Learning Chinese after Japanese

[Language Guy]

Great posts, yingguoguy. I enjoy reading your analyses.

What are you thoughts on how it would be to learn Mandarin, then Japanese? It looks like that's my path for the future.

LG

[yingguoguy]

I've been trying to come up with a sensible answer to this, but as I did it the other way round, I'm having a serious imagination failure.

The best I can come up with is that learning Japanese is grammar intensive than Chinese, lessons in most textbooks focus on learning one sentance pattern or conjegation of a verb (there are hundreds of verb forms in Japanese). I personally find studing grammar quite interesting, as I like thinking about how languages are put together, but if you're someone who learns best by talking, you might find you have to spend too much time with your nose in a text book, or drilling verb conjegations, before you can do some basic things.

It's probably more useful to learn the top twenty or so verbs (to go, to eat, to drink, to buy, to read etc.) in all their different forms than hundreds of verbs with only their basic forms. One of the more difficult things in Japanese is being able to hear a verb in a complex tense and working out both what the tense is and what the base verb is quickly enough that you've not lost the thread of conversation. So if you hear nomasaseraremasen deshita, realizing that it's nomu (to drink) in the polite past negative causative passive form (I wasn't made to drink). Don't worry though that's a deliberately evil example, the rules are a little complicated but there are only three irregular verbs, so it's very logical (unlike English). I still find learning verbs much harder in Japanese than Chinese though as they can end up sounding very similar.

You'll probably find it irritating to have to learn lots of new readings for the Chinese characters again, but I think studying Chinese will give you an advantage as you'll know a lot more about the phonetic components.

I guess its concievable you might start unconciously adding tones to some shared compounds, which would be strange...

[mrtoga]

I don't know anyone that has learnt Japanese after learning Chinese. I would think it must be pretty tricky. Japanese have a habit of not finishing their sentences and just letting the listener figure out from context what the meaning is - they do not like to be too direct. I would say this is the hardest aspect of learning from the point of view of a foreigner.

I know a bunch of Chinese people that study Japanese. Their reading is pretty good but they really struggle with the pronunciation. The exception to this rule is the 朝鲜族, who have a massive advantage because they speak Korean (very similar language) already. Also Katakana is very difficult for them......

[leosmith]

Japanese have a habit of not finishing their sentences and just letting the listener figure out from context what the meaning is - they do not like to be too direct.

Yes, mrtoga-san, but a little........

[Language Guy]

I really love to study grammar, so I'll probably welcome Japanese's challenge, although I really don't forsee any problems with pronunciation as I natively speak English, not Chinese.

I forsee many more problems with Mandarin pronunciation, however...

LG

[atitarev]

Japanese grammar is fun, I like the way Yingguoguy described, kore-wa chotto..., karera-wa sake-wo..., ima konakucha... it is at times difficult, especially if you don't know if this is another verb or just a grammatical form of a known verb. Phonetics is a breeze for me and I can clearly hear each sound - today on the train I heard a Japanese lady (I am in Melbourne) giving instructions to her daughter how to behave in an unknown place, that was interesting to overhear.

IMHO, it's easier for Westerners to switch from Chinese to Japanese that the other way around. If you learn the characters thouroughly in Japanese (which I didn't) this would help but you need to learn the pronunciation. It is a bit irritating to learn multiple readings in Japanese and I found hard to memorise the ON-yomi 音読み (Sino-Japanese readings), especially if you don't learn the examples. e.g. Well, "cat" in Japanese is 猫 (neko) - this is the KUN-yomi (訓読み - native Japanese reading) but to memorise the ON-yomi, you need to learn some examples - 愛猫 (ai-byō) - "cat lover".

I notice that I am more disciplined with learning characters when learning Chinese than when I learned Japanese (you have to!) and I find it easier to relearn some of the Japanese words I tried to avoid - e.g. I used ホテル (hoteru) instead of 旅館 (ryokan- traditional Japanese hotel) because it's easier to read and write but I now know 旅馆 (lǚguǎn), which use the same characters.

[Gestalt]

I've been learning and working with Japanese for more than 20 years (started when I was 10, thanks to a progressive primary school) and now I'm learning Mandarin. For me the biggest challenges with written Mandarin and grammar have been:

1) Chinese grammar seems to me much closer to English than Japanese is, but whenever I try to speak anything other than English I still tend to mentally switch into 'Japanese mode' and sometimes come out with the wrong word order etc. General 'Interference' from Japanese. A Chinese friend who's helping me learn told that me I speak Chinese like a Japanese person, which I presume isn't a compliment.

2) Counters. I already know a complete set of them for Japanese, so having to relearn them (often with the same character for a different class of objects) is a major pain..

