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Mandarin vs Japanese- Is Mand. harder? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6690 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes  Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 9 of 21 17 May 2007 at 9:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I think Raincrowlee has his imagery spot on! I've been studying Mandarin for a number of years now and I have to agree with what he says about constantly encountering new characters.
This is especially true of Chinese literature. I used to spend a considerable amount of time flicking through my Chinese dictionary when I took some modern literature courses at university (I can only imagine how much more time-consuming *classical* literature would have been). Rarer characters also show up a lot in academic texts. I tried reading some untranslated works on Chinese archaeology once and gave up pretty quickly as I was spending too much time tracking down obscure characters in my dictionary. Just as there are specialist terms in English (and every other language), there were plenty of those in those texts. I never knew there were so many different characters specifically used for artifacts. The character 玖(jiu3), for example, refers to black-coloured jade while 珞 (luo4) refers to a neck ornament. In these examples, the radical 玉 would indicate that the character had something to do with jade but you'd still have to guess at the actual meanings of these characters (which can sometimes be determined by the other elements of the character) and you'd still have to hazard a guess at how the character is pronounced. But I digress... I'd personally say that written Chinese is ideal for those people who enjoy trying to decode a script. I find it fascinating to read Chinese text and come across new characters and words. It's just a shame that I cannot have the same success with the spoken language... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6350 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 10 of 21 17 May 2007 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Whether or not it's harder for you depends on what aspects of language learning you find hard.
For me, overall, Mandarin is much easier, mostly due to it's grammar. I would say the writing system is much easier because of having single pronunciations of characters. But I can't say that, since one has to learn simplified and traditional characters. That makes me feel the writing system is only slightly easier. For me multiple pronunciations trump double characters. Mandarin pronunciation is harder, but this is a short term problem with me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Shusaku Senior Member United States Joined 6900 days ago 145 posts - 157 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese | Message 11 of 21 17 May 2007 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been thinking about this question lately as well, so here's my take on a few of the points...
As for the writing system, I feel that Chinese is more difficult. Although the number of readings per Kanji in Japanese adds considerably to the difficulty, I feel this is outweighed by the sheer number of additional characters that are used in Chinese. I'd venture to say that in order to comfortably read any piece of modern Chinese literature, you will need at least twice as many characters as you would in Japanese. For example, the following study (http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/) found that all 13,060 Chinese characters in the BIG5 traditional set were used in Usenet posts during 1993-1994. Even if you ignore the lower frequency characters, say, those which appeared less than 100 times, you're still left with nearly 5000 characters, and I've personally seen a lot of the less common ones in use as well. To be able to read any Chinese text, one must also learn both the traditional and simplified characters. Japanese uses a single set. Vocabulary is an enormous mountain to climb in both, but Japanese has imported thousands of English loan words, whereas Chinese has not. I've found that this makes acquisition marginally easier in Japanese. In terms of morphological complexity, the grammar in Japanese is more difficult, especially in the beginning, but I'm undecided as to whether this is a long term problem. European languages seem much worse in this respect yet many people still overcome this sort of difficulty. I think a lot of people mistakenly think that Chinese is easy after reading the simple "Ta shi zhong guo ren" type sentences in beginner's textbooks. Chinese grammar becomes much harder as you start to build more complex sentences, especially since so many patterns do not follow any particular rule and must be learned individually. Furthermore, Chinese literature makes frequent references to Classical Chinese, and a fair number of the 10,000+ chengyu (four-character idioms) continue to be used in modern Chinese. Japanese uses chengyu as well but to a much lesser degree. The politeness levels in Japanese are tricky. Chinese is simple in this respect. Chinese pronunciation, while manageable, is much more difficult than Japanese, primarily due to the tones. I also feel that due to the number of homonyms and the use of so many short one and two syllable words, listening is a bit harder in Chinese. The learning materials, at least those I've seen which are available in English, are better and more numerous for Japanese. Overall, both languages are quite difficult. I salute anyone who manages to achieve advanced fluency in either. Edited by Shusaku on 18 May 2007 at 7:16am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6502 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 12 of 21 17 May 2007 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the compliments, guys.
Lady Skywalker, have you ever tried to read Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman? The first paragraph is written as if by a classically trained scholar who would have worked for the government during the late imperial period. Even with a translation, I there are some idioms and characters that I can't make correspond with the English translations. And that isn't even true Classical Chinese! I also wanted to mention that recently I've been reading a Chinese translation of the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Every day I would make a list of the characters I didn't know and show it to one of my coworkers, who would then tell me how they were pronounced. I went through the first 40 pages and had a list of about 200 characters. Mind you, my Chinese is nothing to sneeze at. For the Reading Comprehension part of the CPT, I got level 6 (out of 7). I don't know for sure how many characters I know, but it's probably more than 4000. And I still needed to check on average 5 a page. To make matters worse, the person I asked, a twenty-something Taiwanese college student, didn't know 5 or 6 of the characters and had to look them up. And we're not talking especially specialist terminology. I remember one of the works she didn't know translated as rivets. The Chinese writing system is the Mt. Everest of languages. Or maybe it's the Mt. Erebus, because that took even longer to conquer. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Silvestris Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6364 days ago 131 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, Polish*, German | Message 13 of 21 18 May 2007 at 8:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Well thanks for all the replies guys. This has certainly been some food for thought!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Walshy Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6742 days ago 335 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German | Message 14 of 21 18 May 2007 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Let's see what FSI has to say on the matter.
From here.
Now that's interesting, not only does the asterisk mean that Japanese is "typically somewhat" more difficult than Mandarin, but that it's more difficult than Korean too! I never would have guessed. Edited by Walshy on 19 May 2007 at 12:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6568 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 15 of 21 18 May 2007 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I am now both inspired and intimidated to pick up my Mandarin again. :) There are so many good materials in Japanese, too.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6730 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 16 of 21 19 May 2007 at 4:08am | IP Logged | ||
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@Walshy: That's interesting. I saw the statistics on another site and I'm pretty sure that it was Korean which was preceded by an asteriks.
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