Exactly as the title says. Including speech, reading comprehension, and writing (typing as well)

What I know:

To become proficient in Chinese:
aprox 3000 Chinese Characters (HanZi)

PingYing: (In order to type in Chinese) The AP Chinese tests in America is entirely on computer so in order to pass, you need to be decently proficient with PingYing in order to type out Chinese characters on a traditional English keyboard.

Speech (Don't know how to measure that)

+Words (How many?) formed by combining Chinese Characters for reading comprehension. Like 和 is "and" and 和平 is "peace"

[Side note: The Ping Ying proficiency you need depends on what program you use and how "intelligent" that program is. For example, the program I use, wxhcjz. Will get you "I like to eat dumplings." compared to other programs which require woxihuanchijiaozhi? (I'm not to sure since I don't like using the shitty language programs Microsoft gives you). Bottom line is, wxhcjz is a lot easier to remember and faster to type.]


For Japanese: (Please correct me, I don't really understand how Japanese works)

aprox 2000 kanji

katakana

hiragana

Speech

romanji to type?
When I watch Japanese shows, I typically see people using a English keyboard typing in letters which are converted to hiragana? and then converted into Kanji.


Edit: Ultimately, there is no "correct" answer to whether Chinese or Japanese is harder. That all boils down to opinion. The purpose of this topic is to spark a discussion that will enable us to better understand the two languages.
Yea this thread is pretty dead, the first 4 or so pages were interesting, but after that it became irrelevant... X.x

I think that from a beginner's standpoint, they're equally difficult.

漢字:
If you can master the 2000 characters needed for Japanese, then you're not going to have much trouble with the remaining 1000 for basic Chinese proficiency. There's also the boat-load of multiple readings in Japanese compounds.

Speech/Listening:
Chinese has tones, but I think that a tone-deaf person would have equal trouble speaking and hearing Japanese.

Reading comprehension/grammar points:
Chinese may have less formal grammar rules than Japanese, but in the end, comprehension of language comes from knowing loads of vocabulary (10,000+ words), and how they interact with each other ("grammar").

My experience tells me Mandarin is MUUUUCH easier than Japanese. Of course, I learned Japanese first to it isn't odd that I find Mandarin a peice of cake. However, I do have reasons:

Mandarin has two hard aspects: hanzi and tones. Hanzi is, just like kanji, very easy to learn once you use proper techniques like Heisigs. In fact, it's easier since hanzi only has one reading in almost all cases, so it's easy to learn both from the onset.
As for tones, they are really really hard when you start out, but I'm confident it becomes second nature by just exposing and using them. It's not something which is hard to understand, it just takes time.

When both of those hurdles has been passed, Mandarin is a joke.The wordorder is very similar to English and there's very little to call grammar. Learning to speak mandarin is mainly learning new vocabulary, it's very easy to start using it right away.

Japanese on the other hand has a fewer amount of kanji which needs to be learned, at least in theory. However, one has to learn many more readings. While the tone hurdle isn't a big part of Japanese (though intonation IS important), grammar is a pretty big obstacle in Japanese, it's MUCH harder to speak/write natural good sounding Japanese than Chinese. This is a more complex goal and that's what IMO makes Japanese a much harder language.

I love both languages though and I'm determined to learn both to a high level eventually. Sticking with Japanese right now though ^^

To the topic: Yes.

I think chinese is much harder.
But all your reasons seem to fade in front of this one:

For japanese you have tons of manga, anime, doramas and shousetsus to watch and read.
You also have access the best dictionaries ever created by men.

Tobberoth Wrote:My experience tells me Mandarin is MUUUUCH easier than Japanese. Of course, I learned Japanese first to it isn't odd that I find Mandarin a peice of cake.

You couldn't be more wrong. You are making sweeping generalizations that do not have any basis whatsoever. Comments such as "Mandarin is a joke" and "it's MUCH harder to speak/write natural good sounding Japanese than Chinese. This is a more complex goal..." convey to me that Tobberoth is the one who is "a joke." These comments make absolutely no sense. You should probably stop and think before you post any more overly-dramatic propaganda.

Tobberoth Wrote:Mandarin has two hard aspects: hanzi and tones. Hanzi is, just like kanji, very easy to learn once you use proper techniques like Heisigs. In fact, it's easier since hanzi only has one reading in almost all cases, so it's easy to learn both from the onset.
As for tones, they are really really hard when you start out, but I'm confident it becomes second nature by just exposing and using them. It's not something which is hard to understand, it just takes time.

