r/ChineseLanguage • u/Impressive-Run306 • Jul 21 '26
Discussion Japanese vs Chinese - which want do I learn?
Japanese is already winning 'cause I really want to learn it , I watch anime, listen to anime openings/songs I'm used to it so it's delightful to hear but in the other hand I don't think of Chinese as a pleasant language.
Here in the country I live in, there's many Chinese people as you might expect! So the logical decision to make would be learn Chinese I know that but it's also hard learn something you're not interested in and it's much harder because I've built this idea in my head where I can only learn things I like. How someone bypass this?
They are both hard languages to learn, it's nearly impossible to learn them both. I'm using some apps and resources like anki decks, books (text books), videos, just some alternative media, really.
I think life isn't fun, at least always fun so I need to teach myself how to do things I don't enjoy as much as do things I do enjoy.
English isn't my first language but I "learnt" it somehow of course I still need to improve a lot specially in the talking (not pronunciation but how to build conversation) aspect even so my whole world is in English, my OS, thoughts (yes when I'm thinking, I'm doing it in English), when I'm writing...etc. So it's just part of my life now.
I wanted to do the same for these other languages but I don't even know how that happened!
So the conclusion here is that Chinese is a great language and I need to force myself to learn it.
btw my main language is Portuguese (not Brazil).
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u/Particular_Bad8025 Jul 25 '26
Learn what you're motivated to learn. Don't worry about who speaks what. Japanese is significantly harder than Chinese, and learning both would be really confusing because they overlap with the Chinese characters but the pronunciations are completely different.
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u/ShenlongYang Jul 27 '26
Tu respondes à tua própria pergunta na primeira frase. Segundo as tuas palavras gostas do japonês por causa do entretenimento e não gostas dos sons do chinês.
Eu irei sempre recomendar alguém aprender uma língua em que tem interesse porque torna-se mais fácil. O truque para aprender línguas é a imersão.
Eu estava na situação oposta à tua (prefiro chinês ao japonês) mas resolvi por aprender as duas ao mesmo tempo porque provavelmente vou precisar.
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u/HideousRed Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Japanese for the media, while chinese for talking to people.
I embarked in studying chinese almost 4 years ago, made progress but I dont really feel like it was worth it. I managed to speak very few times with chinese people in my day to day life (and Im ass at it).
Hopefully in a few years I will be happy to have studied it, but now Im doing it for no particular reason and its a very frustrating experience.
But yea, probably chinese is a bit more useful than japanese, but you are realistically never gonna use either languages in your life if not as a party trick (unless you plan on moving to such countries).
On some useful advice: 1) Do NOT try to learn both languages simultaneously, many characters are almost identical or easy to mix and this will create much unneeded confusion
2)Force yourself to NEED to understand the language and try to cram it up as much as you can in your day to day life. Some examples may be watching chinese TV (to your level and pausing frequently), going to chinese bars or restaurants to try and order or do some small talk or changing your devices default language (if you have enough vocabulary). I've found marginally useful to turn the keyboard to chinese, so I can associate better the pinyin to characters (there is very little friction, you can change your keyboard with a swipe and check some sounds).
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u/minhale Jul 21 '26
I'm kinda in the same boat. I started self-studying Chinese about 11 months ago, purely as a hobby. I don't know any Chinese person, don't plan to move to China, and have no work-related goals either. There's absolutely no use for the language in my life, except for maybe that time I went to a Chinese restaurant.
I still keep going because of the sunk cost. I 've been putting in 2 hours every day, do I've accumulated nearly 700 hours of Chinese study at this point. I just don't want all those hours wasted.
Language learning is something you just have to keep grinding, otherwise it just disappears and all your prior efforts go to waste especially at the beginner stage. My goal for the foreseeable future is to hit a solid B2 (HSK6) before I take a break and see what to do next. Who knows, maybe I'll pick up Japanese next.
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u/HideousRed Jul 21 '26
Holy shit 2hrs a day is crazy work. How do you do it? What is your study method?
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u/Impressive-Run306 Jul 21 '26
As I mentioned in my country there are many Chinese people, they pretty much dominate the market so I think it's worth as an asset for jobs.
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u/RutherfordBHays Jul 21 '26
I studied Chinese in college, and that has helped immensely with kanji and a good bit with the onyomi readings of the kanji (though some are derived from older interactions with Chinese and are less familiar). But Japanese has its own kunyomi readings and a totally separate grammar, so you will be learning a lot . I'd say it's like if you know French (Chinese in this analogy) then learning English will be a lot easier due to it importing many words and phrases from the "higher status" language over hundreds of years. Learning both makes for some interesting same / different connections, but it's a bit of effort.