3) I tend to leave out "you" and "I" when speaking Chinese, because when Japanese is spoken properly you don't use them that much

4) Some 成语 / 四文字熟語　are the same, but most aren't, so there's a lot to learn there.

Good things:

There's a suprising large amount of vocab which is the same (same characters, different pronunication of course). Plus once you know understand how the mainland simplified their characters then it becomes pretty easy to map them to ones I know already. Unfortunately the overlap tends to happen with "difficult" words rather than the everyday vocab.. so I can skim through an economics or politics article in Mandarin and actually know most of the vocab, but transcripts of ordinary conversations are really hard.

After learning several readings for every one of thousands of Japanese kanji, learning one more reading for Mandarin doesn't seem like much of a chore

I really want to get good at Mandarin, so I'm trying to leverage as much of my Japanese as I can, but I realise at the same time that the best thing to probably to 'unlearn' what I know and start fresh.. Either way, I think it's going to be fun trying.

[HashiriKata]

I still tend to mentally switch into 'Japanese mode' and sometimes come out with the wrong word order etc.

When your Chinese base gets stronger, the interference will be less; and when you've got your "Chinese mode", you'll be free.

I experienced very heavy interference from Japanese at my initial stage of learning Chinese, but I'm virtually free now and the interference tends to occurs only when I speak Chinese with some Japanese nearby .

On the whole, in my experience, knowing Japanese makes the load of learning Chinese significantly lighter.

[geraldc]

I'm never too sure how difficult a language Japanese is to a Chinese speaker.

From speaking to relatives in HK, if they were to send their child overseas for a college/university education, their first choice would be to send their children to an English speaking country (US, UK, Canada, Oz etc). However if the child wasn't that academically gifted i.e they couldn't get into a Western College/University, they'd then consider sending their child to Japan to study, even if the child had never studied Japanese. I think they just assumed that they'd pick up the language up while they were studying.

[leosmith]

I experienced very heavy interference from Japanese at my initial stage of learning Chinese, but I'm virtually free now

I had the same experience when I learned my 3rd language. It hasn't hapened since then, and I'm on my 5th. I'm curious, HashiriKata, was Chinese your 3rd?

[HashiriKata]

I'm never too sure how difficult a language Japanese is to a Chinese speaker.

When Chinese students go to Japan to study, they'll normally need to spend at least a year for the language alone before entering a university course (and they will need more than one year of Japanese if they want to study a humanities' subject). With such a short time for the language, their Japanese will be just 马马虎虎 to get along but will be fine by the time they graduate.

I'm curious, HashiriKata, was Chinese your 3rd?

My 6th, unfortunately!

[Language Guy]

When Chinese students go to Japan to study, they'll normally need to spend at least a year for the language alone before entering a university course (and they will need more than one year of Japanese if they want to study a humanities' subject).

At least here at my university, even intermediate to advanced Japanese language students who want to study abroad are encouraged to spend a year there, not simply a semester, for linguistic purposes, but also cultural adapation/assimilation.

Although, it's arguable how much a gaijin can assimilate into Japanese culture.(sh)

LG

[novemberfog]

My coworker is from Harbin, and he studied a little bit of Japanese on his own in the PRC. He then moved to a small rural town (where we work actually), attended school for a year, and quickly passed the highest level proficiency exam with ease. His weak point was the listening area. He went straight into graduate school and in three years finished. He is very fluent now. He told me all he had to do was learn grammar and speaking. The vocabulary and characters were no trouble at all. Lucky!

[atitarev]

When I went to a Japanese class, my group mates were young Chinese people from Indonesia, they made very good progress with Japanese but the reason could be that they were trilingual already - Indonesian, Chinese and English and having good knowledge of Chinese characters.

[mrtoga]

Japanese has undoubtedly helped my reading of Chinese (although writing is still poor as in 6 years working in Japan I hardly ever had to write - everything is done via computer). However listening is still a major challenge for me in Chinese. I have been here two years now - I am expecting a big improvement on the listening / speaking side this year as that is what happened with my Japanese. If it doesn't happen......guess I'll just have to put it down to old-age.

Even though the grammar is similar to English and I can differentiate the sounds and tones fine, it seems to me the Chinese have a very different way of thinking. I find I will lose the thread of a TV documentary rather quickly. I guess a lot of language study is inference and educated guesswork until you reach the level of genuine proficiency, but I find this is what is lacking in my Chinese ability at the moment - I simply can't guess what people are likely to mean when they say something I don't understand.

It seems I can understand people talking about a particular topic in a logical manner, even using difficult language and speaking quickly, but put me in a room with a bunch of Chinese university students drinking and generally shooting the **** (are we allowed to swear on here?) and I get totally lost. Anyone else have this problem?

