Anyone else studying Japanese after learning Chinese?

7 comments

1. Idk but once I pass N1 (hopefully next year), I’ll be going the other direction.

2. Not a *lot* to say. I studied Chinese in HS for two years before starting Japanese. I’d say be prepared to mix up pronunciations sometimes. I once rather embarrassingly pronounced 病院 as “biao4 yuan4” to a Mandarin speaker who was also learning Japanese with me (embarrassingly because I yelled it across a loud room). Eventually you’ll be able compartmentalize these things, and also get a pretty good ability to guess the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese loan words. Like me you might also develop an irrational nit about the differing principles for stroke order. 🙂

3. I learned both at the same time. They aren’t similar as languages in my opinion. My advice is to think of them this way and then when you do find similarities, think, “oh that’s similar”. Of course all east Asian languages have countless influences from China and Chinese languages!

4. I studied Chinese for a couple of years in school (got to maybe A2 level max) and then went back to Spanish for a few years, then started Japanese. So my Chinese was never great to begin with and was pretty rusty by the time I started Japanese. I still remembered the basic hanzi though and that helped a lot with learning kanji, though it did take me *years* to not automatically read 非常 as fēicháng instead of hijyou

   I go to Japanese class with a native Chinese speaker, and my advice from studying with her would be don’t let your kanji knowledge make you overconfident. Japanese doesn’t consist purely of kanji. Lots of words that can be written in Kanji often aren’t. You’ll be able to read a legal document more easily than a text message. If you rely on your knowledge of Hanzi you’ll be able to get the gist of a passage, but you won’t be able to read the passage aloud or use any of those words yourself because you won’t know the reading. While the writing systems are similar Japanese and Chinese grammar are wildly different. My Chinese speaking friend majorly struggles with Japanese grammar.

   So yeah, resist the urge to zoom through everything because you can get the gist of complicated passages through knowing the meaning of the kanji. Take the time to learn their Japanese readings and study the grammar.

5. >While I’ve lived in China for nearly 6 years, my Chinese is far from perfect. I’m proud that I dont have such an obvious accent, and I put in a lot of hard work. Yet even with being at the HSK 5/6 level my vocabulary is still miles away to go. I can read manga I enjoy, handle nearly any kind of issue in my daily life, talk comfortably about most topics thrown at me. I’d say for all intents and purposes, I’ve reached my goal, and can say with sincerity that I am bilingual. But thats not enough, because I’m a masochist who cant get enough of studying Asian languages. So, I’m trying my hand at Japanese.

   Heh, our Mandarin is likely in a similar place. And I started learning Japanese while living in China, even. But I’ve been learning for maybe ~3 years now and am at a fairly advanced level, all told. Just for context.

   Honestly, I guess it’s like…what is your question? Because you got to a pretty high level in Mandarin…it feels like you should be able to approach Japanese similarly, if not more efficiently given all of the experience you got from learning Mandarin. Beyond that, the resources etc available for Japanese are, in my opinion, significantly better than those available for Mandarin, though the Mandarinresources have been improving significantly. I guess I do miss Pleco a bit for Japanese 🙂

   >
   I’m on day 5 of studying. I can write half of the hiragana chart from memory. I can read all of the kanji in Genki I and II books after briefly browsing through it to see what I’m getting myself into. Probably will be able to handle an intermediate book’s kanji level as well without issue, other than some slight adjustments.

   I guess the one thing I’ll say is that while knowing Mandarinis absolutely a huge advantage when learning Japanese, “knowing all the kanji you see” is a bit deceptive, because pretty much every kanji has at least 2 readings, if not more. So you will generally be able to guess one of them (or if you can’t guess, it will be very easy to remember)…but the other one will be pure memorization. As someone who has memorized 8000+ Chinese characters, honestly, this aspect of Japanese is a huge pain in the ass. It does get better with time, but I do miss the “memorize it and you’re *done*” aspect of Chinese characters.

   I will also say that while people will generally emphasize the benefit of knowing/being able to guess onyomi readings based on your Mandarin knowledge, I actually don’t think that’s the biggest benefit. I think the biggest benefit is having a brain that is used to memorizing characters and assigning meaning and pronunciation to them, as well as knowing how to approach language study in general, especially of a language presumably quite different from your native language. And Mandarin does have some grammar in common with Japanese that can help make sense of some of the grammar that can be quite difficult for new learners…for example, the Mandarin particle 把 can help you understand Japanese’s much more expansive particle grammar, Mandarin’s sentence ending particles can help understand Japanese’s, etc.

   But other than that…it seems like you more or less know how you want to approach the language? You know how much time you want to spend, how many classes you want to take, what you want to read, you know how to use anki, you’ve studied a language to a high level before…

   Actually, after writing all that I did think of one thing I’d warn against…don’t over-leverage your Mandarin literacy to guess the meaning of characters. It will often be similar or related, but will equally often have a nuance that is specific to the Japanese usage. In my experience, knowledge of Chinese characters etc is much more effective as a sort of mnemonic device…yes, when push comes to shove it will give you superhuman guessing powers for kanji compounds…which is super useful, as they make up a huge long tail of vocab that will come up in more technical or formal writing, but still, I would encourage you to actually learn the Japanese meanings and pronunciations well instead of just relying on guessing via Chinese. I know a lot of Chinese people learning Japanese and the vast majority heavily over-rely on their Chinese literacy…this makes them beasts on the JLPT, but can end up being a huge impediment to actually learning the language.

6. I did, but I acquired Chinese as a native speaker, so I think what the others who posted before me applies better (and I generally agree with what they say too).

   The only thing I want to add is that I recall seeing a redditor from Hong Kong who shared and briefly reviewed a list of (Traditional) Chinese-language resources for learning Japanese a couple of times here. I wonder if you might be able to find it via a search.

   I also saw before on another forum, a Singaporean guy who had bad English was griping about how local Japanese language classes were only in English (not Mandarin), and then later he found a video lesson package (with consultations too), put together by a Taiwanese teacher (iirc he said “shigure”), and he thought it was excellent.

   Not sure how effective any of these things are, but more than one local friend – and they are the fluent ones – have told me before that learning Japanese via Mandarin is better (but it’s just anecdata and all of them could well have done it bilingually too).

   All the best 🙂

7. Native mandarin speaker from Singapore here. I think it would be better to study Japanese with Mandarin. It will go faster because Kanji knowledge is assumed. There are a lot of resources online. I quite like https://youtube.com/c/ShuWoon2013