Obviously depends on the person but I am interested in people's reasons for learning Mandarin.

I plan to do so once my Japanese is at an almost native level because:

- If you can speak Mandarin you can speak to over a billion people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lan...e_speakers). If you include English and Japanese, you can speak to almost half the words population.
- There are many Chinese people in Melbourne, Australia where I live. I often hear people speaking it which would provide some useful input and it would be cool to know what they are saying.
- It sounds really weird and cool.
- It is supposed to be really hard with the different tones. I like a challenge.
- I wasted 2 years using bad methods learning Japanese. I am interested in seeing how fast I can go when I do everything right from the start.

Reasons I am thinking about not doing it:

- I really enjoy Japanese anime, manga and books. I like Kung Fu movies, but my understanding is these are in Cantonese. I don't think there is a whole lot of media in Mandarin that interests me.
- Even bigger Kanji burden. RTK was awesome, but I don't feel like doing the same thing again.
- I don't find the culture so interesting, like I do Japanese culture.

What do you guys think? (I'm secretly hoping people will provide more good reasons so I can get more excited about the prospect )

My best reason for learning Mandarin is that its more pleasing to the ear. That, and the fact that I can already speak Vietnamese gives me an edge over native English speakers, since Vietnamese and the various Chinese dialects are tonal. I shouldn't waste this advantage.

Otherwise, Japan is a lot more interesting to me. Sorry to disappoint you =P

I understand that feeling perfectly. This has been a problem with many languages I've started out of curiosity. I didn't have those things to motivate me to go beyond the curiosity stage.

mmh, same for me with Japan being more interesting.

But there is indeed something that motivates to study mandarin and which also gets you more interest in cultural things: Taiwanese dramas! : D
Seriously, I love to watch those, although doing something in Japanese would probably be more beneficial to my studies. ^^;

thermal Wrote:I like Kung Fu movies, but my understanding is these are in Cantonese. I don't think there is a whole lot of media in Mandarin that interests me.

　So learn Cantonese then! Come on... you secretly know it's cooler than Mandarin anyway. Then again... I've heard that even if you want to learn Cantonese it is better to learn Mandarin first because the connection between Cantonese and written Chinese is very confusing or something... o_O

saru_yo, Taiwanese is not Mandarin, but maybe the dramas are in Mandarin. I studied Japanese with Taiwanese people recently and they were from different parts of Taiwan with different dialects and thus used Mandarin to communicate.

SammyB, The way it works AFAIK, all chinese based languages are written the same. Some are just pronounced differently and some significantly different. Not sure about Cantonese, but I know Taiwanese has no written script of it's own, despite being quite different from Mandarin, so they just translate and write in Mandarin (although I believe they don't use simplified characters).

thermal Wrote:saru_yo, Taiwanese is not Mandarin, but maybe the dramas are in Mandarin. I studied Japanese with Taiwanese people recently and they were from different parts of Taiwan with different dialects and thus used Mandarin to communicate.

Yes, exactly. The dramas I mean are from Taiwan but they're all in mandarin as far as I know.
Not sure about the dialect though, I'd guess they should use the standard one in TV series, but I've heard many people say that even though it's mandarin, Taiwanese people tend to pronounce things differently from the mainland standard.

saru_yo Wrote:

thermal Wrote:saru_yo, Taiwanese is not Mandarin, but maybe the dramas are in Mandarin. I studied Japanese with Taiwanese people recently and they were from different parts of Taiwan with different dialects and thus used Mandarin to communicate.

Yes, exactly. The dramas I mean are from Taiwan but they're all in mandarin as far as I know.
Not sure about the dialect though, I'd guess they should use the standard one in TV series, but I've heard many people say that even though it's mandarin, Taiwanese people tend to pronounce things differently from the mainland standard.

Taiwan has some differences in pronunciation, but it's not even as different as British English and American English. After studying in China I went to Taiwan for a while and didn't really have any problem understanding or communicating. One annoying thing is that, of course, Taiwan uses traditional characters, where as mainland uses the simplified. But, learning the traditional variants used in Taiwan can help a lot with your Japanese

I know how you guys feel though. I was never much interested in the culture, entertainment, etc, of China, but there was one huge factor that was my motivation to learn the language...

...Chinese literature is better than Japanese

Don't get me wrong, I love my language's literature and was kinda' a bookworm as a kid, but on a whole I'd say that Chinese literature is, overall, superior to Japanese.
Learning to speak Mandarin was a great difficulty for me because that was never really my focus. I only learned to speak it properly because I had to for people to understand me when I lived there.
Learning to read isn't too difficult, and most westerners tell me that learning to read Mandarin is much, much easier than learning to read Japanese. I think I would agree with that. Mandarin grammar will seem like a relaxing sauna to anyone who has studied intermediate/advanced Japanese grammar, and learning characters is much easier because there's rarely more than a single reading. In Mandarin if you know the characters to a word, then you can read the word. It's that straightforward.

