Hello. I want to preface this by saying I am not learning Japanese. I am a Polish native speaker who speaks English (however terribly) and is planning to eventually learn Italian.
r/languagelearning does not allow posts regarding one specific language, so I thought I might post here. I hope I don’t offend anybody, I am just curious. I can already see some people might be infuriated without any reason, I just want to know, though.
It appears to me that Japanese learning is much more popular than learning Chinese. I do wonder, why?
Like, from what I know (I don’t speak either) both Chinese and Japanese are extremely difficult to learn for a native speaker of an Indo-European language. However, Chinese has like 10 times as many native speakers. So if you invest all that time into learning Chinese, you are likely to be able to speak to many times as many people.
On top of that, China has nukes and is more likely to become a superpower.
I wonder, why exactly is Japanese learning more popular?
Why have you chosen Japanese instead of Chinese? What drove you to it? Do you think Japanese more useful?
26 comments
So I can watch anime without subtitles of course 😆
1, Japanese has a much easier pronunciation than Chinese for English speakers.
2, imo Japanese has easier grammar but some English speakers might find Chinese easier in terms of that. I would say neither are that difficult coming from English.
3, there are more people interested in Japanese content and culture than Chinese (anime, manga, the country itself etc.).
As for me personally, I like kanji in Japanese so much I started learning mandarin…
Chinese having 10 times the number of native speakers doesn’t make it 10 times more useful, you’re not going to speak to 1 billion Chinese speakers. Usefulness of a language is driven by individual goals. Learning Chinese is really only useful if you want to work with Chinese people, live in China, or you’re just interested in China. The exact same thing can be said about Japanese.
So why is Japanese more popular? It’s more conducive to people’s interests. Japan has spent decades accumulating soft power by exporting cultural products (you can read this as anime is popular). People are more interested in Japan and it’s a nicer place to live than China in terms of living standards, so more people want to go there. Hence, learning Japanese is more useful to more people.
Probably just because there is more content in Japanese that people want to be able to enjoy. That at least covers it for me. If I couldn’t speak English that would probably be my language to learn. Ignoring content, another European language would make sense French, German, Spanish.
The reality is that each language probably has just as much media that I’d like to enjoy in its native language, but at the very least I’m not aware of it whereas I am for Japanese.
Japan built up a big wave of export culture from about the mid-80s, which has continued to present-day (arguably peaking around the late-90s/early-2000s, and somewhat overshadowed by Korean pop-culture – the _hallyu_ wave – these days). This – Japan’s “soft power” – enticed many to visit the country, and study the language and culture.
Japanese also has a longer, more established history of being taught as a foreign language – with more plentiful high-quality resources from which to learn.
China still struggles with export culture, and when I started learning Mandarin, over a decade ago, the teaching materials and learning resources were overly-academic, and unrefined. It’s come a long way since then – and acquired learners all over the world – but I’d say it still has some catching up to do with Japanese…
It is not just about being useful or not. People have various reasons for learning a language. Many Japanese learners have a passion for Japanese culture, whether it be pop culture such as anime, manga, dorama, games, or work-related reasons. If one is only looking for opportunities for work or the number of people they can communicate with, then learning Chinese may seem like a better choice. However, it is important to remember that learning a language is not only about work or studies.
I think that it comes from exposure to culture. Japan did far better job at exporting their culture abroad, thus making people more keen to learn their language. Similar thing with Korea.
For me, I was interested in East Asian cultures in general, both Japanese and Chinese. I chose Japanese because it just sounds nice in my opinion (also previously mentioned exposure to the culture). Chinese doesn’t sound bad, but sometimes it may sound kind of funny.
Also I think thay it is much harder to read Chinese, since all of their writing is in Chinese characters. With Japanese it’s only about 40% while the other 60% is kana, which is relatively easy to learn. Japanese is also easier to pronounce. It has many sounds similar to Polish. (I am also Polish)
Because I love Japanese culture and find it way more interesting. Been to Japan once and loved it. Working for a Japanese company now. Will probably never be really good in Japanese but even small progress (recognising Kanji or words) is making me happy!
