Another thing to think about as you weigh your options: widespread use. Chinese is second on the list of the most spoken languages in the world, with 1,117 million Chinese speakers worldwide. Japanese, on the other hand, doesn't crack the top 10, boasting only about one-tenth of that, at roughly 128 million speakers.
Japanese is slightly easier to learn. But, Chinese is much more widely spoken. Both languages have their pros and cons. Ultimately whichever language pulls on your heartstrings the most is the winner.
We wouldn't recommend learning both languages at once, but it is worth saying that learning Japanese gives you a small advantage when learning Mandarin, and vice versa. You could say this is true for any language: learning any language makes you better at language learning.
Whether you're looking for a new academic pursuit, new career skills or a new perspective on life, learning Mandarin Chinese is one of the absolute best investments you can make with your free time.
Chinese and Japanese are two of the most popular languages to learn, Japanese is generally seen as being harder than Chinese due to its writing system and complex grammar structures.
However, due to the sheer volume of English speakers who want to learn Mandarin or Japanese, there are more resources for those languages. From that practical standpoint, learners might find that the hardest language to learn of the three is Korean.
Although English is not the official language of Australia in law, it is the de facto official and national language. It is the most widely spoken language in the country, and is used as the only language in the home by 72% of the population.
Mandarin is a dialect of Chinese and the official state language of China, making it one of the best languages to learn! After all, China is home to 1.4 billion people, and Chinese is the most spoken language in the world.
A neurolinguistic study discovered that learning Chinese lights up more parts of the brain than any other language does. While speaking English, speakers use only the left temporal lobe, whereas Chinese speakers use both. Speaking and writing Chinese enhances your cognitive activities and brainpower!
Most learners have suggested that you should learn Chinese first before Japanese. Why is it exactly? Because once you've mastered Chinese, you're already halfway conquering Japanese. As we've talked about earlier, Japanese has three alphabets — Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.
If you're interested in learning Japanese with anime, J-pop, or because you love Japanese food and culture, then the choice is easy. On the other hand, for those interested in Chinese history and how it shaped many other Asian cultures, learning Chinese would be a great way to gain more insight.
Learning Japanese provides a 'gateway' to other languages with a similarly-high level of difference from English. Chinese, Korean and Arabic, for example, would all become easier to learn if you have an understanding of Japanese.
Anime (Japanese: アニメ, IPA: [aɲime] ( listen)) is hand-drawn and computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, anime refers specifically to animation produced in Japan.
I'd recommend learning Chinese Mandarin first, then Japanese, then Korean last, unless you have a certain preference for one of those languages. Chinese I recommend first because not only does it have a grammatical structure similar to English, it's also the 'latin' of Korean and Japanese.
It takes about 4-7 years (roughly 2200 to 4000 hours) to become fluent in every aspect of the language, if you spend at least an hour and a half to study every day. However, it's quite common for learners to become more fluent in some areas than others depending on how they allotted their study time.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Mandarin is the second most spoken language in Australia, according to the latest 2021 consensus. At least 2.5% of Australians, or 596,703 people, use Mandarin as their primary language at home, making it the most frequently language spoken in the country after English.
Today, Cantonese is the fourth-most spoken language in Australia after Mandarin, Arabic and Vietnamese.
Gateway to Korean and Japanese - it would be easier for you to learn Korean and Japanese once you learned Chinese. These three languages all share sino-vocabulary. In Korean its about 60% of the vocabulary.
It's all about the tones!
Mandarin operates with four different tones, meaning that the way that you say a word can give it four different meanings! It is this tonality – this pronunciation – that causes most trouble for nearly all new speakers and makes Chinese a difficult language to master.
Cantonese is by far the more challenging of the two languages, particularly for a beginning Chinese language learner. This is because there are more tones used in Cantonese (Cantonese uses up to nine tones, whereas Mandarin only uses four).