Chinese vs. Japanese

Okay so. I've planned to learn an Asian language, but I'm stuck between 2.

These are Chinese(mandarin) and Japanese. I know its sorta biased, but can you guys give me an indication of which I should learn?

I want to go to either country and teach english as a second language, but which would be more "opportunistic?"

Chinese grammar and writing system is easier. Japanese pronounciation is easier.

>>1
china is looking for teachers. Japan is paying to get rid of English teachers. Also Chinese aren't too fussy about your qualifications.

Do you speak English?
Welcome aboard

But Chinese English teachers are better.
I mean they do the job better.

If you learn Chinese to work there as an English teacher, you'll be supporting a regime that has killed millions of its own citizens.

If you pick Japanese, you'd look like a giant weeaboo.

I'd choose Chinese.

Chinese.

Chinese will take a much longer time to learn. You'll spend 6 or 7 years learning the language without getting any real satisfaction out of it (unless not being able to read newspapers after learning a language for half a dozen years bring you satisfaction, in that case, GO FOR IT). Getting a job is easier once you master the language, though.
Japanese will be easier to learn, you might benefit more from it if you're a fan of "Japanese culture" (read: YOU LIKEZ DEM ANIME AND JAPGIRLZ), but it MIGHT be harder to get a job. I would go for Japanese because I'm a lazy bastard and because I know absolutely nothing about China.

>>7
Chinese won't take much longer to learn than Japanese, they take about the same time to achieve proficiency.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

OP, I'm currently learning Chinese.  It is simply going to be more useful for my career and is a better investment of my time.

>>8
How much of Chinese literature have you read and for how long have you been learning Chinese?

WE HAVE THE LARGEST NUMBER OF HACKED XXX PASSWORDS, NOW OVER 350! HIGH QUALITY CONTENT!!
Download here:
http://showip.be/url/fe4

>>9
I'm only a semester in.  Taking two quarters worth over the summer, and an additional 3 quarters next year.  Then will probably study in Beijing for a year before graduating.

Thanks for all the help guys!

I'm going to be getting rosetta stone to learn it, but I'll also try to get some real teachers. I'll also have people to talk to, because we often have chinese people closeby our house.

>>11
Okay, now tell me how much you can read without using dictionaries.

>>13
Just how much do you think he can read after only one semester of studying? Like nothing?

>>14
 He's the one who claimed "Chinese won't take longer than Japanese", which is utter bull shit and anyone learning those languages knows it.

>>15
Chinese won't take longer than Japanese, Chinese is more characters but the per-character amount of work is about four times as high in Japanese because you have to memorize multiple readings and various kanji compounds.

For those who claim Chinese is no harder than Japanese, I'll ask the same question again - How many Chinese books have you read without a dictionary?
Most of the time, even after half a dozen years of intensive studying, you'll find yourself using a dictionary.
The lowest number of Kanji/Hanzi characters you need to know in each of the languages to be considered proficient does it no justice. You have to compare how it looks like in practice, and that's where Chinese sucks.

>>17
Ironically, the Chinese themselves manage to know all the characters perfectly.
Chinese characters are a very complicated system that can only be good remembered if Chinese (or a very similar language) is your first language; even the Japanese who have deeply incorporated kanji into their culture normally know twice as less as Chinese do, and the Koreans completely abolished the usage of hanja since nobody felt like using it.

>>18
Actually we still learn them in Korea because they are still occassionally used. I don't mind, in fact I'm happy we didn't completely abolish them as did Vietnam. It's an important part of our cultural identity in my opinion.

>>18
Ironically, someone who has obviously never met a Chinese person, is talking about what they know and what they do not know.
No Chinese person knows "all characters perfectly", you have to be an idiot to claim such a thing.

China- blisteringly fast GDP growth and projected GDP leader in 2050

Japan- stagnant economy since early 1990s; aging, shrinking population

One of these languages is going to be better for your career OP.

>>21
I've heard that the Japanese economy is shrinking, but that badly?

>>21
OP justs wants to teach English... wages and life quality will remain better in Japan during our lifetime.

>>21
Which they'll start tackling by increasing the importance of English language.

China will always be a shithole

Go with Japan

>China will always be a shithole

r u kinda fortuneteller?

I've studied Japanese to fluency and I've studied Chinese some. I'd say Chinese is a language easier to master than Japanese. The only hurdle is Chinese characters, but Chinese does it right, by having most Chinese characters with only 1 reading, thus making it 5x easier to remember the Chinese characters than in Japanese. Yes, there's more, but when you get like me where you know like over 2000 characters, more characters is fucking nothing, and your brain has become attuned for learning them. From Japanese alone, I can look at Chinese and recognize 85% of the characters already purely from Japanese.

The grammar in Chinese is probably the easiest thing I've ever seen, too. Japanese is a completely different monster. You'll find people who studied the language for 4+ years and still struggle with the particles like wa and ga that are introduced like in the first day of class.

In my first semester in my Chinese class, we learned over 400 characters. In my first Japanese class, we knew like less than 100. Hell, Chinese people struggle less with characters when you compare them to Japanese who only have a third to remember which just comes to show.

