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-- Japanese or Chinese? (serious responses please)
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quote:

Originally posted by Akridrot How well can you understand Mandarin now? How long do you think it'd take for you to learn it?

simple as, i dont and have no desire to learn it either.

english, plain and simple, if u dont understand that then u might as well jump off a large commercial building right now

You are more likely to speak Chinese than Japanese (given there are a lot more Chinese speakers in the world). But as someone from a western background you will find Japanese a LOT easier.

Phonetics:
Japanese sounds are very clear. Even without knowing the language you can make out the syllables that are being said and repeat them so a naive will be able to understand you.

Mandarin sounds are not as clear.You can listen to a phrase being said over and over and even if you can make out the consonants and vowels and try to repeat the phrase, chances are you will not be reproducing the tones correctly and what you're saying will be nonsensical. So the tones are another thing that it takes the western ear quite a while to learn to distinguish and copy.

Mandarin uses 5 tones:
1. A long, high level tone: ā
2. Starts at normal pitch and rises to the pitch of tone 1: �
3. A low tone, dipping down briefly before slowly rising to the starting level of tone 2: ǎ
4. A sharply falling tone, starting at the height of tone 1 and falling to somewhere below tone 2's onset: �
5. A neutral tone, sometimes indicated by a zero or a dot (�), which has no specific contour; the actual pitch expressed is directly influenced by the tones of the preceding and following syllables. Mandarin speakers refer to this tone as the "light tone" (輕聲.

These tones can lead to one syllable, e.g. "ma", having numerous meanings, of which five are exemplified below, depending on the tone associated with it, so that "mā" glosses as "mother", "m�" as "hemp", "mǎ" as "horse", "m�" as "scold", and toneless "ma" at the end of a sentence acts as an interrogative particle. This differentiation in tone allows a speaker to create the (not entirely grammatical) sentence:

妈妈骂马的麻吗? (in traditional characters 媽媽罵馬的麻嗎?)
māma m� mǎ de m� ma?
"Is Mother scolding the horse's hemp?"


Cantonese has 10 tones, and is becoming less and less relevant as are the other Chinese dialects.

Writing:
As you probably know, Chinese uses characters or ideograms instead of a phonetic writing system. Each character symbolises a word or idea. These can be relatively simple like This character for water:


Or quite complex like this rare character for a particular type of noodle:


But don't worry, that is one of the most complex characters in modern chinese and quite rare (not found in most dictionaries). By the time you get to learning more complex characters you will have learned some of their common elements (radicals) and will find it a lot easier.

Japanese borrowed the Chinese characters (kanji) and uses them, but apart from these it also has two syllabaries or "kana" which are very easy to learn and work phonetically. These are Hiragana and Katakana. The latter is used mainly for foreign words. The plus side of this is that once you learn hiragana (CLICK) you can use it to spell out any word you want, without having to memorise a separate character for it. You will, however still have to learn kanji if you want to be able to read japanese literature or run around tokyo reading menus, signs on the street etc.

If you have enough time and if you're ambitious enough, you could attempt to learn a bit of both.

I agree that Chinese is more popular and can be used more from a business perspective as well as if you have an overall interest for it.
And yeah, it is more dificult to learn but if you're really enthusiastic about learning it, it shouldn't be as hard.

Like what the others have said, Japanese is easier to learn and clearer to hear.

Personally, I'd like to learn Japanese as I have an interest to go to Japan and would love to do some work there.

It's really down to your enthusiasm, motivation and the reasons on why you want to learn it.

for all the people that recommend Chinese for business...i hope the threadstarter realizes that unless he puts in some serious years of study, it will be impossible for him to conduct business in Chinese for quite awhile.

Chinese is simple to learn for conversational use but IMPOSSIBLE to master due to the number of characters in the chinese dictionary. and I mean that quite literally. but on the other hand, that stems from it being around for quite a long time in which a lot of the characters aren't used anymore.

Japanese I found was more fun to learn and as someone put it, is more similar to the western language in that there is more of an alphabet in which to sound out the words/sentences. Chinese is quite literally a memorization of each character and its pronunciation. and beyond that...the same character can have many different pronunciations....whilst the same pronunciation can also have many different characters.



PS: cantonese is 2nd in fun behind japanese but besides ordering food in chinatown and watch HK films...not much other use for it.

the main languages you'll need in the future are

english, cos its widely spoken as a 2nd language for more people than not
spanish, you can't order sangria & a hot woman without it in spain, or california
urdu, cos then whenever you think people are talking about you, you can reply with a comeback & see if they run away or not
german, many businesses (well run ones that is) are german owned & use their famed efficiency

and for those like me who learned french in school, it's useless unless you're a garlic smoking non-shaving woman fetishis, or of course you're from montreal. sacre bleu!

quote:

How closely related are these languages? French and Haitian Creole close? Or English and German close? Suppose I learn one, would it make learning the other one take half as much time? From what you've posted, it seems like if you learn one, the others would just be like slang.

Some are closer than others. Cantonese and Mandarin are probably closer than the say, Taiwanese and Mandarin. But of course, that may also be because I'm more accustomed to listening to people speak Cantonese, because my parents speak it (but I don't, well, not much) and all the movies out of Hong Kong are in Cantonese.

If Mandarin were English, then Cantonese would probably be French and Taiwanese, German.

quote:

Originally posted by astroboy Or quite complex like this rare character for a particular type of noodle:

lol thats a fucken beast of a word

quote:

Originally posted by KilldaDJ lol thats a fucken beast of a word

Yeah and to add insult to injury, you'd have to write it twice cos the noodles are called "bi�ng bi�ng mi�n" ..

i'm chinese and i cant even speak any of the main chinese dialects.
i know just enough hokkien to not seem like an embarassment back in my hometown.

quote:

Originally posted by TweeK Muahahhaa. Thread title reminds me of this one time i was with this one asian chick i just met. She was riding with me and i go so are you Chinese or Japanese. She got really offended and asked me to take her home. It turned out she was actually vietnamese. /true story

lmao!!! i hear this happens a lot but it still makes me laugh

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