When both of those hurdles has been passed, Mandarin is a joke.The wordorder is very similar to English and there's very little to call grammar. Learning to speak mandarin is mainly learning new vocabulary, it's very easy to start using it right away.

Quite the contrary. Actually, tones only become "second nature" once you are fluent. You DO have to learn the tones with the characters, because if you use the wrong tones no one will understand you. I constantly find myself second guessing which tone a word is and having to refer back to it. For native speakers of Mandarin, they learned the language as a small child, so the tones are second nature to them, and thus they can't even tell exactly what the tone is of a certain character --they just know how to say it and it sounds right to them. For a foreign learner of Mandarin, tones are always the biggest problem. There is also the problem with the tones of certain character changing depending on the situation they are used in or the compound in which they are used. Also, the word order is only similar to English because it is a SVO language like the vast majority of languages in the world. In some cases, though, the verb is at the very end.

Tobberoth Wrote:Japanese on the other hand has a fewer amount of kanji which needs to be learned, at least in theory. However, one has to learn many more readings. While the tone hurdle isn't a big part of Japanese (though intonation IS important), grammar is a pretty big obstacle in Japanese, it's MUCH harder to speak/write natural good sounding Japanese than Chinese. This is a more complex goal and that's what IMO makes Japanese a much harder language.

I have found that there are many characters with sometimes up to 5 pronunciations, though the majority do have 1 reading. As for Japanese and multiple kanji readings, that does not matter at all since the different readings correspond to entirely separate words, thus they are not really "5 different ways to say the same character," it is just the same character used to represent 5 different words.

Japanese has the most standard grammar in the world, which means that once you learn the grammar rules you are set for life. Some Chinese grammar does not even make any sense to me since it is so strange at times. You also have to take into account that there are tons of idioms in Chinese. If anything, I would say that Chinese grammar is more difficult than Japanese since it is far from standard, and in some cases people even say it sounds like gibberish. In Japanese you can learn the grammar rules and be done.

Overall I would say that all languages are different, and thus need to be approached in different ways. Also, as a note to the OP, it is spelled "Pinyin."

Tak47 proves a good point: That he's wrong.

The comment that one can learn grammatical rules in Japanese and be done with it proves a very bad grasp of Japanese. Why do you think we enter sentences into Anki and not separate words? Because you can't simply use rules to write natural Japanese UNLIKE Chinese, Japanese changes way too much depending on context. Give me a chinese word, tell me what kind of word it is and I'll make a proper sentence out of it without any problem. You don't have to conjugate.You don't have to think of tempus. You don't have to think of casus. It's all using the correct words in the correct order. This isn't something I'm saying from just my experience with learning Chinese, I know people living in China studying it and they ALL agree with me. Of course there are specific constructs where certain words put together in a certain way forms an ideomatic structure. This is however present in all languages so it doesn't make Chinese any different from Japanese, that's why the kanzen master JLPT1 and 2 books are filled with nothing but such constructs.

Saying Japanese has the most standard grammar in the world is another way of showing your ignorance for the languages in general. Yeah, it's certainly more similar to western languages than Chinese, but that's more because of Chinese LACK of grammar than Japanese having standard grammar. Like you yourself said however, Chinese has SOV like the VAST majority of languages in the world. Which language has standard grammar did you say?

Did you know that if you study Mandarin in Beijing, they don't even teach you tones? That's right. You hear words and are supposed to pronounce them right without seeing which tones are actually used. You seem to think only fluent people can do that but my friends prove you wrong. Neither of them are fluent yet they all learn and talk Chinese just fine without studying the actual tones. They did that their first year and now they don't need it anymore. Sure, they might pronounce a word wrong from time to time, but show me ONE speaker of Japanese who doesn't mistake intonations constantly? I would guess the reason why you have to refer back to words constantly for tones is because you don't get the exposure my friends living in China does, but that's just an assumption. Maybe you live in China too, I wouldn't know. They can do it just fine however so I don't see why you or I should not be able to.

As for readings, don't even go there. You can't be serious in claiming it isn't a faster process to learn hanzi well compared to kanji, pretty much no one who has tried that hand at both will agree with you there. Even if 5 different readings of a kanji are used in 5 different words, that doesn't change the fact that you need to know 5 different readings to be able to read that kanji when you see it.

