I'm in a rut (never used that word before RTK), I've been studying Japanese since April 07 and I'm crossing over to ~JLPT3 skill level, I usually study 10-11 hours a day, this includes various language forums and watching J-TV so in reality it's around 4 hours of SRS or RTK, I'm on my second week of RTK and I'm at 300 with no major problems as far and I still remember the JLPT4+3 Kanji I learned prior to starting RTK.

The thing is i'm seriously tempted to start learning Mandarin, it just sound so good to the ears to me, so mysterious. I know it's probably the hardest language in the world but has anyone had any experience mixing mandarin study with japanese, I don't want to master the language just get to the point i can make simple statements in it, sort of like JLPT4 level conversation but in Mandarin, my main focus will still be Japanese because to be honest I think Japanese is quite easy and does not deserve the reputation it has as being hard.

I just ran across this article, and it seems to apply here.

What exactly do you mean by you're in a rut? You're getting bored of RTK, or of Japanese?

By in a rut i mean I'm tore between sticking with studying Japanese exclusively or starting mandarin.

EDIT: I've already read that article, I've read pretty much everything on that website, very motivational stuff but his "5 cactus" rating of difficulty for Japanese is far too much.

EDIT2: Re-reading the article, he makes a good point it's best to reach fluency in one language before moving onto the next one, although I'll still have a little go at mandarin just to see how it goes.

I'm curious to hear why you think Mandarin is so hard, and that it's harder than Japanese. I'm inclined to think that Japanese is the harder one.

And if like the linked article says, learning any two languages at the same time is a bad idea (and I'm inclined to think it is), I can say from personal experience that trying to learn Japanese and Mandarin at the same time is an especially bad idea. A lot of the morphemes are so similar, yet not the same, that you will often get confused and probably cause yourself a lot of extra trouble for no reason.

meolox Wrote:I usually study 10-11 hours a day, this includes various language forums and watching J-TV so in reality it's around 4 hours of SRS or RTK, I'm on my second week of RTK and I'm at 300 with no major problems as far and I still remember the JLPT4+3 Kanji I learned prior to starting RTK.

Well, you sound like you have a pretty intense schedule going.. I know that for me, if I was trying to do that on my own, I would burn out in about 3 days. Maybe taking a few days where you just kept up with reviews in SRS would help as long as you were committed to coming back..

JimmySeal Wrote:And if like the linked article says, learning any two languages at the same time is a bad idea (and I'm inclined to think it is), I can say from personal experience that trying to learn Japanese and Mandarin at the same time is an especially bad idea. A lot of the morphemes are so similar, yet not the same, that you will often get confused and probably cause yourself a lot of extra trouble for no reason.

JimmySeal, at what point do you think you can start studying a third language? I am asking this somewhat prematurely, as I dont have a ton of Japanese under my belt, but this is the first time I have really enjoyed learning a language and felt like I could reach a level of proficiency that would be really cool, ie being able to talk to japanese people about a lot of things without problems. But anyways, this has had me feeling much better about language (now that I'm not taking stupid language classes in high school, its alot better ) so i kind of want to start on another language soon (kind of greedy i know).. i am sure that i have to get my japanese to a pretty proficient level before doing any other language, as I was planing on layering, and learning the third one from japanese.. i was thinking about korean, because i have alot of friends who are koreans studying abroad (but sadly very few japanese friend YET) and i dunno how bad i want to take something like mandarin.. but anyways, what level of Japanese do you think you should be at before starting a third language?

I studied Mandarin for a little while in university at the same time I was studying Japanese. Mandarin grammar is pretty easy compared to Japanese, but I found the tones to be hard, and simplfied hanzi were harder for me to remember since there was little to "grab onto". Learning the readings wasn't too bad as they were just about always the same or similar to the Japanese 音読み - assuming Japanese has the character, just have to learn the difference and the tone. Although now that Remembering the Hanzi is out, that might make learning the writing easier.

I didn't find it difficult to study two languages at a time, but I did find myself trying to focus on one language or the other instead of balancing it out. I think learning just one language at a time is definitely more efficient. Don't forget that you need to study English as well, even if it's your first language, if you plan to work in translation/esl/interpretation. I do plan to return to Mandarin at some point, maybe after 漢検1級 (ahaha).

