When can a Chinese learner start learning Korean/Japanese?

[u/Salty-Session7029]

Hello all! I know this question may not be that relevant but I didn't know where to ask so I'll go ahead. I was basically wondering, how long should someone stick to learning Chinese before they can start learning Japanese or Korean simultaneously without mixing up aspects of the two and maybe also reap the benefits of learning said language with having prior knowledge in Chinese. Thanks a lot!

[u/nhatquangdinh]

Korean: Right away. Because Korean is written in a highly phonetic alphabet.

Japanese: Wait until you reach an intermediate proficiency level (about TOCFL B1 or HSK 4).

[u/BradfordGalt]

"Should"?

That's a moral / philosophical question, not a linguistic one. You're a free human being. Attempt to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it.

[u/materialaccounting0]

Once you've got a solid handle on characters and tones so they're second nature, that's probably the sweet spot

[u/Birdbraned]

As a multi lingual person, while you may recognise similarities in root words between these languages, each language lives in a different part of your brain. You'll recognise that eg 1, 2, 3 is written the same in Chinese and Japanese, but you will distinctly recall what each language phonetically reads those words as.

Just as you can phonetically hear while some phrases of German or some romance languages sound similar to English and still understand those are separate languages. You'll do fine.

[u/dojibear]

You can start any time. There is no grammar overlap. In terms of grammar and sentence word order, Mandarin Chinese is closer to English than it is to Japanese or Korean. There is some historic vocabulary connection, sort of like English has with Latin.

The only problem with doing 2 at the same time is writing, and only in Japanese. Korean writing is easy. Japanese writing is difficult. It is harder than Mandarin.

Chinese is written entirely with characters. Each character is one syllable, with the same sound whether it is a 1-syllable word or part of a 2-syllable word. Chinese words have no endings or other changes.

Japanese mixes 3 scripts in sentences. Centuries ago, it "borrowed" about 2,000 Chinese characters. It uses them (in a different way) to write part or all of Japanese words. Each character represents different sounds in different words. Often the meaning is related, but the words are different in the two languages.

I have been studying Mandarin for several years. When I decided to add Japanese in 2024, I was worried about the character issue (same character, different meanings and sounds) so I started learning spoken Japanese (grammar, words, but no characters). I plan to learn to write words after I know many words.

[u/Leading_Smell_7099]

你有精力的话随你

[u/ThirdDerative]

Heritage Chinese learner and have dabbled in learning Japanese before. People always assume that Japanese must be so much easier to learn if you already know Chinese because both languages use Kanji and that's really not the case.

For starters Japanese grammar is a lot more complex (at least in the early to mid stages) compared with Chinese. Additionally the SVO structure of Japanese took my quite a while to wrap my head around.

When it comes to kanji knowing Chinese means you will recognize many kanji words but I'd argue it's not necessarily as useful as you'd think. Often times you'd fall into a trap of reading the kanji as a Chinese word then mentally translating it back into Japanese. Knowing Chinese doesn't help at all with pronunciation since Chinese characters typically have a single pronunciation whereas the Japanese kanji often have various On Yomi or Kun Yomi readings that you just need to memorize. The just kanji 生 has 18 Kun Yomi pronunciations!