I'm planning on learning both in my lifetime, which one do you think I should start learning first?

Also can anyone recommend me some books for learning the characters in both languages?

I only have "Remembering the Kanji" for my Japanese and thats it.

How many characters should i learn?

I hope to achieve just enough to read some manga or a newspaper or something, maybe survive a trip to Tokyo and Beijing in the far future.



Forgot to mention that I'm learning Mandarin, not Cantonese.

Why doesn't anyone want to learn Korean? It's so much easier than Chinese and a lot nicer sounding than Japanese.

I guess you should try to learn Chinese first, because I'm pretty sure Japanese derives some things from Chinese. Not a whole lot, but just some.

well that 1 for chinese

anyone else have any input?

Japanese symbols are derived from chinese ones. so they are mostly the same, with the same meanings, but used in completely different ways as the spoken and grammatical aspects of both languages are very different from eachother.
Chinese is not written phonetically, but entirely with kanji (symbols representing words) in this respect it would be harder to lean to read chinese and translate the words into sounds i believe. However, learning chinese has its advantages in this aswell because you will come across the same characters in japanese and will already know how to write them. but you will still have to learn new sounds and how they are grammatically incorporated into japanese.
However, i think that Japanses is alot easier to learn and it sounds a hell of a lot nicer than chinese, as its not all broken and staccato sounding. Also, writing is easier. If you do not know the kanji for a word it can be written phonetically and be able to convey exactly the same meaning. You will have to learn i think it is 144 phonetic characters which are called hiragana and katakana. Written japanese text encompasses all three writing styles.
In regards to being able to read a chinese newspaper, to do this you would have to have yoears of full time tuition on the writing format, as, as mentioned above, only kanji is used. Im not sure about china, but i know that in japan the average person cannot read a newspaper properly until they are close to the finishing end of high school, because of all the kanji involved.
Thats about as far as my knowledge regarding chinese goes, but if you have japanese specific questions ask away (i know my shit :) )

I guess Japanese cos Japanese girls are cuter than the Chinese (most of the time). I am planning on learning Japanese myself.

If you're wondering which one is the easiest, they're both pretty hard, with both languages being determined a 'category three' (A.K.A. pretty fucking hard) on the difficulty to learn scale by the U.S. Intelligence Community.

I've never attempted to learn Chinese at all, but I do know some Japanese, and I can say it's not easy with their 3 different writing systems and all that other crazy bullshit if you're going to get into that, but learning basic and advanced phrases isn't really that hard.

So, I would personally go with Japanese first, but then again, I haven't tried Chinese, so I would try both if I were you and go from there.

I'd go with Japanese.

I have tried to learn both, and can say with great certainty that Japanese is 1000 times easier to self teach. There are only a certain amount of phonetic sounds, and they're all easy enough to learn to say. Chinese however is incredibly difficult to pronounce correctly. I have a chinese guy on skype who's teaching me basic phrases, and I need to repeat them like 50 times before my pronounciation is even close to correct. And even then apparently I sound like a downs syndrome kid.

Their writing system is a lot easier in Japanese too; only about 2000 kanji need to be learned to read a newspaper, as opposed to 5000 for Chinese. There is also a vast amount of childrens and learners texts in Japanese that use only the kanas, whereas there's no such thing for Chinese.

Plus the fact that Japan is a much more interesting place to visit than China. Well, it depends what you like in a destination I guess.

Japanese.

Chinese is WAY more difficult.

Korean would be nice too, the writing is a lot easier, the sentence structure is very similar to japanese. (not very hard.)

The only hard thing about it is that it's a little difficult for english speakers to learn to pronounce.

I'd say Mandarin, 'cause you'll probably get more use out of it, considering China will probably be the new superpower. More job prospects if your country's trading a lot with China, like mine (Australia).

Then again, either would be handy.

Well i've been leaning towards Chinese because I heard the grammar was piss easy, and the tones are possible to overcome.

To me Japanese seems harder because of the "backwards" grammar, honor system, and Kanji that have two different meanings.

I do admit Japanese has a dead easy pronunciation.

Ehh I'm still debating... but I think I might download "Pimsleur lesson 1" of both languages and see what I like/how it goes.

