Studying Japanese in China

[Crivens200]

In the near future I will be heading to Japan on business quite regularly. Knowing how much easier it is to get around being able to speak the language, would like to start studying Japanese. In the town where I live there are a significant amount of Japanese businesses so as a consequence there are a lot of Chinese people who speak Japanese here and a lot of people trained as japanese teachers.

Was thinking it might be interesting to study Japanese using Chinese as my base language rather than English, ie the the teacher will be Chinese and she will use Chinese to teach me. (I am a native english speaker who speaks Mandarin).

Has anyone done it this way?

Will learning japanese affect my chinese in anyway? Anyone found any problems with learning another language on top of Chinese?

Anyone have any recommendations for text books etc?

[haiying07]

I am learning Japanese in Peking university now , Every Tuesday and Thursday 19:00 to 21:00 . It is free !

the textbook we use is 初级日本语 总主编：赵华敏 北京大学出版社

the text book is easy and with detail explanation about the word and grammar( in Chinese)

For the pronunciation,it has a CD . you can practise it by yourself.

For beginer , i recommend you to use this one .

And there is a very poplular text book called: 标准日本语

there are many materials about learning this text book, including mp3, video...

Hope this will be useful for you!

[studentyoung]

Will learning japanese affect my chinese in anyway? Anyone found any problems with learning another language on top of Chinese?

Yes. The two Japanese teachers (they are both Chinese people) I know complain that they sometimes write the Japanese character when they’re writing Chinese, and write Chinese when writing Japanese. Because so many Japanese Kanji are similar (sometimes even identical) to their Chinese counterpart, even professional people are easy to get confused.

Cheers!

[Mugi]

Was thinking it might be interesting to study Japanese using Chinese as my base language rather than English, ie the the teacher will be Chinese and she will use Chinese to teach me. (I am a native english speaker who speaks Mandarin).

So long as you have good Mandarin, it probably won't matter which language you use as the medium of instruction. I would strongly recommend against being taught by a Chinese teacher though - in general they have notoriously bad pronunciation and their grasp of Japanese grammar is usually not so hot (think of your average Japanese speaking English). You would be much better off trying to find a Japanese woman who has accompanied her husband to China and has learnt Mandarin, of which there should be no shortage. If you're lucky, they may even have a qualification from Japan to teach Japanese to foreigners (a popular thing for housewives to get before going overseas).

As for Japanese affecting your Chinese, it is only likely to happen to the extent that studentyoung has mentioned - you'll probably start confusing almost identical characters (e.g. C. 德 vs J. 徳). But no-one is likely to notice.