first, but then the learner finds out it isnt a perfectly phonetically crafted as people proclaim as well the fact that the lack of Hanja results in more difficulty in learning vocabulary. Hangul (without Hanja) ultimately ends up being a handicap in my opinion. At first the pronunciation seems about the same difficulty as Japanese, but then when you get on to the differences between aspirated and tensed consonants, Korean pronunciation skyrockets to the highest extreme of difficulty. If it wasnt for these phonemes, the difficulty of Korean pronunciation would probably be a similar extent to that of Japanese. Chinese pronunciation is tonal therefore considerably more difficult that that of Japanese. Chinese uses more characters than Japanese (even though they have less readings). These means its writing system takes more time to learn doesnt it? Am I right to believe that out of the big three Asian languages, Japanese is the easiest? If so, by what extent? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5857 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 2 of 43 17 December 2009 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm still waiting for someone that has reached advanced fluency in all three to make a comparison. Until then, it is just speculation, or at least, how hard it is for a beginner. This aspect has been covered many times. In any case, they are all surely extremely hard to reach a high level in, in all skills.
Japanese will be my next Asian language (I don't plan on learning Korean), so I will find out! :) Edited by irrationale on 17 December 2009 at 1:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6509 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 3 of 43 17 December 2009 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here is an old thread where we discuss the relative difficulties of the three languages. The consensus was that Chinese was marginally easier than Japanese. That includes the comments of one poster who has studied all three extensively.
BTW, this is what I said in another thread about Japanese v. Mandarin: "I believe most people come down on the side of Japanese being harder. But it does seem like Chinese characters are a real sore point for people studying Chinese. It never seems like you learn them all. I mean, I know that I've passed the 2000 mark a while back, but I still encounter new *characters* (as opposed to words) on each page of each text I read. It's a very rare occasion when I actually know all of the characters in an entire page of text. And of course, at this point there's a good likelihood that the characters are going to be more complex rather than an unknown simple shape. "I think that's the thing -- with Japanese, learners always kind of feel that the end is in sight. The road may be difficult and steep, but you can see your destination. With Chinese, it always feels like it's at night with a heavy fog. Sometimes you catch a momentary glimpse of what you think is your goal, but when you arrive there you realize it's just another abandoned post along the road, littered with the trash of people who have come this way before and chosen this point to give up." Edited by Raincrowlee on 17 December 2009 at 1:48pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6101 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 4 of 43 17 December 2009 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
Seems Hindi/Urdu, Persian, Malaysian/Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, etc. may also want to be included in the category of big Asian languages. I'm not sure which is the easiest but Taiwanese Minnan gets my vote for toughest language. Just can't seem to make it click... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5390 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 5 of 43 17 December 2009 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree that there are many other interesting languages in Asia. If we were to include them all, maybe Mongolian could give say Korean a good run for its money in terms of difficulty. However, with this thread I specifically would like to speak about Chinese, Japanese and Korean because these are the ones I am either studying or intend to study. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6988 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 6 of 43 17 December 2009 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I really think the nature of Chinese being a tonal language makes it extremely tough. I met a person studying Chinese after studying Japanese and he said that at least with Japanese from the start he could do basic things. He would be understood. Unfortunately this just isn't the case with Chinese. Many people say with context you'll be understood. That's true (but often with many not always), however if you're going to go beyond the standard chit-chat conversations don't expect that context will always get you by. Also I think the fact that Chinese is so idiomatic really can make it difficult. I'm learning Esperanto as a side course to my Chinese and grammar is a really good tool for learning a language. Chinese is the king of idioms! As for the characters I'm surely far past the 3000 mark now. But there's always more characters that crop up. It would seem a bit of a luxury to have less characters with more meanings. At least this way it would be easy to hook mnemonics onto them and words would seem less 'alien'.
If I have chance I'd like to study Japanese in the future, but 5 years down the line there seems still like such a long way to go to fully master Chinese. No doubt, if I ever did get a chance to learn Japanese, Chinese, would still seem the more difficult language as it is my first Asian language and my knowldege of the Chinese language and language learning would make learning Japanese much easier and probably more enjoyable. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| genini1 Senior Member United States Joined 5275 days ago 114 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 43 18 December 2009 at 6:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Difficulty is always going to be relative even to a person that learns the same language. When you learn a language your talking a large commitment over a period of years and the situation your in can be completly different then another period. If you learn japanese first when your in school and have lots of free time it might seem easier then learning mandarin when you have a job and a lot less free time to devote.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5374 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 8 of 43 18 December 2009 at 8:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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The tones are funny things. For some learners they pose a huge obstacle, for others they don't. I personally don't find them to be too difficult. They're not exactly easy either, but no harder in my opinion than the Japanese pitch-accent intonation system. And among tonal Asian languages, Mandarin is pretty simple with only four.
Overall, I think Mandarin is the easiest, because of its grammar. Though I say this as an English speaker; perhaps a Turkish speaker would find Japanese or Korean grammar more intuitive. I think the fact that most characters have one reading (or two similar-sounding readings) makes things a lot easier. Another significant help in learning Chinese characters is the phonetic aspect of the characters, which isn't there to nearly the same degree in Japanese. Though I too may be biased since I've been studying Mandarin for a while and just started on Japanese. I've never studied Korean. Edited by Levi on 18 December 2009 at 8:08am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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