[HashiriKata]

put me in a room with a bunch of Chinese university students drinking and generally shooting the **** (are we allowed to swear on here?) and I get totally lost.

Then I'd have imagined that you'd have an even bigger problem with Japanese (but you didn't). Many people report that due to the Japanese word-order, by the time they've got to the verb, they've already forgot what the sentence is about (?)

[mrtoga]

Ah, but I never actually officially studied Japanese. The main aspect of my "tuition" was in fact sharing drinks with drunk Japanese at big parties. I extended out from there to business Japanese and beyond. Maybe that is where I am going wrong. Trouble is I don't think I could do it in China - the 白酒 would kill me

[youphemism]

Hi-

I'm a complete beginner to the language. This seems like a great site. Anyway, I'm just wandering if anyone here spoken Japanese before you started learing Chinese?

I've studied Japanese for quite a few years and am at a pretty advanced level. I live in Japan. I know there isn't much overlap between the two languages besides the writing system.

I can write and know the meaning of more than 2000 kanji(hanzi) already. Of course, I don't know their Chinese readings yet but after the nightmare of learning Japanese with up to ten readings for one kanji, I don't think it can be that bad since most hanzi only seem to have 2 readings max, which is a real relief. I'd also like to learn both traditional and simplified characters. I personally think simplified are rather unappealing but I know they're widely used so there isn't much choice. Also Japanese uses a mixture of both. I use programs like wakan to figure out which is which. I know sometimes the characters are different as well 乗 is 乘 in Chinese? And I don't know if Japanese kanji like 働 are even used in Chinese... Plus, I know the meanings can be different as well. 大丈夫 is a really common word in Japanese and means "okay" but in Chinese it means "a real man" or something? And some of the words like 手紙 means letter in japanese but ?toilet paper? in Chinese? I think the Chinese meaning makes more sense but...

I've wanted to study Chinese for a long time now. I'm starting on FSI and maybe will try to do some chinesepod lessons as well. I'm trying to learn pinyin too. Unfortunately I still have to devote most of my time to my Japanese studies so I only have a few hours at most/day to study Chinese. My biggest concern is tones and pronunciation - Japanese is really easy to pronounce for English speakers so I've been spoiled in that regard. Also, I live in the countryside so I don't know if I'll eventually be able to find a tutor

Anyway if anyone already knew Japanese before you started studying Chinese, did you find it much easier to learn Chinese (mainly the writing)? Assuming you knew around 2000 kanji already, how many more did you have to learn for Chinese? Did you ever mix up readings? If I see 日本 I automatically read it as "nihon" so ri4ben3 might be hard to get used to - even the word 中文 I automatically want to apply the reading "chuubun" even though it's not even a word in the Japanese language! I just hope my brain can switch modes easily.

I know there are more characters used in Chinese and since kanji seems to be my strong point I'm happy to learn many more. I can already understand a lot of writing just by knowing the meaning although I can't read them in Chinese! I'm quite fond of hanzi and am excited to study the language they were originally created for. Anyway, I hope having a headstart on the characters will make learning Chinese easier and if anyone has any advice or pitfalls to avoid, etc about this I'd appreciate your thoughts. Sorry for the rambling... Thanks!

[HashiriKata]

Hi!

There are a few people here who know Japanese before starting Chinese, but it's weekend today so you may not see many. For the time being, I don't think it'll be of much help but I'll just try:

Yes, compared to others who don't know kanji, you've obviously got some advantages and your knowledge of kanji should make it easier to learn and your progress will be faster. On the pronunciation front, the advantage is quite negligible, but you may still be able to do some guess-work with some characters, and the Japanese on-yomi may even help you to remember the Chinese pronunciation more easily.

As for the intrusion of Japanese into your Chinese speaking, it does happen and that is natural. However, when your Chinese has got stronger, the degrees of interference will be less. The good thing is most of the times the intrusion is quite temporary: after the initial five minutes of speaking, the intrusion may be completely out of the way. From my own experience, I don't mix up Chinese and Japanese pronunciations. The two systems seem to be too distinct for that to happen. The sentence structure is the biggest problem I face in this regard: I keep starting the sentence with the object first (as in Japanese) and then have to restart the sentence to correct it!

The number of characters you need to learn in Chinese is obviously larger, but if you can't afford the time at the initial stage, you can still get by by learning only to read them and to recognize them. The fact that we normally use the computer to write Chinese has made this option very tempting. Also, you're not alone in starting Chinese on a DIY basis. Just make sure that your foundation is fairly solid, you'll be fine. And don't forget to keep yourself motivated: learning a language is a long term project...

That's all for now but come back anytime with further questions, and good luck!

[Koneko]

Apart from HashiriKata's comments, I think the better your Kanbun is, the easier you'll find to understand Chinese.

かんばってください！

K.