JimmySeal Wrote:I'm curious to hear why you think Mandarin is so hard, and that it's harder than Japanese. I'm inclined to think that Japanese is the harder one.

And if like the linked article says, learning any two languages at the same time is a bad idea (and I'm inclined to think it is), I can say from personal experience that trying to learn Japanese and Mandarin at the same time is an especially bad idea. A lot of the morphemes are so similar, yet not the same, that you will often get confused and probably cause yourself a lot of extra trouble for no reason.

Tones mostly, difficult to express emotion, not obvious to a beginner wether a sentence is past,present or potential/future, I really can't say since I haven't studied mandarin just read a few texts about the basics of the langage but when I first looked at Japanese texts I thought that would be impossible. What is it that makes you think Japanese is the harder of the two?

I've decided against studying both, just curious as to how others thought about studying two languages at once.

I enjoyed this article, "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard." I may have gotten to it originally by a link on this site - can't remember.

It concludes: "Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility." I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility."

Wow that was surely one of the best things I've read in a long time, thanks for that aboros, I especially liked this part "It should be said that classical chinese gets better the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket."

He also mentions what has kept me going in learning Japanese "Gee i've came this far I can't stop now", every time I feel like quitting I just think of how stupid I was a few months ago.

He compares Japanese to Chinese in difficulty, despite the similarties in writing in my opinion they are far in terms of difficulty, I've never stopped and though "Japanese is really difficult" though I'm as ignorant to the differences as the writer of this article is as he makes no mention of having studied japanese to any extent beyond knowing the names of the syllabaries.

That pdf reminds me of the old "So you want to learn Japanese" site, except a bit more scholarly

I had thought about trying Chinese after I finished Japanese. But after reading that article...

I thought the part about how a Chinese person wouldn't be able to understand the wall scrolls either was interesting. I've asked Chinese people what some of the signs say in the Chinese restaurants near here. And they seem to be unable to answer over half of the time.

Somewhat related, yet off-topic: I had a tea ceremony lesson one time while I was in Japan. There was a wall scroll that had 水 written on it so aesthetically that even the native Japanese who were sitting in on the class couldn't read it. Why is writing something so that it is impossible to read considered a skill?

I'd love to see that 水 how much can you distort that?

aboros Wrote:I enjoyed this article, "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard."

Thanks for this! Awesome, awesome paper: I love his writing style. It's scholarly and funny; who would have dunk?

On-topic, the fact that the two languages are similar is more than sufficient reason why you should not mix them, at least until you're fairly confident of your Japanese skills. They are similar, yes, but not the same, and discerning the differences may be more trouble than it's worth if you don't know what you were looking for in the first place.

But, then again, I know nothing about Chinese aside from kanji: try asking someone who does actually know what he's talking (how about Serge?).

meolox Wrote:What is it that makes you think Japanese is the harder of the two?

I apologize in advance for the long post.

Ok, let's look at what difficulties exist in Chinese and not in Japanese from the perspective of an English speaker:
1. pronunciation - Chinese has many sounds that don't exist in English, and several that sound very similar (at least to us English speakers)
2. tones - pronouncing them correctly and hearing them correctly
3. tones - remembering the tone of a word/morpheme
4. characters - Chinese requires about twice as many as the corresponding level in Japanese
...and the two that you mentioned:
5. expressing emotion is more unfamiliar when intonation is tied to meaning (tones)
6. no easily discernable past tense (Japanese also lacks a clear future tense)

Alright. 1 and 2 are undeniable difficulties and those, combined with the hanzi are the reason I gave up on learning Chinese about 3 times. But a conscientious student can presumably get these under control in a reasonable amount of time (say, under a year while studying other facets of Chinese concurrently). So while it is a significant obstacle, it's not a perpetual one. There are a lot of other languages with unfamiliar sounds, and tones (Thai, for example).

3. tones is an extra bit of information that Japanese students don't have to deal with, but Japanese have to tackle similar problems that Chinese don't face. Let's look at an example:
In Mandarin, 出 is pronounced chu1, and 発 is pronounced fa1. And these characters will always be pronounced that way no matter what you do with them. 出発 is pronounced chu1 fa1. And the same uniformity applies across all characters with almost no exceptions. Characters don't change their pronunciation in compounds, and when the tones change, it is extremely regular, as explained by tone sandhi, and only ever occurs when two third tones occur side by side.
Now in Japanese, 出 has the on-yomi しゅつ and はつ for 発, but put them together and they turn into しゅっ and ぱつ! It can't even be said that such euphonics have uniform rules. They are somewhat predictable, but they really have to be learned on a case by case basis. So while anyone learning Chinese characters has a larger initial memory burden per reading, the task of learning how characters are pronounced together is a never-ending task for the Japanese student.