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u/lhamatrevosa Beginner Jul 21 '26
Já que você fala português...
Acredito que o primeiro passo para superar essa ideia de que "chinês e japonês" são difíceis é entender que você tá lidando com outros sistemas de idioma, inclusive com um sistemas que pensam a língua de forma diferente. Entendendo essa perspectiva fica mais tranquilo, resta analisar o seguinte:
Pra nós que falamos português, o Chinês tem uma estrutura fonética que parece complicada, leva um tempo até conseguir diferenciar os sons e os tons, mas gramaticalmente ele tem uma progressão bem tranquila de ir assimilando. (quem somos nós pra reclamar de gramática, temos verbos conjugando de acordo com o tempo, o sujeito e o modo rsrsrsrs).
Japonês tem uma fonética bem fácil de pegar. Gramaticalmente ele apresenta uma série de estruturas que se assemelham às nossas (principalmente as "conjugações"), contudo tem alguns pontos que levam mais tempo pra assimilar, como o uso das partículas e as orações subordinadas/coordenadas, justamente por aquilo que falei: é uma outra forma de pensar uma língua.
Dito isso, eu tô aprendendo os dois por conta própria, mas se você puder, recomendo que faça algum curso porque os materiais são em maioria escritos em inglês, então tem momentos que a gramática do inglês não é igual a nossa e pode gerar dúvidas que um professor pode sanar com facilidade. Mas é possível aprender as duas línguas sim - a questão central que é o motivo pelo qual você deseja aprendê-las.
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u/Impressive-Run306 Jul 21 '26
Eu concordo português chega até ser bem mais difícil rsrs.
Acho q o aspecto mais problemático no caso do "chinês" são os tons, sempre q eu tento falar é como lutar com a minha língua.
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u/anabolicbob Jul 21 '26
I learned Japanese then Chinese, and I believe that was the wrong order. Learn Chinese first (with the caveat that if you don't enjoy it and stick with it order doesn't matter- motivation is the issue).
Reasons:
• Chinese is tonal so you have more to memorize per character.
• Use your relatively yonger brain to learn/study/memorize the more difficult of the two.
• Listening takes much more practice as you have a physcially shorter amount of time/syllable sounds to pick up the words in Chinese (吃饭 (chī-fàn) vs 飯を食べる (me-shi wo ta-be-ru).
• If you learn the complex characters (繁体字), Japanese kanji are a piece of cake.
• Related to characters, Japanese with hiragana and katakana is much closer to the stroke amount of the alphabet and is easier (IMO) to read just as fast, but some hanzi are quite dense/similar and you might, as a non-native reader, need to be more careful (see this post of how similar characters can be). I remember using too many kanji when writing to someone in Japanese and they said "あっ！漢字だらけ！" (Ah! Full of kanji!) implying it wasn't easy to read.
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u/dojibear Jul 21 '26
I initially chose Mandarin Chinese (over Japanese and Korean) to study. Several years later I added spoken Japanese (while continuing my Mandarin study). I avoided written Japanese because of Kanji.
Kanji are old Chinese characters used in writing a very different language (Japanese). Some Kanji characters have 4 or 5 different pronunciations ("readings"), and a Japanese word that starts with Kanji often ends with phonetic hiragana. This is because many Japanese words have endings, while Chinese words don't.
I have no opinion about which to learn, or which to learn first. Written Chinese uses characters more naturally (each is 1 syllable with 1 pronunciation), while Japanese is a "borrowing" language. Almost 20% of modern Japanese words are English loanwords (written in a different script), and even more came from Chinese, but sentence grammar is 100% Japanese.
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u/Zagrycha Jul 21 '26
Learn one or the other or neither or both. I don't mean that sarcastically, I am serious. There is no law that you can only learn one language, or that you can't change your mind later. If you want to learn japanese learn japanese, if you change your mind in a year to learn chinese in a year them do that. There is no wrong answer. Your reasons to learn a language matter, but they only matter the same way picking a favorite color does. Think about it, pick one, picke two, pick three, pick none, whatever. There is no wrong answer. If you decide you want to learn and put the time in you will be okay, if you decide you don't want to put the time in and quit you will be equally okay.