My interests are purely personal, not really rationally motivated. I would also like to learn Latin, for example, and the amount of native speakers there is zero 😉
For various reasons (which, of course, let’s be honest, include manga&anime, but are not limited to them) I like Japan quite a bit since late childhood, while I don’t feel the same for China. Don’t get me wrong, I know China also has a rich history and interesting culture, but the same is true for many countries. You cannot like them all the same.
Additionally, chances are that I will in my life, speak to a lot less than a million native speakers, so it makes no difference if there are a billion or less of them. Admittedly, for my job it would be minimally better the learn Chinese – my (European) company has an office in Hong Kong – but since I don’t do anything sales- or customer-related, that would be so extremely minimal that it doesn’t matter.
Just because Chinese has more native speakers doesn’t mean much. If that was the case, why would I bother with either when Hindi is even easier than those two to learn? Many people learn Japanese because Japanese culture in recent decades has exploded in the West, and with that spike in popularity, more people want to learn about the culture and language. Japanese is a very useful language, especially since they are the 3rd largest economy in the world, and are the primary “gateway” if you will to Asia for western business (sans Hong Kong), since relations with the CCP are icy at best and it’s incredibly hard to expand there. Also what does owning nukes have literally anything to do with learning a language lol? In that case why doesn’t everyone learn Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Traditional Korean and French? But mainly, most people learn because they have an intrest in Japanese culture (and I’m sure Chinese would have a similar spike if a certain organization didn’t absolutely destroy Chinese culture and made it a crime).
Because I’m in school to be an illustrator who works for animation and games. Japan is actually a pretty big part of those industries, so I feel like it’s a useful language to learn. Plus as an artist, kanji is actually fun for me to learn and easy to remember.
Because I like Tokyo, Disneyland, more than I like Shanghai and Hong Kong, Disneyland.
How can you write a post like this and claim your English is terrible? Sus.
I have no desire to go to China because of their of human rights violations. I’ve wanted to visit Japan for as long as I remember. Both countries are fascinating, but Japanese citizens have freedom of speech. I don’t want to go to a place that executes people for criticizing the government.
I have no reason for picking up the language really, just people around me during covid lockdowns were all getting hobbies to keep themselves sane and I felt left out. I do watch anime and a decent amount of the games I play are made in Japan so I just figured “why not, maybe one day I can consume the media I like in the native language”.
Soft power.
It has the biggest animation/comics industry in the world. (No equivalent in China)
It has second biggest game industry in the world. First one being global/English oriented. (No equivalent in China, and China has strict rules and censorship when it comes to videogames)
It has revered world popular influential cinematography. (Hong Kong as well, but whether it is China is debatable)
Second biggest music industry.
A lot of people appreciate Japanese culture/history/cuisine.
It is also a first-world country that is vastly different from Western ones. It used to be worlds 2nd biggest economy. Words Made in Japan mean quality. Made in China means cheap knock-off. Many of household electronic brands are Japanese. Also many of car makes are Japanese. Unlike with Chinese, you don’t get Japanese economic migrants (hence mostly Chinese people working in Japanese restaurants in USA/UK)
It’s also home to many martial arts like karate, aikido, kendo and many other ones.
It depends on what you mean by popular, because it is really only popular in the US. Though the amount of people trying to learn Japanese in let’s say..countries in Europe is much smaller than people trying to learn mandarin.
Japan considers the U.S. one of its top ally, we have military bases and operations around Japan. So naturally we put a emphasis on exports from that country which lead to a cultural exchange as well. Japanese culture is a very profitable thing in the U.S. so it’s easy to sell..I believe all these are the major reasons why,
Edit:also Japan has a rich culture and interesting that contrasts with western culture. So naturally there is a nice novelty and influence to want to learn more.
For me it’s anime, manga and fun. Love the country and want to be able to communicate at my next holiday visit.
The first reason is undoubtedly political. In the post WW2 period, there was a fear that Japan would turn Communist, so the US took on the burden of rebuilding the nation. Since then Japan was always open to the US allowing for greater cultural exchange throughout the non-Communist world.
