Of course, I'm still a disaster in spoken Japanese and though I've completed 2042 (hooray!), I still have 300 (!!!!) failed kanji to clean up.

About the same, but clearing them up should be much easier. Most of my failed cards come from the last quarter. But since I finished I started working fulltime again and havent spent much time on the red stack.

A Chinese friend of mine studied with me at my Japanese language school in Tokyo. I asked him how many kanji he knew. You're probably not going to believe this but he said 20,000. I had to repeat this to make sure he hadn't made mistakes with the odd Japanese counting system. "2万？本当に？"

But for anyone considering learning Chinese, you can take heart. I know three or four friends from countries without kanji who have studied both Japanese and Chinese. Every one of them said Chinese was easier.

That is correct (as far as I know). The main problem with kanji in Japanese is the multiple pronunciations. Only in Japan do you get situations where learned scholars look at place names or people's names and are uncertain about how to pronounce what they are reading.

However the problem with Chinese is the multiple tones. I have heard that Cantonese in particular is one of the hardest languages to pronounce. (You can say the word 'ma' in 9 (I think) different tonal patterns and the meaning changes). However you have to get the hang of this fairly quickly and once you do then it's easy. Or so I've heard.

Japanese is very easy to pronounce but the kanji and the grammar are a nightmare.

Last edited by wrightak (2006 June 23, 1:17 am)

wrightak wrote:

Japanese is very easy to pronounce but the kanji and the grammar are a nightmare.

I think Japanese grammar is very regular and thus easy. Sure there is slang and common use which don't follow the rules so strictly, but they're all simple modifications and easy enough to get used to. I believe that kanji is the largest obstacle to becoming proficient in the language, and hence my studies on this wonderful site.

I have only studied some basic grammar for now (I am using Genki vol.2 right now)... and some things are definitly not too difficult with very few exeption (verb...) but particle aren't easy IMO.
Beside I have the impression the textbook focus on using the same pattern, but when you try writing a text it become much more difficult (I guess that's also kind of normal at my level...). You just have to express everything differently in japanese, building sentence can be quite tricky for me... well that's just my impression, I still have a lot to learn.

It's maybe a bit off-topic but has someone tryed that website for grammar:
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/
I have head some good comment about it... they seem to have an different approach by starting from the basis

wrightak wrote:

To radical_tyro: How far have you gone with the grammar? I've studied all of the grammar necessary for JLPT level 2, (a total of 190 grammar points in addition to the standard grammar covered in most text books), and I would definitely say that it was more than tricky.

In addition to that there's particles. I still get confused about when to use ? and ?.

You said that kanji is the largest obstacle for you but what is it about the kanji that makes it so hard? Is recognising the characters difficult, understanding what they mean, how they sound? Which bit makes it the challenge it is or is it a combination of all of them?

I'm about at the same level as you, grammar wise... JLPT 2. At this level, I feel like most of the grammar points are simply slight variations or different ways to express the things I've already learned. It's very often a matter of remembering the syntax or rule, with few exceptions. English on the other hand is an entirely different beast! Particles indeed can be tricky. As for ? and ?, it's something that is probably best mastered by practice or osmosis I think.

As for kanji, the hardest part is trying to write. I can easily compose on the computer, but when I am left with just a pen and paper, I blank on converting the words to kanji. This is what led me to Heisig's method. I reached a point where I just couldn't hold that much information in my head all at once without a structured method. Even after the long and difficult journey of finishing RTK1, there remains the problems of readings and combining to form compounds. This is why I feel the kanji are the hardest part of the language to master.

In relation to the Chinese literacy comments. I'm no expert but I can say that my friend is not particulary interested in kanji or calligraphy, he was talking generally and not about himself. I was incredulous myself at the time, and I quizzed him on it. Unfortunately, he has left my school and I've lost touch so I can't ask him about it again. I think I'll ask some of my other Chinese speaking friends about it.

Wiki: "It is usually said that about 2,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), and a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters."

I don't how to resolve what my friend said with what's quoted in the wiki but I will make the following points.

Note the "It is usually said" and "well in excess" parts of the quote. In an extensive article on Chinese characters, the above, very short paragraph is all that is said about literacy. It's usually said that 2000 characters are all that is needed in Japanese as well but as the necessity for RTK 3 points out, I don't think that realistically this is the case.

I think there has to be a big line drawn between how many kanji you can read and how many you write. So with stastics, it's important to take these two kinds of knowledge into account.

My Japanese friend is specialising in education research in her master course. She told me that Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, which is surprising given the kanji. With China's enormous population and after taking economic factors into account, I wouldn't like to hazard a guess about the literacy level of your average Chinese person in the countryside. Perhaps my Chinese friend was only refering to students and not the entire population.

As we've mentioned, there are simplified as well as traditional character sets. I believe that the same character can be written in several different ways. Maybe my friend was counting each one separately but the wiki counted them all as the same character.

Another poster in another thread mentioned that after showing RTK 1 to a chinese speaking friend, their friend said that they recognised 90% of the characters. I find this incredible. Maybe the other 10% were primitives and not proper characters. I have studied Japanese with many Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong(ese?) people in my time and I have never encountered a situation where they did not immediately recognise every single kanji in Japanese.

Matthew: Have you got any other online sources about this subject? I would be interested to look it up and have a look. At some point in the future, I am thinking about learning Chinese (mandarin).

I have just found another article at http://www.chinaorbit.com/Number_of_Chi … 873.0.html which says the following:

"Chinese children learn 3000 characters in the first six school years. This is sufficient for reading books and newspapers. Chinese who can master more than 1500 characters are not regarded as illiterates. Educated Chinese have internalized about 6000 characters. With the knowledge of the most common 3500 characters you are at least able to read about 99.7% of a text."

6000 doesn't come close to what my friend said but it's also quite different from the wiki. I wonder what the truth is.

Last edited by wrightak (2006 June 23, 1:48 am)

astridtops wrote:

I've been told the Chinese language uses a lot more kanji even than Japanese does. Figures, since they have no hiragana, they have to do all their inflections, particles, etc, with kanji. That is actually a help for me to remember the kanji for bull's eye, since that one seems to be some sort of particle in Chinese. If I look at Chinese texts, it's everywhere. So my story for it became "It's that Chinese particle again... bull's eye!"

I realize this is an old thread, but I just joined this site, so it's all new to me.
The bull's eye kanji has many uses in Chinese, a very common one being a possessive, like 's in English or の in Japanese.
To follow other ideas on this thread, Chinese certainly is a difficult language to pronounce, but it has one of the simplest grammar systems imaginable. There is effectively no conjugation, so the form of a verb always remains the same. For example, to put a verb into a past tense, you really only have to start a sentence with 'yesterday,' eg: "Yesterday I go ..." You can put verbs into past perfect or future tenses, for example, but that only requires adding one word after the verb - and it's the same word for every verb! That should put a smile on the face of anyone who has ever tried to conjugate the subjunctive in French

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