I have been trying to learn Chinese and been failing at it, which sucks since I bought so much material so my husband suggested we learn Japanese together instead since we both love anime and the culture and it’s been in our lives since we were kids.
So like the title, is Japanese gonna be easier for a English speaker?
He wants to just learn to read and speak it, I want to add in writing as well cuz I have always thought the characters were beautiful, I’m worried about memorizing though. We are gonna be using Duolingo along with other study apps and materials, not sure where to start tho..
One of the things that’s already easy is being able to actually sound out the words, I might be off at times on how to pronounce something or I get it right away, but I couldn’t even fathem doing that with Chinese.
Edit: what I mean by easy to learn is, is it easier than learning Mandarin in some aspects. Like I said above I can guess at how to pronounce something in Japanese and usually seem to get it right but in Mandarin it’s near impossible due to tones.
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No, in fact it supposedly is [the most difficult language](https://gurmentor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gurmentor.com-what-is-the-hardest-language-to-learn-2020-02-05_18-56-16_784105.jpg).
Hahaha wait till you hit cantonese and its nine tone bullshit xd
IMO whether or not it’s easier depends on what you find hard about chinese, and what aspects of langauge are easiest/most natural for you to learn/understand/comprehend
it’s not about easiness. You research and learn the best methods that would work for you and then you persevere – that’s it
JP is hard as hard can be
Learn French or Spanish if you want easy-street.
German is a little harder than those but doable with English.
JP is for crazy ppl.
I think what’s easiest is the language you’re motivated to learn. If you guys really love Japanese entertainment, it’ll be a lot easier to learn it in my opinion
I would recommend the app busuu or renshuu instead of Duolingo. Duolingo is really bad, unfortunately.
[Here](http://heavenlypath.notion.site/) is a link to a site that has a very good guide for learning Chinese. There’s no such thing as failing in language learning, there’s only giving up.
Wow I’m the exact opposite. I took Mandarin Chinese at the Univerity and I found it so easy. The grammar is very simple, there is absolutely no conjugation, there is no kana to learn. It was all tones and ‘kanjis’. Tones were also easy to learn(and fun at a times) and learning the writing system was just a matter of practice and memorising.
Japanese on the other hand has keigo, kana, complicated rules, many expressions and their writing system uses three different elements in the same sentence, hiragana, katakana and kanji. It’s easier to pronounce, that’s for sure, but the rest? It’s one of the most complicated languages I’ve had to learn.
Depends what was hard about chinese for you. I thought chinese was way easier because hanzi usually only having 1 pronunciation made it easier (versus Kanji having many pronunciations), and I just found chinese grammar easier to remember. I do think japanese will be Slightly easier for you because: you’re studying with someone so there’s someone to motivate and help you, and you like Japanese things so you can use them for motivation and study material when you feel like giving up.
That said both languages take many hours to learn. FSIs estimate for both languages is 2200 study hours. While the actual hours may vary, it’s safe to assume both languages will take a lot more hours to learn than say French would. So study a decent amount of time each day to make sure you are making progress as fast as you’d like. For example if I studied French for 30 minutes to learn to read graded readers in 6 months, I’d want to do 1-2 hours a day of japanese to read graded readers in 6 months. Or accept you will make progress over more months/years and that’s totally fine, you’re still making progress, you’re not doing anything wrong it just takes more study hours for progress in chinese or Japanese.
As someone who has worked on several languages
I can tell you they are all hard in some way, “easy language to learn” is a trap
The easiest language is the one you’re interested in and motivated to learn.
Reading through these comments, *I feel like I’ve made a BIG mistake,* but also… *I kinda needed a hobby so I’m not complaining*
Katakana is filth and I hate it 😊
Well it has these weird variations that confused the hell out of me. Then the kanji that changes depending of whom it’s partnering with.
I do know that Mandarin will be next after Japanese but that’s because it’s a natural step. I have a Chinese friend who struggles with Kanji, they know the meaning but that’s it.
As someone who studies both, I find Chinese easier because of the grammar. But each language has its challenges.
Objectively speaking, Chinese is far easier for a native English speaker to pick up than Japanese across a wide range of aspects including grammar, syntax and word order/sentence structure, writing systems, how vocabulary functions (without even taking into account the large number of loan words) etc. The major areas of difficulty are adjusting to characters (which is present for Japanese as well) and finetuning your pronunciation, more the vowel system than tones which can be picked up naturally with enough exposure.
Granted, everyone is different and it may be you end up finding Japanese more accessible.
They have different difficulty spikes, and it depends on what your goal is. Chinese is much harder initially, but if your end goal is to be able to read, write, speak, and listen at as close to a native level as possible, then Japanese is harder in the long run
Japanese is definitely more difficult. But, if the culture/media interests you more and if you also have a learning partner that will help motivate you along the way, you will most likely be more successful in the end. All languages are difficult, so the only way to succeed with any of them is if you have the interest and discipline to make it all the way through. I’d recommend Cure Dolly to learn Japanese grammar btw.
I took both for many years and they are very difficult in their own ways. The good news is that there is some synergy in learning both.
I dont know Mandarin but I’ve heard its a nightmare. if you mess Up the pitch you can say completely the wrong thing. In that aspect I’d definitely say Japanese is easier….but maybe Its because I already know it and I dont know chinese.
