Compared to Chinese, Japanese does have its own set of complexities and challenges but overall, it's considered easier for beginners. Japanese is a language spoken by nearly 130 million people in Japan, as well as in many other countries across the world.
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.
Chinese is more difficult at the beginner level due to the complexity of the tones. However, once you master tones, it is easier to speak the sentence thanks to its simpler grammar. Japanese is easier at the beginner level, and Chinese is easier at the intermediate level.
Number of speakers
But Chinese does open more doors for you: Mandarin has 1.1+ billion speakers, and Japanese only has 126+ million speakers. Mandarin has almost 200 million non-native speakers, while Japan only has 121 thousand foreign speakers. (Numbers from Wikipedia.) This also goes town into job opportunities.
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.
Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English natives to master. This is because it does not have a lot of likeness in structure to English. Approximately it will take 88 weeks, or 2200 hours of studying, to become fluent.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike other East-Asian languages, Korean isn't a tonal language. This means, that the meaning of the word doesn't change, regardless of what your accent is like. This makes learning Korean much easier than Japanese.
Relatively, Korean would be an easier language to learn. Thanks to its phonetic alphabet and more simplistic grammar rules, Korean is not the most challenging Asian language to learn. Chinese on the other hand is much more widely spoken. This means that finding study materials and practice partners would be easier.
Korean and Japanese might be the easiest languages for a native Chinese speaker to learn. While Korean and Japanese belong to a different language family from Chinese, centuries of cultural exchange have filled Korean and Japanese with Chinese vocabulary, in fact, 60% of Korean vocabulary has Chinese roots.
The Japanese language is considered one of the most difficult to learn by many English speakers. With three separate writing systems, an opposite sentence structure to English, and a complicated hierarchy of politeness, it's decidedly complex.
Arabic is usually considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, topped by only a few languages like Japanese in terms of difficulty. Plus, it's even harder (or so they say) if you are a native speaker of English or a romance language.
Generally speaking, we might assert that Korean is easier for an English speaker to learn than Mandarin Chinese. But this is very relative. In fact, the US Foreign Service Institute assigns Mandarin Chinese and Korean the same level of difficulty. Both languages are in “Category Four”.
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.
If you know Japanese then it is easier to move to just one writing system. Speaking & Listening: as discussed, the difficult part of speaking in Chinese is the different tonal accentuation so moving from Japanese to Chinese would be considered more difficult.
Depending the length of your study time every day and how often you can practice alone, such as having speaking practice over Skype, listening to podcasts like JapanesePod101, reading and writing the writing systems, and actively trying to utilize kanji, you can learn intermediate level Japanese within 1-3 years.
The average length of time to learn advanced Japanese is 2-3 years. At the intermediate level, you can understand most of what your teacher says, and you can follow along with TV programs. When it comes to using the language with other Japanese speakers, however, you still have some limitations.
Learning Japanese isn't easy and it will take time. It's probably fair to say that you can expect a commitment of at least three years in order to achieve something resembling fluency. The average learner gets to the advanced level in three or four years.