Of course, both languages will probably take 3-4x longer to learn than Spanish if your native tongue is English so they are hard, just that Japanese will probably take more time. Knowing either of the languages will probably cut the other time down by 75% though so why not learn both?

>>27
I disagree. To vastly oversimplify, many of the things Japanese can do which put it above most other languages have to do with how it makes ideograms and phonograms work together. Chinese uses only ideograms (native speakers will try to tell you they have a phonetic alphabet to help learn the characters, but that doesn't count since it's never used in any remotely serious writing), so it has all the strengths and weaknesses of ideograms, namely it is highly artistic while having some extreme issues with clarity.

The easiest example is simply that Chinese pronunciation is a living hell. Though I doubt it's the only language that uses tones, the fact remains that learning tones, and getting used to hearing and using them naturally on every syllable in a sentence, is an incredible pain. If I didn't love languages so much I'd never have even tried, much less made slight progress on it (my hearing is subpar, so I'll never be any good at it). In addition, a number of phonemes they use are so, so similar it is almost impossible to tell them apart, even for some of the native speakers I shared the class with. And the fact that pinyin is incredibly counterintuitive to anyone but a resident of China certainly doesn't help.

The second easiest concrete example is that, always in Japanese, and sometimes in English, you can tell what part of speech a word is by knowing some basic phonetic cues. Such as "ly" at the end means it's probably an adverb, and "s" or "es" at the end means it's probably a plural noun. In Japanese, cues like that work on probably half of the entire lexicon, and with so few exceptions I could count them on one hand. In Chinese, you usually have no way to tell what part of speech something is without having memorized that detail along with the word itself. Since this can get rather ridiculous, they have a whole subset of particles for the sole purpose of marking which word is what part of speech, when it is judged to be too confusing. Naturally, when that is and isn't true is impossible for me to comprehend much less take advantage of after only a year of study.

>>28
I can't comment on the rest of your post because I have never taken Japanese, but I've never really found tones to be that hard.  If you have a good professor who spends the first month or so just on the proper pronunciation of the pinyin chart and tones, it is fairly easy to program them in your head.

>>28
Chinese in pinyin is probably easier to understand than in Japanese. In fact, Chinese can probably read pinyin better than Japanese can read roma-ji (english letters). When Japanese read it, they sound like they're 4 years old trying to read for the first time. Japanese has a serious lack of pronunciation options, so you'll find stuff like there's 17 words that are pronounced kisei　きせい and without the kanji it is more of a bitch than Chinese where there's tons more sounds, and then there's tones to really break it down.

You'll also find that pronunciation is something you master waaay before you master the language anyway. If you're emerged into Chinese like as if you lived in China, you would get used to it rather quickly.

The last part you're talking about is just funny. This is the part that makes Chinese extremely easy. Now you don't have to remember a million different ways to modify words with their million exceptions. Stuff like Break and broke, go, gone and went, etc. You got to learn these words individually, and that really makes vocabulary a huge pain in the ass. In Chinese, you what, add 性 for thing like -ness or -ity. You don't even have to modify the word, you just add it on and that is a very good thing.

>>30
>This is the part that makes Chinese extremely easy.
Hey, fag. Come back here once you've studied Chinese for half a dozen years, learned more than 20,000 signs and are still confused after seeing at least two unknown Hanzis in each newspaper sentence because their system is so ridiculously retarded and counterintuitive.

I honestly wish the folks who either just started learning Chinese a couple of semesters ago, or have never been taught Chinese would just shut the hell up.
"Chinese is extremely easy" can come from someone who only started learning the language and feels smart because their grammar is easy. Chinese itself isn't easy, it's an outdated language that should adopt a new writing system or else it will be confined solely to China's territory.

Mandarin Chinese has the fewest amount of tones among other Chinese languages, it also does not have final consonant stops. Compare it to much more complicated Cantonese or Hokkien, the latter also has a very excessive tone sandhi. I'd say Mandarin Chinese has the easiest phonology ever to exist.

chinese, japanese
dirty knees
look at these

>>31
>>32
lol, you mad?

>>35
朋克

Okay, so. I've chosen mandarin, unless you can sway my mind, but should I learn traditional or simplified mandarin?

>>37
Both.

>>38
I've chosen simplified, because some of my friends have only learned simplified, but they can still talk or even read and write traditional.

>>39
Yeah because they also learned traditional characters.

>>39
Traditional characters are in fact more clarifying and easier to remember, despite their complicated appearance. I'd recommend learning both simultaneously, it's not that hard. In fact, you can never study simplified and still understand mainland Chinese texts.

>>31
As if you fucking meet your own requirements
gtfo

>>42
Unfortunately, I do.

>>43
Yes, you know 20,000 characters. Right.

Chinese know maybe 1/3 of that.

>>44
Reread my post again. I have been intensively studying Mandarin for more than 6 years.

>>45
even with 6 years, that shouldn't be enough to learn 20k. Besides, how the fuck do you know how many you know?

>>46
Is right.

>>45
You fag, 20k characters are not what are used daily, or even in specialized texts. There are said to be 40000 characters, but a whole lot of that has been lost in history.
Unless you read classical Chinese from the Tang dinasty, or whatever, you are not going to bump into 20000 hanzi.