As for me being a joke and posting "overly-dramatic" propaganda, I'm just retelling my experience learning Chinese. I think it's easy, you obviously don't. Unless you can somehow prove to me that I do in fact NOT think it's easy to pick up Chinese, you should probably keep that attitude to yourself.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I think chinese is much harder.
But all your reasons seem to fade in front of this one:

For japanese you have tons of manga, anime, doramas and shousetsus to watch and read.
You also have access the best dictionaries ever created by men.

Actually, j-addicts has quite a few Chinese dramas. Buying books is hardly a problem with Chinas economy, should be very cheap. I mean yeah, if you depend on the biggest resources for Japanese stuff you might have a problem, but getting enough Chinese material to learn by exposure shouldn't be all that hard.

And my experience is that Chinese has pretty good dictionaries. Where I find jisho.org to be the best free J-E dictionary, Chinese has nciku which has tons of example sentences with build-in text-to-speech.. it has writing recognition...

Great stuff for beginners.

Chinese is easier in this sense:

Starting from knowing nothing, if you gave me one year to study Mandarin and one year to study Japanese (somehow in parallel so I don't get the cross-benefits of knowing one before the other), I am 100% certain that I would be better able to communicate/read/understand Chinese than Japanese.

The "barrier to entry" in Japanese is quite steep relative to Mandarin.

Tobberoth Wrote:The comment that one can learn grammatical rules in Japanese and be done with it proves a very bad grasp of Japanese. Why do you think we enter sentences into Anki and not separate words? Because you can't simply use rules to write natural Japanese UNLIKE Chinese, Japanese changes way too much depending on context. Give me a chinese word, tell me what kind of word it is and I'll make a proper sentence out of it without any problem. You don't have to conjugate.You don't have to think of tempus. You don't have to think of casus. It's all using the correct words in the correct order.

First of all, what do you mean by "unlike Chinese"? Chinese is ALL about context. As for the bolded portion of the above: that is called Grammar. Also, no, you do not conjugate anything, but you add other characters instead, so it's almost the same thing.

Tobberoth Wrote:Saying Japanese has the most standard grammar in the world is another way of showing your ignorance for the languages in general. Yeah, it's certainly more similar to western languages than Chinese, but that's more because of Chinese LACK of grammar than Japanese having standard grammar. Like you yourself said however, Chinese has SOV like the VAST majority of languages in the world. Which language has standard grammar did you say?

That is "SVO," and Japanese having standard grammar has nothing to do with the fact that it is a SOV language. It has barely any exceptions to its own grammar rules whereas English has a ridiculous amount of exceptions, and Chinese doesn't really even have grammar rules, making it more difficult speak/write correctly. Japanese does have the most standard grammar in the world because there are almost no exceptions to the rules.

Tobberoth Wrote:Did you know that if you study Mandarin in Beijing, they don't even teach you tones? That's right. You hear words and are supposed to pronounce them right without seeing which tones are actually used. You seem to think only fluent people can do that but my friends prove you wrong. Neither of them are fluent yet they all learn and talk Chinese just fine without studying the actual tones. They did that their first year and now they don't need it anymore.

That only works if you have someone guiding you through the language at every step.

Tobberoth Wrote:As for readings, don't even go there. You can't be serious in claiming it isn't a faster process to learn hanzi well compared to kanji, pretty much no one who has tried that hand at both will agree with you there. Even if 5 different readings of a kanji are used in 5 different words, that doesn't change the fact that you need to know 5 different readings to be able to read that kanji when you see it.

The difference here is that in Chinese you may have to learn entirely new CHARACTERS instead of just learning a new pronunciation for a character you already know. Also, when you see the kanji it will be in context, thus you only need to know one way to read it in that situation.

Your overly-exaggerated claims are quite laughable.

Tak47 Wrote:First of all, what do you mean by "unlike Chinese"? Chinese is ALL about context. As for the bolded portion of the above: that is called Grammar. Also, no, you do not conjugate anything, but you add other characters instead, so it's almost the same thing.

In my experience with Chinese, there is generally just a few ways of stating something. If you know the words used in a sentence, the odds of you not understanding the sentence are very small. In Japanese, you can understand every word in the sentence yet have no idea what it means since you're not familiar with the grammar used.

Tak47 Wrote:That is "SVO," and Japanese having standard grammar has nothing to do with the fact that it is a SOV language. It has barely any exceptions to its own grammar rules whereas English has a ridiculous amount of exceptions, and Chinese doesn't really even have grammar rules, making it more difficult speak/write correctly. Japanese does have the most standard grammar in the world because there are almost no exceptions to the rules.

