Thoughts on learning chinese before japanese?

9 comments

1. well try it and come back in 20 years to tell us what it was like

2. If you want to learn chinese, by all means go for it! But if you’re learning chinese to have an easier experience learning japanese, you’re just wasting time that you could’ve used to learn japanese from the start? Idk to me, it sounds counter productive bc eventually you need to start all over again with japanese?

3. Fun fact the kanji japanese use is the old style kanji, standard chinese use new style kanji with cut alot of stroke order, so yeah it can be benefits you when learn kanji, apart from that they are different language.

   The cut in half in N1 is from the kanji learning process, but that for native people who know kanji for their entire life, you learn from scratch so I’m not sure it will cut any time.

4. I took a few semesters of Chinese in college (about a decade ago….) and really enjoyed it. I never stuck with it, but what I can say is it’s hard. Very hard, and hard in ways different from Japanese. I’m just getting into Japanese now and I’m very much a beginner, but I think it will be very hard to commit to both. Sure, knowing Chinese characters might make Kanji a little easier but they are wildly different in other ways. Learning the different tones for Chinese can make your head spin, and then you’d have to throw all that knowledge out with Japanese cause it just doesn’t work the same way.

5. Both chinese and japanese are incredibly difficult to learn and it would definitely be easier and more time efficient to start learning japanese now than to learn chinese and then japanese. Chinese has very little in common to japanese other than kanji so it would not be worth it.

6. I’ve learned Chinese to a fairly advanced level (I’m maybe somewhere in the gap between B2 and C1) and I’ve also dabbled in Japanese here and there over the years.

   In my experience, after learning kana and a few grammatical points, like the broad strokes of how particles work and the more common verb endings, a literate Chinese speaker can parse the meaning of a Japanese sentence with some accuracy… while having no idea how anything written in kanji is pronounced in Japanese. The readings of kanji in Japanese still have to be memorized, though there are ways to “cheat” and guess what the on-yomi readings might be. Otherwise, needless to say, learning Chinese helps very little at all with speaking Japanese or understanding spoken Japanese.

   Diving deeper into Japanese grammar is a challenge, because that aspect is **very** different between the languages. On the flip side of that, there are idioms in both Chinese and Japanese that are derived from Classical Chinese, and these more readily make grammatical sense to Chinese speakers/learners.

   Sometimes certain characters that are rarer in Standard Chinese are more common in Japanese, e.g. 嫌, but this isn’t a huge deal if your Chinese vocabulary is large enough. Also note that Japanese shinjitai kanji don’t correspond neatly to either the simplified or traditional character sets used in Chinese. For example, 学 is shared between Japanese and simplified Chinese (traditional is 學); 動 is shared between Japanese and traditional Chinese (simplified is 动); Japanese 戦 is distinct from **both** simplified 战 **and** traditional 戰; and where simplified has 机 and traditional has 機, Japanese has **both**, meaning different things. This sort of thing isn’t uncommon, but it doesn’t take a lot of effort to just kind of see different versions of the same character as if they’re just in different “fonts,” sort of.

   My personal take is this: I love Chinese and I’d never discourage learning it for its own sake, but if Japanese is what you’re passionate about learning, I’d just go for that.

   Edit: Also, after getting a solid grasp on tone in Chinese, Japanese pitch accent is pretty simple.

7. Hi! Chinese person here. From my personal experience, knowing Chinese has minimal direct correlation to learning Kanji as a whole. Pronunciation is different, sometimes meaning is different, usage is different. But what it does help massively with is learning how to learn Kanji. If you get used to learning characters in Chinese, then learning extra character in the context of Japanese is much easier.

   I would mention that when you become fluent in Chinese, it’s difficult to shift into the Japanese mindset since it’s so easy to refer back to the Chinese way of using the character instead of the Japanese way.

8. I’m learning Japanese and I know Chinese, which is helpful indeed. But if your goal is to learn Japanese I’d say it’s very overkill to learn Chinese first. Just focus on Japanese 🤓

9. In my personal opinion, you’d get confused and it would be a waste of time