Which should be easier for an English speaker to learn, Chinese or Japanese?

[saibot]

Originally Posted by Joao

According to this guy, Chinese would be easier than Japanese:

Everything he says about Japanese and Korean is true. However, he downplays Chinese grammar (and I think he also downplays the pronunciation). As he says, he's a beginner in Chinese. It's easy to make very short, simple sentences with a "subject-verb-object" word order, but as soon as it get a little beyond that, it becomes pretty complex. Just not having verb conjugations or noun gender doesn't make a language easy.

[Joao]

^ Interesting points. In favour of Japanese, I'd guess it to have less dialects or less different varieties than Chinese, given Japan is much smaller than China, and its population much smaller too. It reminds me of Hebrew vs Arabic. Hebrew does not have as many varieties as Arabic, which would make it easier to learn. Having said that, it seems most linguists agree that the Japanese grammar is more complex than the Chinese one, and as the study of it progresses Japanese would become harder than Chinese.

Motivation also must be taken into account:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DuPgXWAzT8

[euro123]

OP, have you considered Korean btw? There seems to be huge overlap between Chinese and Korean at least according to some people who speak one of them and even between Japanese and korean despite claims that both have nothing in common...

[Joao]

Originally Posted by euro123

OP, have you considered Korean btw? There seems to be huge overlap between Chinese and Korean at least according to some people who speak one of them and even between Japanese and korean despite claims that both have nothing in common...

Originally Posted by Joao

According to this guy, Chinese would be easier than Japanese:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxrzBpJLHIU

According to him, Korean would have the easiest writing system and a grammar somewhat more complex - though not as much - as the Japanese one.

[saibot]

Originally Posted by euro123

OP, have you considered Korean btw? There seems to be huge overlap between Chinese and Korean at least according to some people who speak one of them and even between Japanese and Korean despite claims that both have nothing in common...

Both Japanese and Korean borrowed hundreds of words from Chinese (and altered them to fit their phonetic systems). If you are fluent in Chinese, you have a head start in learning advanced Japanese/Korean vocabulary, because you will recognize some of these loanwords. It is especially easy to recognize them in Japanese, which still uses Chinese characters.

Japanese and Korean have nothing in common with Chinese except for that.

Japanese and Korean have almost no vocabulary in common with each other except for those Chinese loanwords. Their grammatical structure is extremely similar, however--they use the same word order and they both use particles to indicate case, to name two similarities.

The Korean writing system (hangul) is so easy and logical. I've never even studied Korean, but after reading a couple of articles about hangul, I can pronounce easy words written in hangul, even though I have no idea what they mean.