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Saw this question on Area 51 and I'm learning both languages.

Which order should I learn Japanese and Chinese? I already know some French and am fluent in English, so what way would I go from that?

Are there analogies between learning Japanese and Chinese versus learning English and French, and if so, are there implications for which one it is easier to learn first?

Golden Cuy
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bleh
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  • Questions about specific languages that are not widely applicable are not on topic for this site. – fi12 Apr 05 '16 at 19:47
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    The order in which to learn a language depends entirely on your reasons for learning a language. – Flimzy Apr 05 '16 at 19:50
  • This question is like asking which food should be eaten first: potatoes or carrots. – callyalater Apr 05 '16 at 19:55
  • I think the new last paragraph (and my answer) sum up the issue, and I nominate the question for reopening in its current form. – Tom Au Apr 05 '16 at 21:08
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    Asking whether Japanese or Chinese is a "better" language without any criteria would be opinion based. But asking about how easy it is to learn X then Y versus Y then X should have a basis in fact. – Golden Cuy Apr 08 '16 at 09:29
  • bleh, your second and third paragraphs have two very different questions, which will not work for this Q&A format; you should focus on only one of them. – ANeves May 10 '16 at 09:17

1 Answers1

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I've studied both, and I would learn Chinese first. Because written Chinese is almost a "subset" of Japanese, it's easier to learn Chinese first, because you don't have to "unlearn" any of it when studying Japanese

Essentially "all" of written Chinese has an equivalent in Japanese. Put another way, most of the written Chinese languages "maps" to a subset of Japanese. Essentially all Kanji characters are Chinese based.

The reverse is not true, because Japanese has significant "indigenous" (non-Chinese) based strains (katakana, hiragana) characters. This might confuse you if you studied this first, and then learned Chinese.

It's like saying that English has both a "latin" (French related) strain and a German strain. I'd learn French first, then French-based English words such as "chair" and later German-based equivalents such as "stool."

Tom Au
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    Seems really opinion based to me. – fi12 Apr 05 '16 at 19:54
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    @fi12: If Chinese is a "subset" of Japanese, it's easier to learn Chinese first, because you don't have to "unlearn" any of it when studying Japanese. Whereas if you studied "non-Chinese" Japanese, you'd have to unlearn those things. The second two paragraphs are just empirical facts. – Tom Au Apr 05 '16 at 19:56
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    Chinese is not a "subset" of Japanese. They do not even belong to the same language family. The similarities are superficial because Japanese took the Kanji (which literally means "chinese characters") from Chinese and assigned different pronunciations to them. Linguistically, they are very different and are only accidentally similar. – callyalater Apr 05 '16 at 20:09
  • @callyalater: It's more than "accidentally" similar. I'd say that the Kanji version is a "takeoff" on Chinese. Yes, there is some "distortion" in the translation, but less than one might think. I've found Chinese pronunciations a reliable guide to reading Kanji 80%-90% of the time. – Tom Au Apr 05 '16 at 20:11
  • @TomAu For reading, yes, the characters are (virtually) mutually intelligible (I am fluent in Chinese and can read Kanji very well). But spoken, they are entirely different. – callyalater Apr 05 '16 at 20:14
  • Does it matter whether you learn simplified or traditional Chinese? – Golden Cuy Apr 05 '16 at 21:18
  • @AndrewGrimm: I was referring to traditional characters. My arguments hold, but with less force, for "simplified." – Tom Au Apr 05 '16 at 21:19
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    It's certainly inaccurate to say they are only accidentally similar, however I do not think it's accurate to describe written Chinese as a subset of written Japanese. For one, Chinese has a far greater number of characters in general use than the ~2000 Japanese 常用漢字, so if anything "superset" would be more accurate. However, being proficient in a "written language" is much more than learning characters, so I think it's better to say something like "a large number of Japanese words when written in kanji use the same characters as the equivalent Chinese words written in traditional characters". – John Apr 06 '16 at 01:12
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    In addition, the 音読み of a Japanese character is often similar to the Mandarin pronunciation (eg the Japanese word 天気 tenki becomes 天氣 tiānqì. The character 気 is of special interest because it's somewhere between the traditional Chinese character 氣 and its simplified equivalent 气). Anecdotally, I survived my first few weeks in Taiwan based only on my knowledge of Japanese kanji, and even now regularly use my Japanese vocabulary to "guess" a Chinese word with a reasonable success rate, so the connection is real, and of practical importance. – John Apr 06 '16 at 01:12
  • I would say from personal experience that the only advantage knowing Chinese first is that it gets you over the cultural shock of writing and reading pictograms and that the stroke order when writing kanji is easier to acclimatise. Otherwise the pronunciation generally maps to mandarin pronunciation but otherwise one should not treat these languages as similar in any other way, the grammar for Chinese is more similar to English whilst Japanese has the verb at the end for example boy kick ball can map to Chinese word for word and be grammatically correct in Japanese it's boy ball kick – EdChum Apr 06 '16 at 08:14
  • Additionally the hardest thing to learn in Japanese are the weird social sentences that don't seem to exist in other languages I have encountered, such as casual, polite form, different forms for addressing customers, children, imperial family etc. These stock sentences are used throughout their culture and are difficult to memorise and recall I have found, if you respond in an incorrect they can think you're rude or not educated – EdChum Apr 06 '16 at 08:17
  • I would say that what is easier in Japanese are the phonetics, there is an alphabet with a set of pronunciations, once you learn these you can pronounce all the words and kanji typically has hiragana phonetic equivalents – EdChum Apr 06 '16 at 08:19
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    My good people, comments are not for extended discussion. The format is really not good for a discussion. Feel free to discuss this in chat. – ANeves May 10 '16 at 09:14