I am a native Cantonese, Mandarin speaker (can read and write), fluent in English and I am deciding whether I should learn Japanese with Chinese textbooks or English textbooks.
I am currently in the UK so its probably hard to find textbooks written in Chinese or in person classes that teach Japanese in Chinese.
Which do you think I should use?
20 comments
Use the one that you have the most resources (English), since you are already fluent in English.
Your advantage in understanding Kanji or other similarities between Chinese and English will still remain, no matter what kind of books or resources that you are using.
Good to see other Cantonese speakers in the sub, good luck and godspeed on your Japanese journey.
Edit: You don’t have to limit yourself only on one kind of sources — they are both useful if you are able to obtain them.
Hi, I’m also a native cantonese speaker, not quite fluent in mandarin but decent. You will find that some japanese words sound very close to cantonese. It’s fascinating and might point to a shared history in the past.
Check out this post. [http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?1,151688,151692](http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?1,151688,151692)
The origins of hiragana from chinese characters [https://omniglot.com/images/writing/hiragana.gif](https://omniglot.com/images/writing/hiragana.gif)
知 in cantonese sounds closer to ち than it does in mandarin.
Same for 加 and か.
Some Japanese textbooks come with Chinese and Korean examples alongside English; I know the Sō-Matome books do. You could prioritise those. And some textbooks come with Chinese versions.
I’m using English as it has more resources but Bilibili has some interesting videos, especially ones showing how kana evolved from Hanzi (e.g. 毛 turning into も and 世 into せ).
Knowing Chinese is an insane buff.. I speak Mandarin too and I passed N3 with 6 months of self study (from zero). And as more kanjis show up, reading becomes easier…
That being said, I don’t think it matters? If you know Chinese you will make the connection between the Japanese Kanji to the Chinese ones automatically. It doesn’t matter if the source material is Chinese or English. The beginner textbook I used (标准日本语) has way more vocab than Genki though.
Honestly, if you can, it’s better to avoid textbooks altogether. Immersion is the key, you need to surround yourself with as much Japanese as possible, which is the reason why in person lessons in Japan are best, as the teachers make an effort to not speak any language other than Japanese while still helping you understand it, and you also get the immersion from being in Japan. Textbooks are probably the worst way to learn on its own, as they provide no examples of pronunciation or real-world use, and use your own language to teach Japanese so it will be making links in your head between eg English words and Japanese words that won’t be strictly accurate. They are, however, a great tool to use alongside other methods.
I personally don’t know chinese but I think it’s worth to mention the grammar.
With English or other languages with a complex grammar with particles you can have a 1:1 or almost translation. That’s really useful to learn grammar.
Again i don’t know chinese but in case it doesn’t have particles i think grammar is explained with some workaround (that probably works good but is not the same of having 1:1 reference).
So in the end i suggest to think about that, plus as other mentioned, even if you use English resources you still maintain your kanji knowledge. Let us know what you think, also because I’m interested in Chinese as well.
Pretty much in the same boat as you are, but I’ve had a lot of good experience with English material and supplementing with Cantonese ones when it’s more convenient.
English explanation in the Genki and Tobira series are pretty good for me. But some terms or phrases make more sense translated in Canto than English imo.
Why not try to find resources in both?
Adding to the other comments, knowing Cantonese and mandarin helped a lot in finding the pronunciations of kanji borrowed from Chinese for me personally. It might help you to explicitly learn the rules from deriving them, much like you implicitly learned the rules for converting Cantonese pronunciations to mandarin.
I’d think it’d be easier with Chinese but as the others said no matter what manual you get, you’ll have the advantage of knowing many characters.
Try the basics of both online and see what you like more
I kind of use both since some words or sentence are are easier to understand in Chinese and vice versa. I did do classes in English at the start so I’m more used to that.
If you’re going to try classes, which I assume would also be in English since you’re in UK , it’s probably easier to do it in that language.
I would recommend using Chinese materials. English materials tend to go slower.
When you already know the characters, it makes it easier to identify Chinese loan words.
I am an American. I started learning Chinese in college while studying engineering, then took a break when classes in my major took all my time. Then I studied Japanese for a year. After graduation, I went to Taiwan to study Chinese. I took intensive classes for a few years, then stopped when I had to travel a lot for work. After a few years, I started studying Japanese at a Taiwanese university, an hour of classes a day.
The pace of the Japanese classes in Chinese was much faster. In the US, we were expected to know hiragana after a semester. In Taiwan, after two weeks, the teacher said “You should all know hiragana by now. It’s only about 50 characters, and they are easy.” It was great for me, drinking from the firehouse. I could not keep up with my classmates and had to repeat classes a few times, but I learned a lot. The school used their own textbooks for the beginning classes, then switched to Chinese translations of common English textbooks. I got the English versions off Amazon, though, as it was easier for me to understand the grammar explanations.
There is a super intensive class in Taipei that promises to get you to N1 in less than a year. That is a lot of hard work, and a somewhat artificial target, but it does show that knowing Chinese characters is a big help.