There's tons of exceptions. Maybe you haven't learned the difference between such a simple thing as は and が yet? Japanese is filled with exceptions and situations where the construct means something else than in other situations, 以上 being a good example.

Tak47 Wrote:That only works if you have someone guiding you through the language at every step.

Allow me to introduce AJATT: The idea that you should only learn a language from natives. You should learn pronunciation from radio, video etc. You should learn word usage from real usage by natives. So yeah, you should always have natives guiding you through the language at every step. That is, if you want to become really good at it.

Tak47 Wrote:The difference here is that in Chinese you may have to learn entirely new CHARACTERS instead of just learning a new pronunciation for a character you already know. Also, when you see the kanji it will be in context, thus you only need to know one way to read it in that situation.

Except the fact that the amount of kanji you have to know for highlevel Japanese is not such a huge difference from the amount of hanzi you have to know. If you know a hanzi, you can read it, it's very easy to learn new compounds once you know the hanzi used. This isn't AS true in Japanese, though it's similar. In Chinese, you have to check the tone if you want to use the word in conversation (but you could ignore that and wait until you've heard it used, that's the goal of AJATT anyway) but in Japanese, you have to look it up since you might not have seen that reading before.

Tak47 Wrote:Your overly-exaggerated claims are quite laughable.

None of my claims are over-exaggerated.

Jesus, that didn't take long.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Jesus, that didn't take long.

For the inevitable fight, you mean? I don't think this was intended as a troll topic, but I don't think a troll could have got people worked up much better.

wccrawford Wrote:

QuackingShoe Wrote:Jesus, that didn't take long.

For the inevitable fight, you mean? I don't think this was intended as a troll topic, but I don't think a troll could have got people worked up much better.

yeah no kidding! What was that!?!? Oh sorry, don't let me get in the way of your hijack...

Tak47 Wrote:You couldn't be more wrong. You are making sweeping generalizations that do not have any basis whatsoever. Comments such as "Mandarin is a joke" and "it's MUCH harder to speak/write natural good sounding Japanese than Chinese. This is a more complex goal..." convey to me that Tobberoth is the one who is "a joke."

Oh no you dit int!

*snap snap*

MrT Wrote:Actually, j-addicts has quite a few Chinese dramas. Buying books is hardly a problem with Chinas economy, should be very cheap. I mean yeah, if you depend on the biggest resources for Japanese stuff you might have a problem, but getting enough Chinese material to learn by exposure shouldn't be all that hard.

Finding Cantonese dramas and audio seems to be a breeze... The Mandarin numbers seem to be fewer. Could someone point to some good Mandarin resources?

skinnyneo Wrote:

wccrawford Wrote:

QuackingShoe Wrote:Jesus, that didn't take long.

For the inevitable fight, you mean? I don't think this was intended as a troll topic, but I don't think a troll could have got people worked up much better.

yeah no kidding! What was that!?!? Oh sorry, don't let me get in the way of your hijack...

It's not a hijack, it's a metacommentary.

A hijack is when you change the subject of the thread to something else... Like Apple Pie.

Man, I love Apple Pie. Do they have Apple Pie in Japan?

Tak47 Wrote:First of all, what do you mean by "unlike Chinese"?
Chinese is ALL about context.

It's hard to win a CONTEXT argument when comparing Mandarin vs Japanese.

In Japanese, you are talking about a language where the subject and quite often the object or the person you are talking to is DROPPED OUT. In fact, it is almost wrong/unnatural to be overly explicit in Japanese. In other words, without using implied context in Japanese, you sound like a fool - context is a requirement in Japanese.

For example, one sure sign of a beginning speaker of Japanese is the use of わたし or あなた. Note: I just said "use" not "overuse".

Living in Tokyo, I can't remember the last time I used or heard those two pronouns.

I've learned how to say and write things in Mandarin chinese in the past few weeks that took me months is japanese. That's all I have to say. I agree with Tobertooth on pretty much all points.


you may have to learn entirely new CHARACTERS


Are we on the same site here? That's what we all....like to do.

Tak47 Wrote:Japanese does have the most standard grammar in the world because there are almost no exceptions to the rules.

You do realize that there's a difference between verb conjugation and grammar, right? And even from the standpoint of verb conjugation Japanese is far from the most regular in the world.
Your statement that Japanese has the most standard grammar in the world is quite laughable.

Tak47 Wrote:As for Japanese and multiple kanji readings, that does not matter at all since the different readings correspond to entirely separate words, thus they are not really "5 different ways to say the same character," it is just the same character used to represent 5 different words.

