I'm looking for advice on learning Mandarin Chinese for a college educated native Japanese person with near native level English skills. They also have native Chinese speaking friends who would be able to help with conversation practice and error correction.

Where should they start? What materials? Any need to work on the hanzi or just let them show up in their vocabulary study? Traditional or Simplified first?

Thanks.

For Traditional or Simplified, you already know most, if not all, of Traditional, so I don't think you need to worry about it. It really comes down to what you want. If you're learning Chinese for your friends, and they all use Simplified, then go with Simplified. If they use Traditional, then go with that.

Marble101 Wrote:For Traditional or Simplified, you already know most, if not all, of Traditional, so I don't think you need to worry about it. It really comes down to what you want. If you're learning Chinese for your friends, and they all use Simplified, then go with Simplified. If they use Traditional, then go with that.

It's not quite true that you'd know most of the traditional characters by knowing Japanese. If memory serves, Taiwanese children learn up to 4800 characters (guessing it's around there for Hong Kong as well) while Japanese learn a bit over 2000 characters. If you're decently educated you might know 3000 or so as a Japanese, but even so there is not a complete overlap. Many traditional characters use forms which are now no longer used in Japan, and others that have pretty much never been used (at least I can't find a single Japanese word for some characters I've looked up(quick examples 她 嗎 both super common)).

That said, a lot of the characters would be very easy to learn by learning how the characters have been simplified in Japanese　(if you learn 權 you pretty much get 歡觀勸灌 for free since you know the simplified form). You definitely have a lot of help from knowing Japanese but the same could be said if you want to learn simplified, either way, you still need to learn the basic difference between the characters or you're going to find that unknown characters will pop up too often for comfort.

My tip as far as characters go is that you don't need to focus on them the same way a non 漢字 -using native would have to, but it's probably a good idea to study them on the side for a bit. When it comes to choosing whether to start out with traditional or simplified it all depends on the person and how and where that person would use his knowledge. If it doesn't really matter then go with the one you prefer or with the one with most readily accessible material (which on the internet I would dare say would be simplified).

Sites like http://readchinese.nflc.org/?page=home could be used to practice reading at a variety of difficulty levels. I'm sure there's a useful collection of links somewhere on this forum that you can use. There are also DS games that teach Chinese from the perspective of a Japanese but I have no idea if these are effective or not.