4. Chinese requires approximately twice as many characters as Japanese, but let's look at that. With a system like Heisig, learning to recognize characters becomes considerably simpler, and then the larger difficulty lies in learning their readings. On this front, Japanese is easily the more difficult. I can say from my 3-month experience learning Mandarin that learning one character with 2 readings is about as hard as learning 4 characters with one reading each. Even worse for 3 or 4 readings. Multiple readings instantly cause confusion. I believe the statistic is that about 10% of common-use hanzi have more than one reading, while the number is around 65% for Japanese. So by a rough estimate, learning the 2000 kanji is like learning 5900 hanzi with one reading, and learning the necessary 4000 hanzi is about as hard as 5600 hanzi with one reading. Not bulletproof logic, but I think it's pretty close.
On top of that, the readings of hanzi are much more uniform than the on-yomi and predictable based on their phonetic components, making at least reading, if not writing, more predictable. As the final whammy, Japanese has the kun-yomi, a set of readings completely unrelated to the on-yomi, with nearly no internal logic with respect to the kanji. And the reader has the eternal task of learning and discerning when to use one or the other. They have to learn that 出窓 is pronounced でまど and not しゅっそう.

5. This is a problem that students of Japanese don't face as much. I will say that learning to speak Japanese with natural intonation is probably a comparable task, but Chinese still comes out as a bit more difficult on this front.

6. Learning to use a language without a "past tense" as we know it is a matter of adjusting to the way the other language expresses things. I think as far as expressing things differently from English, Japanese is by far the more "foreign" one and in addition, Chinese learners don't have to learn the verb conjugations and particle usage that are ubiquitous in Japanese.

I think with all that in mind, Japanese comes out as a bit more difficult. There are a few more points that I could mention, but this is sufficient in my mind. Thanks for reading.

I gave pimsleur Mandarin a go and got to about lesson 25 before the words just started to sound too similar and I was lost. If it was all around me , then i would be ok but learning it in Japan purely for toursist reasons was a bit much.

However, when I was in Beijing I saw many more toursits being able to speak Madarin than you ever see in Japan. Most of them being French, don't know why. Maybe this is because the development of study materials for Chinese langauge , culture and history is far more well developed than Japanese.

Also, once you hear a Mandarin word that you don't know, you can easily look it up in the dictionary and it will be as you hear it. there are none of the conjugations that you find in Japanese. Before I knew about the the "te" form of verbs in japnese, I spent ages looking through a dictionary for "nonde" and "matte" etc. the first time someone said to me "taberaremasu ka" I tried to find it in my diction, but ofcourse I couln't. So in this way, Chinese is easier.

A little extar note. i study japanese because I live in japan and German because I want to read German books, watch films, German is the second langauge of the EU etc. The languages and the reasons are so different that they never interfere with each other.

Also, according to the article from "How to learn any langauge", you should finish a langauge before you move on. What does "finish" mean? A language is never finished. there is a difference between satisfied with and finished.

aboros Wrote:I enjoyed this article, "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard." I may have gotten to it originally by a link on this site - can't remember.

It concludes: "Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility." I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility."

This article is very tongue-in-cheek and should not be taken too seriously.

I have been studying Chinese for quite some time now and have to agree with JimmySeal: Japanese is by far more difficult.

