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I have decided to take up Japanese and i have been doing Chinese for a little while and i am finding it quite difficult.

Which do you think is harder?

I think Chinese is harder, but this is merely a guess based on what other people have told me. I don't know any of the languages, but I have some friends who know one or both.

I started taking Japanese classes 2 weeks ago myself

I haven't attempted Chinese, but I've found Japanese very difficult... and even MORE difficult when the darn translator goes against grammatical truths!!!

Personally, I think Chinese is harder. Imo, the difficult part of Japanese is learning the written part. I took French last year and I think that Japanese is easier than French and, according to what I've hard, Japanese is supposed to be a very difficult language to learn, particularly if your starting language is latin-based.

@Sandrock You're not likely to learn much Japanese, at least not accurately, from an online language translator. For simpler things, I would suggest a Japanese-English/English-Japanese Dictionary; and for the more complex stuff, I recommend taking actual lessons. IIRC your age, it won't be too long before you finish High School, so you might want to consider looking for a college that, in addition to whatever you want to major in, teaches Japanese as one of their foriegn languages.

Originally posted by Sailor Saturn:
<STRONG>@Sandrock You're not likely to learn much Japanese, at least not accurately, from an online language translator. For simpler things, I would suggest a Japanese-English/English-Japanese Dictionary; and for the more complex stuff, I recommend taking actual lessons. IIRC your age, it won't be too long before you finish High School, so you might want to consider looking for a college that, in addition to whatever you want to major in, teaches Japanese as one of their foriegn languages. </STRONG>

I do use a J~E/E~J dictionary, though all sorts of different websites have different attempts at the language...

I will look into colleges with Japanese courses. I mean, I am in 10th grade, gotta start somewhere... Hopefully I can take both Spanish and Japanese, as Spanish is usually required for meteorology. But I WILL take Spanish in high school. That's at least a start.

I have several friends who have done degreees in Pacific and Asian studies; they all attest that Chinese is by far the more diificult language language to learn.

Chinese is the most difficult due to hwo the language is constructed. it is not based on the same sort of "letters" that western langauges use, and other asian languages are similar in this nature and different from Chinese as well.

Japanese:
私は多くのつま先を持つアメリカヘラジカのよう 395;踊る
Chinese:
当心我的匙子, 所有我的魔术迪斯科力量来源

Now which is harder to understand?



*Note: Even if you can read this, I guarantee it’s not going to make the slightest bit of sense.

EDIT: Damnit, the one symbol appears as 395! Oh well, probably makes more sense this way.

[ 10-01-2001: Message edited by: Kayless ]