I have the Pimsleur Japanese collection thanks to Yoyo, and it's fantastic.

I have the Pimsleur Japanese collection thanks to Yoyo, and it's fantastic.

Yeah thank god for torrents.

Anyway i found some transcripts for pimsleur Japanese if you needed them.

http://goofypunter.blogspot.com/2006/04/pimsleur-japanese-1-unit-1-notes.html

Edit/Update

Well after going over both languages pimsleur lessons, I decided to go with Japanese.

Even though I was more interested in Mandarin, my Japanese friend remarked on my good pronunciation, and he wants to help me out.

Thanks everyone for the advice

Yeah thank god for torrents.

Anyway i found some transcripts for pimsleur Japanese if you needed them.

http://goofypunter.blogspot.com/2006/04/pimsleur-japanese-1-unit-1-notes.html

Edit/Update

Well after going over both languages pimsleur lessons, I decided to go with Japanese.

Even though I was more interested in Mandarin, my Japanese friend remarked on my good pronunciation, and he wants to help me out.

Thanks everyone for the advice

Thanks a lot!

And consider yourself lucky that you have someone to help you!

Thanks a lot!

And consider yourself lucky that you have someone to help you!

http://www.language-exchanges.org

Quick search + add = a whole bunch of people on skype who speak whatever native language you want and who are learning English.

The timezones can be a bitch though; I live in England. Don't know about you.

http://www.language-exchanges.org

Quick search + add = a whole bunch of people on skype who speak whatever native language you want and who are learning English.

The timezones can be a bitch though; I live in England. Don't know about you.

Looks good, I'll keep an eye on it aswell...Not sure about teaching them English though...Even after 18 years I can barely speak the language myself ;)

Yeah I live in England too.

Go with Japanese... for reasons already mentioned in this topic. I'm learning Japanese, I think it's freaking easy. Easier for me than French was.

Japanese.....if for no other reason so that you can watch unsubbed anime better/import games from japan

i'm going to say japanese probably. Its alot easier to learn grammar structures and basic kanji, which you can then use when you study chinese
ive been studying japanese for about 5 years now so i gotta warn you, to like pay attention to everything realllllly welll

but yeah its so much fun when you can translate anime and stuff
and sometimes itll even impress the bitches ;)

I'm doing about 5 minutes a day on Japanese...I've been drilling chapters one and two of Pimsleurs Japanese 1 into my head via my PSP until I know it to the tee.

わ日本語が少しわかります！

I'm not even going to tell you how long it took for me to configure my OS to swap between English and phonetic Hiragana...I really do hate the unnecessary complexity of some things.

EDIT:

Do I need the わ there? I heard that the Japanese tend to miss out 'I' and 'you' unless they're explict...But I dont' know what defines explicit in this case.

And also, would it not be 私?

I'm doing about 5 minutes a day on Japanese...I've been drilling chapters one and two of Pimsleurs Japanese 1 into my head via my PSP until I know it to the tee.

わ日本語が少しわかります！

I'm not even going to tell you how long it took for me to configure my OS to swap between English and phonetic Hiragana...I really do hate the unnecessary complexity of some things.

EDIT:

Do I need the わ there? I heard that the Japanese tend to miss out 'I' and 'you' unless they're explict...But I dont' know what defines explicit in this case.

And also, would it not be 私?

The full pronounciation of 私 is わたし or more formally, わたくし (I have never heard this one used, except in formal business situations and the like). Also, informally for males, "I" can be written as 僕 『ぼく』. So your sentence is pretty dang close; it could be written as both 私は日本語が少し分かります or 私は日本語が少し分かることができます (the second one is literally "I can do the thing of understanding Japanese a little bit). Like you said, the Japanese tend to drop the subject if it is easily implied, which tends to make some situations really, really confusing, in my opinion!

When you say the subject is implicit, I take it you mean implicit by the conjugation of the verb. If not, how if a subject implicit in Nihongo?

When you say the subject is implicit, I take it you mean implicit by the conjugation of the verb. If not, how if a subject implicit in Nihongo?

I said explicit :)

And the subject would me 'I' myself.

