Is it easier to learn to speak Chinese or Japanese?
If you are just talking about spoken language, then Japanese is easier. This is because Japanese only have five vowels (I.E, あ), forty consonant-vowel unions (I.E, か), and one singular consonant (ん). Japanese also doesn’t have tones, which Chinese Mandarin, Cantonese and some other (NOT ALL) has. Japanese uses pitch instead instead, for example, you can go from high to low (I.E, 辞書) or low to high (I.E, 柿). Another reason learning the spoken language of Japanese is easier is because Japanese has around a-hundred sounds, while Chinese has around 1600.However, if you’re talking about writing and/or grammar, then Chinese is easier. This is because Chinese (In Mainland China) now only uses simplified characters. For example, 聽 became 听. Japanese also have simplified characters however, they have way less then the simplified characters in Chinese. Also, the grammar is easier because it is less complicated. For example, in Japanese you have to conjugate A LOT, to get different meanings out of a word while in Chinese you can just replace a word/words or add one in the sentence to make it mean something else. An example of this is “I like this” and “I don’t like this in Japanese”. For example, in Chinese, both sentences, in respective order, is “我喜欢这个” and “我喜不欢这个”, as you can see, you just add 不, to make the sentence negative. However for Japanese, it would be “これは好きです” and “これは好きじゃない”.
If you learn Chinese, would it make it easier to learn Japanese?
I know japanese has kanji, hiragana and katakana, but I have absolutely no idea about chinese. The truth is, my brother in law is chinese so my nephew and niece are half as well, I thought that it'd be nice if I could learn Chinese for them, but besides that, I'd like to learn Japanese also. So If I learn how to read/write chinese, would it make it easier to learn Japanese or is it almost the same? I'm not saying it's easy or anything, I know that they are languages and are not to be taken lightly. This question comes to mind because I heard that Hiragana characters are Chinese Characters as well, so now I'm really confused. Please avoid vague answers, I might get even MORE confused xD
Which language is easier to learn - Greek, Japanese, Chinese, ?
I am of English origin and would like to know which one is a easy language to learn. I was also thinking Egyption Hieroglyphics if possible too ? And if possible can u please provide me a website where I can learn that particular language effectively ?
Which is easiest to learn, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese?
Well they're all pretty hard! lol Speaking: Japanese is by far the easiest. Korean pronunciations can be hard even for natives and Chinese pronunciations uses tones. In Chinese, there are five tones (pitches): high, falling, dipping, falling, and voiceless. If you don't use the right tone in Chinese, you could be saying a completely different sentence. Japanese is probably the easiest to pronounce. Here's an example: Japanese: Mune (Moo-nay) Chinese: xin (pronounced shin in the high tone) Korean: mah-eum (I don't know how to say it) Writing: Korean by far is easiest. Korean uses basically an alphabet. You put the letters in "boxes" and you form a word. Japanese is the next hardest. It has 2 simple alphabets and thousands of complex Kanji. Kanji are basically picture symbols, one or two simples mean and entire word. Chinese is the hardest. It's like the latter part of Japanese I described. Nothing but complex symbols and hours of memorization. Not to mention there's simplified Chinese and traditional. Japanese: Writing system 1- ア Writing system 2- あ Kanji- 平仮名 Korean: 심 장 Chinese: 喂 Sentence structure: Chinese wins. Chinese has a closer sentence structure to English. In Japanese and Korean, if you want to say "I am eating" you say "Watashi-wa gohan wo tabete imasu"; literally "I rice eating am." But Japanese does have sentence marks (-wa -wo -i) to mark where the subject, object, and adjectives are. And Japanese isn't so picky. You could leave off subjects and verbs and the sentence would be just as correct sometimes. They're all pretty hard. Although probably hardest, Chinese (Mandarin dialect) would be most useful though...
Is it really easier for a Japanese speaker to learn Chinese, and vice-versa?