My advice is that you do one at a time but learn the language that you are more likely to use on a regular basis first. For example, I had been studying Japanese on and off for about 10 years and then my life changed and I started renting a room with a family of vietnamese refugees,,, be it that I was exposed to hours of Vietnamese language per day I took it upon myself to learn the language. Studying 2-3 hours per day and having conversations in Vietnamese for at least an hour per day for the past three years have made me more than comfortably fluent to talk with anyone in any situation in Vietnamese. Now I am just starting to pick Japanese back up and going through RTK1. IMMERSION is the only way to really get comfortable speaking (USING) a language, forget the books, forget the reading. So pick the language you are more exposed to and learn it first,,, Chinese and Vietnamese are both tonal and very simple languages,, but just being able to express emotions in the language took me two years of extensive practice. TONAL LANGUAGES ARE HARD ! if you are over 25 years old with no exposure then forget about learning tonal languages, or if you are tone-deaf, I started learning Viet at 19 years old and beyond my accent I still get some tones off at times,,, all of the new learners over forty years old that I have heard speak it are completely unintelligible (HONESTLY). Writing is writing,,,, if you know all the kanji it is cool, really cool, but learning the kanji or learning to read is like a prize for yourself,,, but the spoken part of the language is about reaching out and connecting with others, something that everyone will get a prize from... So Japanese or Mandarin it doesn't really matter, pick the one that you will be USING and learn that first.

I totally agree that immersion using(speaking) the language is the only way to become comfortable with a language. There are many fourth year Japanese major students here at my university that cannot hold a spontaneous natural conversation in Japanese, because they have not had that exposure. That said, this IS a site dedicated to learning how to write (not even read, yet) the kanji.

Immersion is indeed the only way to be able to speak a language properly. I don't know if every university in the UK does this but from people I know who have studied modrn langauges, they spend two years studying in the UK, then the third year is an immersion year in any country that speaks that langauge and the the fourth year is spent back in the UK getting deeper in the language. The result being, anyone who has studied modern languages in the UK is pretty good. My father studied Spanish this way 45 years ago and can still converse in spanish with someone very easily.
Is this the method they use in universities in the US, Canada etc?

Is their anyone out their who can say they have proper immersion in Japanese? Ok, you live in Japan, have a Japanese partner, work at a school etc. But can you say that you are immersed fully and treated as an equal? I can say that in my private life I am immersed nicely, nobody in my area speaks English to me and my girlfriend's family don't speak any English. However, at work it isn't like that at all. is this familiar?

kyotokanji Wrote:Is their anyone out their who can say they have proper immersion in Japanese? Ok, you live in Japan, have a Japanese partner, work at a school etc. But can you say that you are immersed fully and treated as an equal? I can say that in my private life I am immersed nicely, nobody in my area speaks English to me and my girlfriend's family don't speak any English. However, at work it isn't like that at all. is this familiar?

From my experience, most people in Japan doing exchange studies tend to gravitate around other foreigners. When I was studying at a Japanese university, I tried to avoid other foreigners as much as possible. The majority of my friends were Japanese, I took part in a music club which had no English speakers, I had a part time job at an eikaiwa where my boss didn't speak English functionally, I lived with a Japanese family with no English ability for 6 months, and then with a Japanese girlfriend with no functional English for another 6 months. All the music, tv, and movies I consumed were also in Japanese.

By my second month in Japan I went from not being comfortable/having the confidence to speak Japanese, to being able to speak quite well and naturally. The few foreign friends I had mostly just stayed around the foreigner lounge at the university, and went out after classes with other foreigners. When they did talk with Japanese people, it was in English. Still others just stayed in their dorms when not in classes playing videogames/watching anime/reading manga in English. Needless to say their Japanese ability didn't improve much.

Immersion is what you make of it.

Sounds like you did well, excellent stuff. Was your purpose of coming to Japan to learn Japanese? Did you study before you came here?

I was studying Japanese before I went to Japan, but as is all too often the case, my school had a rather poor Japanese program - so everything I learned was basically self taught. I studied in Japan for a year as an exchange student, and then transferred back to a top university with a decent Japanese program. I am working on a Japanese major with a translation certificate and a minor in East Asian studies.

While no longer in Japan, I try to keep as much of the immersion that I can. I talk on Skype with Japanese people I know for 1-2 hours a day, write daily lengthy emails in Japanese, and in many of my classes I've located Japanese exchange students with whom I study. There is also a rather decent Japanese conversation club where the Japanese members far outnumber the learners.

I've also started playing some videogames in Japanese, which I had no time for while in Japan. I just finished ゼルダの伝説〜夢幻の砂時計〜 today (it's ridiculously easy). I'd recommend it for anyone studying kanji though, since it has a feature whereby you can tap a word to see its yomigana. I hope more games follow the same route instead of just putting EVERYTHING into kana. That's friggin annoying.