Which is more difficult, Japanese or Mandarin?

A lot of people have asked me which one was harder for me to learn, Japanese or Mandarin?

There's a problem with the question though. As anyone who has learned multiple languages as an adult knows, it's really not that simple. It depends on a lot of different things...what other languages you speak, what your personal strengths are, and how flexible you are, whether you are a visual or auditory learner, how immersed you are in the language, and what your goals are.

Different aspects of a language can be easy or difficult.

Japanese pronunciation is extremely easy, which made it very easy for me to open my mouth and start talking, but many Japanese people are shy which gave me fewer opportunities to speak when I came to Japan. Mandarin pronunciation has 4 tones but more than that, the romanization, called pinyin, isn't always intuitive for English speakers.

On the other hand, Japanese grammar has always been a nightmare for me. There are different levels of politeness, and each level has it's own grammar. Because there are so many ways to express the same idea, I often find myself lost in my head while speaking or listening.

I often have to ask myself "Should I use more casual Japanese or should I be polite". "Taberu?" and "Tabemasuka?" both mean "Do you want to eat, but the former is casual and the latter is polite. Some people always use polite form with people older than them or people who they aren't close with, but this can create a cycle where you never get close with people, especially this day in age where everyone seems stuck between these two ways of speaking.

This is one of the many reasons social interactions in Japan are awkward.

I also find that since people love reading in Japan, the active vocabulary of most people is massive. There are SO many words you have to know if you want to understand television or books, and this is why my listening skills aren't as great as I'd like them to be.

Reading and writing in Japanese was difficult at first but after drilling first hiragana and katakana, which are more like alphabets, and then the characters called kanji, I find that if I have the time to decipher what is being said, and especially if I have a dictionary, reading isn't very hard. There are tooooons of interesting books and manga too, so it makes reading more exciting.

Mandarin is so much easier for me to speak. People are not as reserved so I had so many opportunities to speak. I have at on of close friends who I speak Mandarin with, and I find that because people are more direct, they sometimes use simpler vocabulary.

I also learned Japanese first so Chinese characters were easy for me to pick up, I had to study them at all. 50% of the characters are exactly the same, and another 40% are similar between the two. Messages with friends come very easily, especially because Chinese only uses a single writing system, characters. There is nothing like an alphabet. Switching between alphabets and characters in Japanese is tiring.

Reading on the other hand, is a nightmare. Because I learned from a combination of grammar books and conversation, but never learned formal grammar, I have a really hard time with written Chinese. If you handed me a contract in Japanese, I'd get nervous, but if you hand me a contract in Chinese, there is no way I'd sign it because there is no chance I can understand it.

There are also a TON of idioms and people actually use them. Japanese has lots of idioms too but I rarely hear them in daily conversations.

Many people find the tones challenging and they are at first but after I learned to distinguish them, I learned through imitation. That means, I often use the right tone in a sentence but when I say a word by itself, I get the wrong tone.

In Japanese, my meaning may be misunderstood but my words are almost never misunderstood. In Mandarin, it wasn't all that uncommon, although I could usually get my point across in the end.

Chinese also has a lot of dialects and accents. I'm not even talking about Cantonese or Hakka which are basically different languages. Wuhan and Chengdu speak dialects which are totally intelligible from standard Mandarin but the difference is much greater than British and American English.

Northern Chinese is considered standard but I made a point to learn Mandarin in Fujian because I liked the southern accent, it's usually more gentle. It's much much closer to standard than Chengdu or Wuhan, but I still have a hard time understanding very strong Northern accents, and I find they use more idioms.

I think the main thing that makes Mandarin easier for me is that my goals are different. I've always wanted to read books by Yukio Mishima or watch anime without subtitles, and understand newspaper articles in Japanese. I've never really cared about that in Mandarin, I mostly just enjoyed talking with people.

For someone who wants to study Taoism or Buddhism in Chinese, it's going to be a hell of a lot more difficult. I am interested in those things, but rather than read about them, I've always enjoyed learning about them directly through conversation.

Speaking in Japanese is easier for me because I've spent more time with it, but listening in Mandarin is easier because I'm spent a lot of time listening to casual conversations. I also stopped speaking Japanese for 6 years when I took a break from Japan, but I never had to stop speaking Mandarin, I can use it anywhere I go.

So for me personally, Mandarin was a lot easier overall but for someone else, that may not be the case. For a Korean speaker, the grammar is almost identical to Japanese, so it'll definitely be easier, and for someone who isn't working here or reading media, they might find Japanese a lot easier because of the pronunciation.

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