There has traditionally been a focus in the process for English learners on getting people to a level of “business” fluency as soon as possible. That results in taking some shortcuts, e.g. starting with polite language (です/ますforms), when less formal forms are more fundamental. The traditional Western language teaching process, particularly in a college setting, does not pay much attention to spoken language. It goes directly to writing and memorizing verb conjugation, because that was the hard part of Latin and other Romance languages.
Similarly, the Chinese education system pays less attention to speaking and even less to grammar. The hard part is learning all the characters. You sometimes see Chinese learners of English who can read very well, but can’t speak. In Japanese, there are a lot of Chinese loan words, but the basic language is not Chinese. It’s better to focus on the spoken language as the primary thing and learning the grammar. Later on your knowledge of Chinese will boost your vocabulary.
I study both japanese and chinese at the moment in Uni, learning both at the same time is almost like cheating I feel like ))) If you speak mandarin, you should 100% learn from mandarin tools. Most Kanji come from old chinese writting system, you will be laughing literaly. This is going to be an easy task for you
I think the pronunciation of Japanese is closer to English than Chinese, but I guess it doesn’t really matter as long as you use comprehensible input and immersion
As others have said, there’s no harm in trying both. What’s important is getting practice, so just use whatever gets you to practice more.
One thing I’d like to add is, when you get to a high enough level (JLPT N3-N2), the best language to study Japanese, is Japanese. Here is a guide to [monolingual studying](https://learnjapanese.moe/monolingual/). One of the main points of the guide is that translations are inaccurate, no matter which language it is translated into. The only downside is that it takes way longer to look up new words, at first.
Though, judging from your post, I’m guessing you are just starting out — so don’t worry about this yet. Once you start reading significant portions of Japanese text — actual manga or LN’s, rather than just study snippets — you should consider monolingual studying.
Native Cantonese speaker here. I took a year of Japanese at a US college. I didn’t learn much and it was mostly a waste of time. I found English resources to be too slow, and they don’t explain grammar well. Please don’t waste your money and time on them.
Years later, I restarted on learning Japanese. I ordered self-learning books that cover essential or trickier grammar points from a Taiwanese online bookstore, http://www.books.com.tw. Each of them took about a few hours to read, and I spent no more than 3 hours a week reading them. After reading the first grammar book, I was able to read raw manga while looking up every word that I didnt know. 6 months after I restarted learning Japanese and 2 more grammar books later (and re-reading them), I started reading Japanese novels. I have read at least 50 light novels in the 2 years since then. I still look up every word that I don’t know which is much easier to do on ebook and web novel, and that’s is how I expand vocabulary exclusively. I have never spent even a second on specifically memorizing vocabulary throughout this 2 years and a half. I also look up any frequently appearing kanji, even I know their meanings, for their reading. I am now getting pretty good at guessing their onyomi readings based on their Cantonese pronunciation.
Here are the grammar books that I read initially, and in this order:
日語大跳級 (super helpful, it’s really all you need after learning hiragana and katakana to start reading native Japanese text, given you also have a decent Chinese vocabulary. The drawback of this book is that it doesn’t have any furigana to any kanji)
王可樂的日文超圖解 (it explains a lot of subtle grammar points and word nuances)
日語助詞王
林老師日語診所
你以為你懂，但你其實不懂的日語Q&A (explains even more subtle grammar points, but it’s a bit on the dry side, and most of the contents are covered in 穩紮穩打！新日本語能力試驗 N4 and n3 (explain below) though, since they are written by the same author)
你以為簡單，但其實不簡單的日語文法Q&A (I haven’t read this yet but it’s by the same author of the book above, so it should be pretty good)
I am now reading 穩紮穩打！新日本語能力試驗 series which are more comprehensive and detailed than the above grammar books. But it will take a lot longer to finish each book in this series than just reading the quick grammar books.
Good luck!
Edit: I read novels on my iPad which I added the iOS Japanese-Chinese dictionary, in addition to the Japanese and Japanese-English dictionary to give me the best coverage. Usually the Chinese definition (besides the Japanese one) is better at capturing the nuance
As a native Mandarin speaker I prefer to learn Japanese with English just because there’re so many kanji that have different pronounciation and meaning to their hanzi counterpart, that I would find it more confusing to study Japanese from a Chinese mindset.
For grammar, it’s a toss up. Cantonese AFAIK is grammatically similar to Mandarin, and both are in the SVO family of languages, the same as English, but Japanese is a SOV language. Since you’re fluent in both, you will probably find similar, in-depth explanations of grammar points in resources for both languages (or if not directly Cantonese, Mandarin definitely).
As for Hanzi/Kanji, use what you know and Cantonese/Mandarin resources for it (I don’t know what the sources there use, but I’d make sure it uses something standard like Hepburn romanization for Japanese; I once had a book on learning Mandarin written for Japanese speakers, and while it used Pinyin, it also put the sounds into a Katakana sound system).
Most of the Kanji resources in English are for people who never learned how to learn the characters and so English natives are stuck learning, how to look up, stroke order, pronunciation, and use, whereas speakers familiar with traditional characters will pretty much only have to memorize the Japanese pronunciations of the characters, and perhaps some usage as a few characters aren’t a 1-to1 due to how characters were borrowed, sounds changed, and use became more inline with Japanese culture/history. That and the collection of characters that are unique to Japanese versus other places still using traditional characters.