Similarly to how I learnt (and kind of mastered?) English: I just had a lot of people in my new school who came from overseas, whom I talked to daily. It’s been merely four years and my English has improved by tenfold: I’m able to start to speak English normally, write a few B-range essays, and I think I’m even losing my native accent.
I’ve been very interested in Japanese pop-culture and want to learn their language since around half of the Japanese manga and video games I watch and play aren’t translated. Since I’m Chinese I literally had to rely on occasional Kanji appearing and try to guess what Japanese texts meant in Chinese words. Learning Japanese via tutoring isn’t really an option now because of covid restrictions. (and I can’t quite work online)
I am wondering if learning Japanese is as difficult as learning English if I know Chinese? And what parts would be the most difficult?
Also given that I learnt English by talking to foreigners in their language, can I improve Japanese by doing the same? If so, where on the internet can I talk/chat with Japanese people?
3 comments
Well, the two languages are not related and from different language families. But if you can read, Kanji will only be a minor issue, and there are certainly cognates. But overall the biggest benefit will be that there are lots of resources in Chinese to learn Japanese as well as lots of people in Japan who have learned Chinese.
I live in Singapore and many friends and myself are fluent English-Chinese bilinguals. A couple of them have told me it’s easier to learn Japanese via Chinese than via English.
On top of the obvious benefits of partially sharing the same script and plenty of loanwords (in both directions), there are also less obvious grammatical similarities, not often mentioned but from my experience, quite a few expressions are easier to “map” onto Chinese than English (off the top of my head, ～過ぎない maps to ～只不过是, a lot of expressions with deictic（こ、そ、あ、ど、何）pronouns, etc) map better to Chinese than English, particles that act like sentence adverbs, function a bit like Chinese ones, e.g. 呢，吗，啦，的，etc. The effect is pretty subtle I think, and not often noted in English-speaking communities (naturally!) but my personal subjective opinion is it does make things easier.
Because this is an English-speaking site, probably it would be easier for you to search the web in Chinese to find Chinese-language resources.
I myself use English to learn because I’m far more literate in English than Chinese. In fact, studying Japanese has improved my Chinese literacy by quite a bit!
As for finding speakers, I’ve been studying without interaction with Japanese speakers so I can’t help you with this. I just shadow what I hear on various media.
All the best
As a Cantonese speaker and fluent in English, I have found Japanese to be harder to learn than English due to the complexity in Japanese grammar, even though Chinese resources are already better at explaining them.
Here are the books that I recommend. You can order them on http://www.books.com.tw
日語大跳級 (super helpful, it’s really all you need after learning some really basic Japanese 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)
日語助詞王
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)
林老師日語診所
日語接續詞大全
穩紮穩打！新日本語能力試驗 Series (highly recommend this. If you have a limited budget, just get books in this series, since they cover almost everything in the other books except 日語接續詞大全 but with extremely clear and detailed explanation)
To give you some background, I took a year of Japanese class at a US college, and quitted because it was torturously slow and sometimes quite confusing. Then many years later and a pandemic, after I finished reading the first book in the list above, I was able to read manga, and then after the second book, I started reading novels. I have read about 25 novels in the year since then. Reading ebooks or on the web makes looking up words much easier than reading manga, and novels also cover a much wider range of vocabs and grammar than manga.
I also added both the iOS Japanese to English and Japanese to Chinese dictionaries on my iPad. Having both gives me a better coverage since some words only appear in one but not in another, and the Chinese definition is usually more precise. But I still need a Japanese to English dictionary app as a backup.