For more context: I am a engineering student who needs to fill credits to fit my general education requirements and my university offers Chinese but not Japanese.
I am a beginner in Japanese and would rather learn japanese but because my university only offers Chinese I was thinking of putting my required general ed requirement to use and do Chinese. Will learning Chinese help in terms of Japanese in anyway? Such as Kanji.
16 comments
might improve your general ability to recognize those types of forms, but these things are too different to be super useful. the pronunciation is not the same and the meanings are often not the same. so in terms of just readying your mind to learn a character-based writing system, i guess it might do *something*, but if you’re gonna learn chinese you should just do it to learn chinese. learning chinese to learn japanese is a waste of time. better ways to learn how the kanji would actually be used in japanese.
I’m not sure if this would be all that useful. A lot of Chinese characters have been simplified and differ from the ones used in Japanese, and you probably wouldn’t even learn that many in an introductory class.
I think you would see a lot of overlap, and it could help prime future Japanese learning, to say nothing of the benefits you might derive from some basic Chinese knowledge. I’ve certainly found knowledge of Chinese characters helpful.
However, is the Chinese class taught with traditional or simplified characters? Given the choice, you’d probably want to focus more on traditional characters; as I understand it, kanji have had their own simplifications over the years, but they’re still much more similar to traditional characters ([a stackexchange post](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/10995/usage-of-traditional-style-characters-vs-simplified-chinese-characters-adopted-i) seems to confirm this).
I don’t think it would really help.
I know a lot of Hanzi (Chinese) and can read most books, but not a lot of Kanji. If you give me a Japanese sentence, I would not be able to read it with my Chinese knowledge.
Sometimes I can infer the meaning some kanji, and very occasionally there may be a similarity in pronunciation some hanzi and kanji (only some specific words). But knowing Chinese is not helping me in Japanese because I don’t know my grammar.
Prior chinese knowledge gave me like 1% advantage in kanji vocabulary. However, I would not recommend learning chinese from scratch if your goal is to learn Japanese.
Disclaimer: My japanese level is under N5. Probably.
That’s a complete waste of the opportunity to perhaps learn something you actually care about and will be committed to/use.
Is your college part of a network? If it is, there is a possibility you could find an online course for Japanese through one of its network colleges.
As someone who did it with a less intense major, it’s not all /that/ useful, especially if you’re learning simplified characters
If you learn enough Chinese, it will definitely help your understanding of Japanese to a degree – not just kanji, but also a lot of literary allusions in Japanese come from Chinese antiquity, both Buddhist and secular.
The problem is that modern Chinese (outside of Taiwan, as far as I know) uses simplified characters, and you need to be pretty well advanced in both Chinese and Japanese before the literary allusions start to become meaningful.
Learning a “traditional” Chinese dialect in order to help your Japanese would be like if you studied Latin in order to brush up on your English. Learning a *modern* Chinese dialect would be like if you studied Spanish in order to brush up on your English. There is definitely a connection, but it definitely won’t help you in day-to-day conversation.
(Counterpoint: any language study at all trains your brain in how to acquire new languages, and is always useful. If you can’t study Japanese right now and are interested in Chinese, then by all means go for it. Just don’t assume that it will be smooth sailing if return to Japanese later on.)
Trying to make a long story short, I was a Japanese-emphasis in my undergrad major that required language and regional studies, I took Japanese until about N4 level in university, university stopped offering Japanese and told me I had to completely switch languages and countries to be able to graduate on-time. I switched to Mandarin Chinese. Honestly? Unless you become really proficient in one of the languages first, and I mean truly truly proficient, you’ll have a bigger chance of screwing up both of your Japanese and Chinese skills by learning a bit of both. I now live and study in Japan and I still mix my Japanese with my Chinese, I still read some characters in Chinese first rather than Japanese. It means that even though I might recognize the meaning of the characters, I couldn’t even attempt to read it aloud accurately in Japanese. The kicker? Some character meanings have changed. Not all Chinese characters have the same meaning as the Japanese characters and vice versa. Like others said here, Mainland China simplified their characters after Japan adopted/stole Hanzi and adapted it for Kanji, so you often wouldn’t be reading the same characters (but they might be somewhat similar enough to slightly recognize them in some cases). The grammar is completely different. It’s just setting yourself up for a mess unless you intend to spend time in Mandarin-speaking countries to become proficient and then learn Japanese afterward. If you’re proficient in Mandarin, it would be at a point where it would help more than it would hurt, but would still be complicated. If you’re just doing it to fill credits, then I’d honestly advise against it. I love languages, and it screwed both my Japanese and my Mandarin Chinese for years. Not everyone shares my experience, but this is my advice. I don’t recommend. Good luck!
手紙
I would advice against it. I had basic mandarin, maybe grade 1 elementary. When I started learning Japanese, it messed me up where it was quite difficult for me to switch my brain to think in Kanji vs Mandarin. The meaning of some often used characters are different.
Example:
我。It translates to “I” in both but with different context.
的。Used often in both and has different meaning in Kanji vs Mandarin.
Compare the meaning for 我的 in Japanese versus Chinese. This kind of difference messed me up a bit.
Would benefit slightly if you are intend to learn Chinese anyway.
But if your sole purpose of taking Chinese is to help you learning Japanese then no. You’d better just taking other classes and laser focus on learning Japanese on your own. There are similarities between them but you would end up getting confused and mix up the usages of many characters.
My mother tongue is Cantonese and being a lifetime user of traditional Chinese characters, I would say I had a only 20 to 30% advantage in learning Japanese over the usual Western learners. And it is not worth it to learn Chinese in a semester or two just trying to gain this advantage.
I had N1 level Japanese before learning Chinese in an intense US government program. The Japanese knowledge helped immensely. The amount of vocabulary overlap at the intermediate and advanced levels is just absurd. You can literally open up a Japanese HSK 5/6 book and just see row after row of words with the same definitions in Japanese and Chinese (with simplification and pronunciation differences of course).
Folks learning Japanese with advanced Chinese knowledge also benefit the same way and there is a whole meme in the Japanese language learning community about Chinese people rocking N1 after a year of study without ever learning how to speak Japanese.
That said – you only get this benefit if you know one of the languages at an advanced level. If you only have casual Japanese and take an introductory Chinese class, you’re not going to get much benefit.
For example, I found that the vast majority of individual kanji and hanzi share the same core meanings. Like an easy 95%. You just have to be mindful of simplification and pronunciation differences. However, the few that do differ in meaning seemed to be concentrated in the introductory levels, and this can get confusing for entry-level learners.
No
Take something that will improve your GPA more.
It will help in recognizing the most common of characters, but most characters used in chinese languages are not used in Japanese and vice versa. So it can only take you so far