Oh and thanks Social...I'm going by Pimsleurs :D

I know what you said, goddammit. Don't take that patronizing tone with me. :mad: Social Junker said that "the Japanese tend to drop the subject if it is easily implied," hence the implicit. Now I was wondering how a subject goes about being implicit in Japanese. Is it a matter of context, verb conjugation, or something else entirely? You don't have to go on babbling nonsense like you are because nothing you've said so far has made any sense.

I would say context. But it could be verb conjugation, as well, due to the honorifics that are found ad nauseum in Japanese.

i lived in beijing for 2 years. i can resd write and speak mandarin.

zhende, yige hei ren hui shou zhongwen. = (yes, a nigger can speak chinese)


i found it easy once you completely broke yourself away from english.


the way a chinese person speaks broken english is how chinese grammar works. "now you buy 5 dollar" = xenzai ni mai wu quian

there is no plural and very few prepositions.

the hard part is the tones there are 4 tones, or inflections for every syllable. a flat, a rising , faling and a updownup or u shaped tone.

for example MA can mean mother, horse, rope, or a modifier used at the end of a statement to make it a question.

once you get over that you are home free. cause there are no declensions or conjugations. no changing forms of words. there are actually only 10,000 words in a traditional dictionary. but no they make up words to account for new ideas and technology. like telephone is dian hua electric speech, tv is dian shi electric program.

the thing that tripped me out was that they take english names and make them chinese ,l ike mi kao chao dan=micheal jordan or mi kao
ja ku si micheal jackson.

i can infer meaning from kanji cause the char come from china an retain some of the same basic definition. but not much.

chinese can be written phonetically its called pinyin.

我会说汉语，英语，和拉丁语。

中文不太难...

In all seriousness I took a year or two of Chinese a while ago... and It is becoming more and more useful as China's influence grows. I find that once you get past the 4 [+1 unmarked] tones speaking it can become a breeze... the written part isn't difficult if you don''t mind memorizing tons of characters. Yet, I find that the individual radicals can be very helpful in getting you through characters you don't know like built in context clues. However, not all radicals help as rusty+old+knife =/= teacher. [/ramble]

I would like to see you learn Chinese because:

It gives you a foot hold into other eastern languages
It is of growing use and popularity
It isn't really hard to speak [once you are past the tones]
It is easier grammatically than Japanese
If you are willing to learn Japanese you might as well do both in the long run

Japanese is easier than mandarin.

but hey, mandarin is one of the most widely used languages in the world. Saying you can speak mandarin looks damn good on a resume.

我会说汉语，英语，和拉丁语。

中文不太难...

In all seriousness I took a year or two of Chinese a while ago... and It is becoming more and more useful as China's influence grows. I find that once you get past the 4 [+1 unmarked] tones speaking it can become a breeze... the written part isn't difficult if you don''t mind memorizing tons of characters. Yet, I find that the individual radicals can be very helpful in getting you through characters you don't know like built in context clues. However, not all radicals help as rusty+old+knife =/= teacher. [/ramble]

I would like to see you learn Chinese because:

It gives you a foot hold into other eastern languages
It is of growing use and popularity
It isn't really hard to speak [once you are past the tones]
It is easier grammatically than Japanese
If you are willing to learn Japanese you might as well do both in the long run

I actually thought about learning both until I figured I would have to remember a shitload of characters.

2000+ for japanese
and atleast 3000+ maybe for Chinese (I think thats the basic fluency amount)

We were forced to learn basic Korean in my Taekwondo class. It isn't hard...once you've repeated it 15,000 times.

I vote Japanese, since I want to learn it also. Actually, I want to learn the following languages, in order of most important to least important:

French
German
Japanese
Gaelic
Spanish

We were forced to learn basic Korean in my Taekwondo class. It isn't hard...once you've repeated it 15,000 times.

I vote Japanese, since I want to learn it also. Actually, I want to learn the following languages, in order of most important to least important:

French
German
Japanese
Gaelic
Spanish

...Gaelic? Why would you want to learn Gaelic?

...Gaelic? Why would you want to learn Gaelic?

Because my real life surname, Montgomery, is Scottish. Google "History of Montgomery Clan" to read some damn interesting history of my family, such as I'm related to William the Conqueror (no bullshit)