Secondly, China has had a great deal of censorship in the past century, whether it was internal from the Communist Party, external from Japanese Imperialism. This stifled or even erased a great deal of cultural expression, and further limited what would be exported. Japan hasn’t had much in the way of censorship since the 1940s (to my knowledge), so more cultural artifacts could be exported to the West and beyond.
Third, Japan has invested hard in its culture – both traditional arts and modern. Because they’re invested in pushing their soft power (culture), it absolutely boomed especially during the late 1990s-early 2000s. This of course drew more attention to Japan, Japanese language study. There’s actual data about foreign language study at US universities, and Japanese is one of the few languages that’s seen an increase of students, followed by Korean (no doubt influenced the popularity of K-Pop).
I’m not aware of many modern cultural exports of Chinese or any movement to promote the language/culture, which might be the cause of its lack of popularity. Couple this with a more restrictive political environment and I can see how/why Japanese beats out Chinese.
Learning Russian would be far more useful than Italian, also easier for a Slav. So why would you waste your time on Italian?
Simply speaking it’s amount of content you can enjoy with each language. How many popular Chinese manga/drama/movies are there? with no offence most of them are trash. People in the west simply don’t want to consume censored Chinese media
Yes Chinese will be more useful in terms of business & resume sense but most people here are learning Japanese for fun not to get into some jobs that require Japanese, so the usefulness of language is out of picture. I also see a lot of people with Chinese ethnicity in my company. So I found hardly any reason to learn Chinese since I can just ask my coworker. Unless you are going into profession like supply chain management or something I found hardly any reason to learn Chinese since it is almost guaranteed that you will find one native Chinese speaker in any company.
1. I was bored.
2. Just out of pure interest I decided it would be some Asian language (choice between Chinese, Korean and Japanese)
3. I was consuming Japanese media anyway, so why not do that in their language?
4. Kind of a minor one, but because of easier pronunciation
5. Because of writing system! I wanted to try and make sense of these quirky pictures they call words (that’s a reason why not Korean)
So yeah, as I said, it all started because I was bored, so I didn’t really put much thought into it and didn’t have much hopes.. But then it just snowballed, I got to like the process of learning, I like to find new kanji (chinese characters used in Japanese) and I’m just having a good time! And that’s mainly because it is all self learning, I don’t have any exams to look up to, no deadlines, no pressure.
Also I definitely plan to try Chinese as well, but maybe later
“China has nukes.” I, too, consult a world map of nuclear powers when choosing what to learn.
For me, I moved to Japan (a choice in itself to be sure), so it was never a question. Hobbyists are drawn to cultural factors that make them interested in a language. I don’t think it’s a mystery, because it’s also certain that learning Chinese has become more popular as its soft power and influence has increased.
For a lot of people it has to do with the higher amount of Japanese media that’s popular outside Japan, compared to Chinese media popular outside Chinese-speaking countries. But in my college classes, my Chinese classes were just as full and big as my Japanese ones, so it might also be that Japanese learners are just comparatively more represented in online-nerd-slanting spaces, for obvious reasons, whereas in the real world there are plenty of both.
They learn for the country and culture, not necessarily how many people they can talk to
Personally?
A friend of mine is a military family and moved to Japan. I wanted to visit while she was there, so figured I’d learn a few phrases. I became fascinated with the writing system. Kept studying. Started learning about the culture as i studied, became more fascinated. Kept studying.
Now I am in love with the country. And the language learning aspects gives me satisfaction every time I recognize something new.
I wasn’t huge into the pop culture scene before I started studying the language. I do consume more Japanese media now that I am learning the language though. Technically, as a kid, i was super into it (unknowingly): i loved pokemon, but had no idea it was from Japan- so I don’t count that amongst my reasons 😂
As a side… perk maybe? There are many Japanese companies in my area, so perhaps when I go back to work, if i have learned enough, it could help me land a job. But that wasn’t my initial motivation.