If one is trying to learn by reading, which I feel is the best way to learn, then it matters very much how many readings the characters have.

I have learned a tiny little bit of Japanese, and am learning Chinese now. The Hanzi-part comes pretty natural and is not too hard with the method laid out by Heisig. (Especially with the iKnow-lists, which give you high-quality material for vocab up to 3000-x hanzi). While natural it does take some more time than Japanese. However after 3000 you are ready to stop adding large number of new Hanzi.
However the pronounciation is in fact harder than Japanese and really deserves a mention. You also have to learn more sounds that are not in English/German/French/Spanish as opposed to Japanese where you pretty much only have to learn the "r" (that's what I figure from my tiny bit of studies).

HerrPetersen Wrote:I have learned a tiny little bit of Japanese, and am learning Chinese now. The Hanzi-part comes pretty natural and is not too hard with the method laid out by Heisig. (Especially with the iKnow-lists, which give you high-quality material for vocab up to 3000-x hanzi). While natural it does take some more time than Japanese. However after 3000 you are ready to stop adding large number of new Hanzi.
However the pronounciation is in fact harder than Japanese and really deserves a mention. You also have to learn more sounds that are not in English/German/French/Spanish as opposed to Japanese where you pretty much only have to learn the "r" (that's what I figure from my tiny bit of studies).

From that it seems like the only difficulty Mandarin/Cantonese have over Japanese is the pronunciation. Japanese being more difficult to read and having more difficult grammar puts it ahead on the difficulty meter then, wouldn't you agree?

HerrPetersen Wrote:However the pronounciation is in fact harder than Japanese and really deserves a mention. You also have to learn more sounds that are not in English/German/French/Spanish as opposed to Japanese where you pretty much only have to learn the "r" (that's what I figure from my tiny bit of studies).

Both true and untrue. Pronunciation IS much harder for Chinese without a doubt (though I personally think pronunciation is a minor thing when it comes to languages. Exposure and shadowing can make you pretty amazing at it quite quickly and when it's learned, you're done. It's not like vocabulary, something you will never really be finished with). What's untrue is that "r" is the only new thing to learn with Japanese, that's a common misconception which is the reason why most westerners have horrible pronunciation in Japanese. Americans tend to pronounce the japanese "a" very wrong, just as an example. There's also the huge deal with intonation in Japanese which is rarely taught or even mentioned in traditional classes but is considered very important by Japanese people. For example, 雨 and 飴 are both read "あめ" but they aren't pronounced the same, one starts high and goes low, the other starts low and goes high. Intonation in Japanese isn't as vital as in Chinese but it's a bit sad that it's often ignored, it makes a big difference towards how skilled a speaker sounds.

@kazelee: From the limited amount of exposure I had to learning Japanese I agree: Japanese is harder overall. Some time ago there was someone called kanjihanzihub (or something like that) on the forums who made some controversial posts - nonetheless he said he quit Japanese because he found Chinese easier.
@tobberoth: Yea - I figuered there was a little more to it, so thanks for the input. When shadowing Chinese though, you have to be really carefull. There are quiet a lot of sounds that you might think you pronounce right but actually mess up pretty bad because of wrong tongue positioning. All my anki-stuff has audio (even before iKnow's Chinese lessons) so I was shadowing for some time, but learned that my tongue position was messed up for the zh ch sh x j q sounds. I finally set most of it (hopefully) straight, after reading this:
http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/pronunciation/02/ (here it shows misconceptions, on the next page it is explained how to do it right)
Now I also am able to distinguish better between sounds.
So I kindly disagree that pronounciation is a "minor thing" when it comes to learning Chinese. I would exchange learning 2000 extra hanzi for perfect listening/pronounciation anytime

HerrPetersen is right about the "tongue thing" in Chinese.

It's hard to get right.

Not only that, depending on the "flavor" of Mandarin that you are learning, especially from Beijing and the NE, there are also special tongue curls at the end of sentences. But people will still understand you if you don't use those.

In standard Mandarin, there are basically only two things you really need to get down for pronunciation:

1. Getting zh ch sh x j sounds right.
2. Getting pitch right.

If you begin to talk about memorizing grammar, Portuguese is also badass.
But somehow foreigners seem to pick up the language in a few months.

In my opinion the dificulty of a language depends on the vocabulary.
And japanese vocabulary seems to be more alien than chinese.
It is like if it was a mix of two languages: one that uses on yomi and names; and other that use kun yomi, adjetives and verbs.