Taiwanese is more or less what people would call standard mandarin I'd say. In China, every town has various hard accents and quirks (my friend lives in Beijing and has studied Mandarin for years, he still has problems understanding people speaking in pure Beijing dialect of mandarin since it's so different from "standard" mandarin.)

Taiwan Mandarin is supposedly an awesome source to learn from.

Edward Sapir says that there are just five languages that have had overwhelming significance as carriers of culture. One of them is Chinese. (The others are Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.)

Reasons for learning Chinese (Mandarin):

- China is the cradle of civilization in the Far East.
- Chinese grammar is easier than Japanese one.
- Most characters have one reading only.
- Mandarin has 4 (or 5) tones only while Cantonese has 9.
- Chinese film industry achieved massive success recently.
- Chinese culture and history is rich and diverse.

Aijin Wrote:Chinese literature is better than Japanese

Really?

I prefer Japanese literature, but can you suggest some good Chinese writers?

[ファブリス]

Sima Qian ?

Is learning Chinese (Mandarin) worth it?

-only if you plan to live and work in China... or plan to make a big ebay business...

Tobberoth Wrote:Taiwanese is more or less what people would call standard mandarin I'd say.

No, Taiwanese is a different language. Taiwanese Mandarin is pretty much Standard Mandarin (a few minor differences in pronunciation, as Aijin said), but Taiwanese is a variant of 閩南語 (mǐn nán yǔ, Minnan dialect).

thermal, there are a lot of Kung Fu movies in Mandarin. A lot of the classic Shaw Brothers movies (36th Chamber of Shaolin, Come Drink With Me, The One-Armed Swordsman) are, for instance. And many Cantonese movies have Mandarin tracks on them (2046, Infernal Affairs). You may have to buy the Chinese release of them, but that shouldn't be too hard if there's a Chinatown near you, or even a used bookstore (I've bought a lot of my movies from Half Price Books).

And as far as the writing, yes, all Chinese languages are "officially" written the same (that is, based on Mandarin). And yes, the characters are pronounced differently, but that doesn't mean, for instance, that Shanghainese is spoken with the same grammar and syntax as Mandarin, just with different pronunciations. It's really a different language (though the language vs. dialect debate belongs to another thread). However, Cantonese and Shanghainese at least (maybe others) have written languages, using characters, and written as spoken. For instance in Shanghainese, 你好 (nǐhǎo, hello) is 儂好 (simp. 侬好, noŋ hɔ).

Everyone knows Chinese plan to switch over to English, so learning this is a complete waste of time.

I'm kind of surprised at some of the responses here. I thought this forum was open-minded. I bet we wouldn't get the same reactions in a thread called "Is learning Japanese worth it?"

I'd like a little clarification on kazelee's post. Chinese plan to switch over to English? What? Can you give any sort of explanation or are you just spouting off bullshit? What possible base do you have for saying that learning the most widely spoken language, with one of the longest cultural histories, is a "complete waste of time?" This might be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read, and especially coming from someone learning Japanese (I assume). What makes a knowledge of Japanese inherently so much more useful than a knowledge of Chinese, that Japanese is worthwhile, but Chinese is a complete waste of time?

I think he was being sarcastic...

Eh, maybe so. :/

Yeah, that was sarcasm I think

I don't think that learning anything is a 'waste of time' as long as you enjoy it and it adds texture and color to your life.

Differences in pronunciation can be a little frustrating sometimes. Even though Taiwanese Mandarin is practically the same, some of the differences can be confusing. They don't really say 'sh' and 's' differently, for example, so 是 and 四 practically sound the same when they say it, while in Mainland China the difference is extremely obvious.

There is also a small difference in vocabulary. My username, for example, is 'spouse' in Mainland China, where as in Taiwan it simply means 'lover'. Some words also are written the same, but have different pronunciations. Foreign words/names also get translated differently in the two countries. I remember there being some slight grammar differences, but nothing significant enough for me to actually recall.

ahibba Wrote:I prefer Japanese literature, but can you suggest some good Chinese writers?

I don't have access to my mini-library at the moment, but when I do I'll list some of the authors that I really enjoyed

There are more speakers of Chinese outside of China than there are French speakers in the whole world. Also there are Chinese in almost every community on Earth. If you learn Chinese, you will have an 'in' to that community and could find a connection almost anywhere. Also, I'm sure you'd get the queens service at any Chinese restaurant you go to.