As far as as “is it easy”….answer is it depends what you consider to be easy…..If you compare with chinese, then possibly it is easier…..but if you compare it to something like spanish (when english is your NL), then Spanish would be easier
there is no easy way to getbto fluency in any language…it is a life long journey…there are some people that study the language off an on for over 10 years for maybe a few minutes a day and could get to an intermediate level….there are others (like me) that study for most of the day (+8 hours) every day for only a few years and can be more involved in the language, its culture and just overall content much faster…but even then its with managed expectations…I knew I wanted to focus on consuming content (manga, anime, JDramas, movies, books, etc)…so I focused on my understanding of the language…about 3 years into it and I suck at speaking…but to me thats expected because I never focused on it too much…I just want to watch shows and read books….not talk to people…so knowing that I just basivally learned kana + kanji and began reading every day…there will be frustrating moments…everyone has those….but if you see your goals clearly you can certainly do it 🙂
But it all depends in your goals and your level of patience..and having the correct expectations set…too low expectations and you might not progress as fast as you want to…too high and you might give up because you might not reach the level you want on your expected time..
I don’t know if it is easier because I never studied Chinese. But if if Japanese culture is more interesting to you and if you like Japanese media better I would say to go for it. I think motivation can be one of the key factors in language learning.
Japanese is much easier for beginners. Learning a tonal language is really difficult, to the point where pinyin almost holds you back so great are some of the vowel sound changes. Japanese gets harder and harder at the intermediate / advanced / native level, but for beginners and consumers iof lighter material where pronunciation is cleaner it is easier to pick out familiar words. Basically with Japanese you can be “off” in the sound and still get the word whereas in Chinese who the hell knows what is being said if you get the tone wrong. Reading is also easier as you have the kana (and you can learn hiragana in about 2 hours and then just practice to get your speed up), so not everything is a character. The only downside is that Japanese grammar is much harder and more unfamiliar, but it is quite logical.
Once you get past being a beginner Japanese ramps up in difficulty, and joins Chinese as being about as hard a language as you can get for an English native speaker. So it’s not easier to learn but it is easier to get started. I say this as someone about a year into learning Japanese who then had to switch to Chinese due to a relationship (but still hangs around here as I can’t let go).
The one big thing on your side with Japanese that makes the comparison irrelevant tho is your interest. Learning a language with someone to consume entertainment material that you enjoy is a huge motivator. With that type of enthusiasm I can see a holiday in Japan in your futures, and that’s a great motivator as well to learn.
So even if Japanese were twice as hard with both of you doing it together as something that will become your hobby you will be much better off learning it instead.
The most important thing is picking a language you have motivation and interest in learning.
I could probably have learned 3 other languages in the time I learned Japanese, but I didn’t (except Spanish) because I reckon I’ll use Japanese a lot more in my life, and whenever it gets difficult or annoying I find motivation easily to pick it back up.
I have spent a lot more time studying Mandarin than Japanese, but I find Mandarin easier because the grammar is more like English, and the use of characters is more logical and partially phonetic. (Most Chinese characters contain a clue to the pronunciation which only makes sense in Chinese.) On the other hand Japanese has a lot more loan words from English and these are much easier to recognize since they are written in katakana.
To be frank: reading and writing are very nearly the same thing. If you can’t read kanji you will be functionally illiterate and will have difficulty working with most learning resources.
IMO just bite the bullet and study the kanji together!
I’m a heritage speaker of Chinese and I’ve been studying Japanese as a hobby for the past 3 years.
Both are exceptionally difficult for a native English speaker, just because they are Asian languages that have no genetic relationship to any European language. Something like Dutch or Spanish would be orders of magnitude easier for an English speaker to learn.
As others have said, there are things in Japanese that are easier than Mandarin and things that are more difficult.
I think Mandarin has an extremely high barrier to entry, the difficulty level is extremely high in the beginning with mastering tones, memorizing Hanzi, and figuring out how to say things with almost no cognates to English. As you’ve probably discovered, Mandarin Chinese has borrowed exceptionally few loanwords compared to most other languages, strongly preferring calques to direct loanwords. However after you master these very difficult basics, things get easier and easier as you go on for a long time until you get to stuff like Chinese literature and classical Chinese, where the difficulty ramps up dramatically once again.
For Japanese, the barrier to entry in the beginning is lower. It starts off relatively easily especially if you ignore Kanji at first. The pronunciation is much easier, there are tens of thousands of English loanwords to “help” you (10% of Japanese vocabulary is now English loanwords), there are kana that you can spell things out with.
However, the deeper you get into Japanese, the more difficult and arcane it becomes. You learn that it’s agglutinative language, there’s a hundred ways to conjugate a verb based on tense, formality, intention, passive vs active, negation, etc. You learn about the complex levels of formality. You learn how there’s like a dozen different first and second person pronouns, but you’re not supposed to use any of them most of the time. You start learning Kanji readings and discovering how crazy and arbitrary these readings can be. You start getting into the Japanese obsession with vagueness and indirectness, and not finishing half the sentence leaving you to infer the rest of it. You learn the extremely subtle nuances and shades of meaning you can get from different verb endings and conjugations. You get into the difference between male and female speech, there are complicated grammar things that make you sound more masculine or feminine.
TLDR: Mandarin is harder in the beginning, then gets easier as you go until you hit literary/classical Chinese
Japanese is easier in the beginning but gets dramatically more difficult to deeper you go.
easier in terms of pronunciation:
with Japanese you may super thick accent, and still be intelligible
with Chinese – you would need to learn to “sing” it (ergo, won’t be easy if you’re tone deaf)
How much Chinese are you intending to learn?
Conversational level Chinese is relatively easy. Being fluent is the difficult part; The use of set phrases, proverbs, allegories, are the real killer as they incorporate historical and literary elements.