I believe that it's significantly more difficult for a Chinese to learn Japanese than the other way around.Here's why:Pretty much any Japanese not in his 60s would know a bit about English grammar, and so would already be familiar with the SVO construction which is used in both English and Chinese. For a Chinese, there's no way they're going to be familiar with the SOV construction, especially when most Japanese sentences don't even have a subject.Knowing the meaning of kanji is only half the battle, knowing how to pronounce them in different contexts is much harder. In Japanese, the same kanji can have several different "readings" depending on the context, almost all of them have at least 2. Remembering which reading to use in which situation is pure rote memorization, even native speakers mess it up.For Japanese learning Chinese, no such issue exists as very, very few Chinese characters have more than 1 pronunciation regardless of context. Moreover, in about 80% of cases, the Japanese speaker already knows the Chinese reading once they learn how to guess it as there's a fairly regular pattern of converting the Japanese "Chinese-style" reading of a kanji to actual real Chinese.Chinese need to learn 2 new writing systems: hiragana and katakana. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to learn and use.Japanese just need to learn a few more kanji. Most educated Japanese are functionally literate in Chinese with no prior training.It is extremely difficult for Chinese (or anyone else that isn't Japanese or Korean) to wrap their head around the idea of sentence construction without subjects. It's not even "I, the ball, kick", it's "ball, kick".Remembering to place a subject in a sentence for Japanese speakers doesn't appear to be difficult at all. None of the Japanese I've met seem to have an issue with this when speaking English or Chinese. Using a subject in a sentence seems to jive pretty well with the human brain.Japanese has "soft" verb conjugation, as in it's not always necessary to use the proper conjugation for a verb. This is part of natural speech for Japanese and is very hard to grasp for non-native speakers. Verb conjugation as a whole is just another thing to learn for Chinese speakers who don't have to deal with it in their native language.Japanese speakers don't have to worry about conjugation at all when learning Chinese, yay...TL;DR: it's very easy for Japanese to learn Chinese, not so much the other way around though.
Should I learn Chinese or Japanese and which is harder?
First I should mention that these remarks refer to Mandarin Chinese. Other varieties of Chinese share many characteristics with Mandarin, though have different pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Learning to read and write Japanese is probably harder than Chinese because most Japanese characters (kanji) have two or more pronunciations, whereas the vast majority of Chinese characters (hanzi) only have one. In Japanese you also have to contend with two syllabic scripts (hiragana and katakana). On the other hand, some Japanese words and word endings are easier to read than Chinese ones as they're written phonetically with hiragana or katakana, whereas all Chinese words are written with hanzi. If you don't know the pronunciation of the hanzi, you can only guess it based on similar hanzi you do know. Chinese word order is closer to that of English, and other European languages to some extent, whereas Japanese word order has a closer resemblance to that of Korean, Mongolian and the Turkic languages. So for English speakers, Chinese is easier than Japanese from this aspect. Chinese grammar is generally considered a lot easier to learn than Japanese. Chinese is an isolating language, even more so than English, with no verb conjugations, noun cases or grammatical gender. Moreover plurals are only used to a limited extent and are often optional. Japanese is a agglutanative language with numerous verb, noun and adjective conjugations. Japanese pronunciation is probably easier to learn than Chinese. Japanese uses a limited number of phonemes and has no tones. Japanese words do have different intontation patterns though which need to be learnt to ensure that people can understand you. Only a few Japanese words are distinguished by intontation though, so if you get it wrong, you'll probably still be understand. Chinese has a larger inventory of phonemes and each syllable has its own tone. Pronouncing a syllable with the wrong tone can change its meaning. Most varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin have more phonemes and tones - there are six or seven tones in Cantonese and eight in Taiwanese for example. There are about a billion mandarin Chinese speakers; 126 million Japanese speakers.
Which language should I learn? Chinese, Korean, Japanese?
Like you said, you speak 3 Indian languages. India is pretty diverse, just as China. Similarly, there are different Chinese languages, but most would refer to them as dialects for political purposes. Since you love the "awesomeness of Japan" so much, I think it would be appropriate for me to show you two of the most popular Chinese languages, (besides Mandarin, the official language) in anime style. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWAQFJ_So... The video features Shanghainese spoken by the boy, and Cantonese spoken by the girl. It's a fan dub, and both languages are mutually unintelligible. These plus the Chinese you mentioned in your question (probably referring to Mandarin?) have differences in grammar, vocab and pronunciation of words. I hope that was informative for you. Now that you learned something new (lol), what I will advice is that you should learn the one you are most interested in, and that is Japanese. They have an incredible pop culture, and since you like it so much, learning it will be not only a breeze but quick as well. After that, you can pick up any other languages you feel like. It won't be nice if you were to say, learned the Chinese language(s) first, and then later felt that you should have learned Japanese first because it sounds much nicer, or has a better pop culture. When that happens, it's not fun anymore, and feels like a chore. Go with Japanese.