To answer the topic name directly, I'd say it's worth it regardless. If there's one language you really ought to know (outside of English obviously) it's definitely Mandarin.

Mandarin will definitely be my third language, although I'm having trouble presently trying to find enough interesting things to justify biting the bullet and getting my hands dirty (though I think Aijin is right on the money about Chinese literature, which will probably lure me in eventually). Oh yeah, and there's that whole "time" concept to work around...

Besides, it feels to me like a decent knowledge of Chinese will reinforce one's knowledge of Japanese, no? As onyomi is (very roughly) based off of Chinese pronunciation and the two languages share a great deal of characters and word compounds, I can see how knowledge of Chinese could strengthen knowledge of Japanese, similar to the correlation between Latin and English, and so forth. The etymology of language really fascinates me, so studying Mandarin next seems like a pretty logical progression. That, and I personally love Chinese characters.

welldone101 Wrote:There are more speakers of Chinese outside of China than there are French speakers in the whole world. Also there are Chinese in almost every community on Earth. If you learn Chinese, you will have an 'in' to that community and could find a connection almost anywhere. Also, I'm sure you'd get the queens service at any Chinese restaurant you go to.

Last time I tried speaking Mandarin to a waiter at a Chinese restaurant they just stared at me and then said, "I'm Mongolian" haha! Everytime I go to a "Japanese restaurant" here in California all the servers are Chinese though...so maybe you'd have better luck speaking Mandarin at a sushi bar in the states


As for learning Mandarin reinforcing Japanese...I don't know if that's necessarily true. If anything I think learning the languages at the same time just muddles everything. 音読み rarely actually sound like how the character is read in standard Mandarin. Most characters will sound kinda' similar to the 音読み, but usually it just makes it more confusing rather than making it easier to remember. You really need to split your brain in half almost, devoting one side to Mandarin, one to Japanese, and not letting them cross at all.

It might be different if Japanese isn't your native language though. Personally, my own language was so engraved in my mind that it was hard to read Chinese without my mind automatically pronouncing characters, words, etc in Japanese.
Another problem is that a characters sometimes have different meanings between the two languages, and that there are compounds which mean different things. Even when it's basically the same word, it very often evolved to have different associations and nuances in each country. Keeping it all straight can be very confusing sometimes

thermal Wrote:Reasons I am thinking about not doing it:

- Even bigger Kanji burden. RTK was awesome, but I don't feel like doing the same thing again.

Well don't you think that it would be easier if you already have knowledge of Kanji if you'd learn Mandarin afterwards. I mean, ofcourse, there are new/different characters you need to learn, but a lot of them are the same.

thermal Wrote:- I don't find the culture so interesting, like I do Japanese culture.

C'mon, a country THAT big and diverse as China with more than 5000 years history doesn't have an interesting culture? Not to mention a LOT came from China to Japan, what you like is anime and video games, wake up, there's more than that.

SammyB Wrote:

thermal Wrote:I like Kung Fu movies, but my understanding is these are in Cantonese. I don't think there is a whole lot of media in Mandarin that interests me.

　So learn Cantonese then! Come on... you secretly know it's cooler than Mandarin anyway. Then again... I've heard that even if you want to learn Cantonese it is better to learn Mandarin first because the connection between Cantonese and written Chinese is very confusing or something... o_O

OFCOURSE Cantonese is MUCH cooler and difficult than Mandarin, and if you can speak it... *patting myself on the shoulder

bflatnine Wrote:I'm kind of surprised at some of the responses here. I thought this forum was open-minded. I bet we wouldn't get the same reactions in a thread called "Is learning Japanese worth it?"

I'd like a little clarification on kazelee's post. Chinese plan to switch over to English? What? Can you give any sort of explanation or are you just spouting off bullshit? What possible base do you have for saying that learning the most widely spoken language, with one of the longest cultural histories, is a "complete waste of time?" This might be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read, and especially coming from someone learning Japanese (I assume). What makes a knowledge of Japanese inherently so much more useful than a knowledge of Chinese, that Japanese is worthwhile, but Chinese is a complete waste of time?

LOL, my statement is no more sensical than the question at hand.

If you think my claim's the most ridiculous you've ever heard, take a look at this thread.

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=1846

Musashi Wrote:C'mon, a country THAT big and diverse as China with more than 5000 years history doesn't have an interesting culture? Not to mention a LOT came from China to Japan, what you like is anime and video games, wake up, there's more than that.

That's the thing. I am not very interested in History. I more interested in people that are currently living. For me I don't find the current culture tremendously enticing. Can you elaborate more on what draws you to it?