10 ms·

Japanese is usually more difficult than Cantonese? Really? As an English native speaker who has learnt some rudimentary Cantonese I find this hard to believe.

cbhl 9y ago
Japanese has fewer phonemes than Canto or Mando, which always gave me the impression that it was easier to learn. Maybe the added difficulty comes from needing to understand the grammar (particles) and the different forms of speech for different levels of politeness (after a few years, it now weirds me out when a white dude calls himself 'watashi'). Edit: Actually, if the methodology is "average time spent to learn" another possibility is that the average is slower because the barrier to learning the language is just low enough to attract a bunch of slow learners that wouldn't be interested in Chinese or Korean. (Reminds me of a study where decreasing page weight in KBs increased average page load time because users on the slowest connections were now able to load the page and skewed the average upward.)
- fiblye 9y ago
  Many, many learners wish Japanese had more available phonemes. One of the biggest problems with Japanese is it imported batches of tens of thousands of Chinese words and forced them into a language with only a fraction of the sound complexity. The result is loads of words with the same pronunciation but completely different meaning. "Shoushin" can mean a work promotion or cowardice. "Shinkou" can mean attack, (military) invasion, progress, encouragement, pickles, or religious faith. None of these usages are rare. If English had half the available consonants and vowels it had now, it'd be far more difficult to learn rather than easy. Japanese has the same problem.
- mikesickler 9y ago
  What's weird about a white dude referring to himself as 'watashi'? I'm a white dude and I have done that plenty of times.
  - kirerukaze 9y ago
    "watashi" is the more feminine form of "I/me". "boku" or "ore" is more masculine. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns
    - mikesickler 9y ago
      yeah I get that. But it's not unusual for a man to use it in a formal setting.
hamstercat 9y ago
I can't comment on Cantonese, but I've heard that most people never truly learn Japanese unless they went to school in Japan. Apparently you can learn the basic in a year or two if you immerse, but learning the more complex stuff can take a decade or more.
- alphonsegaston 9y ago
  This is the kind of mythical chauvinism that some Japanese people like to espouse, but it’s by no means true. Fluency is entirely possible as people like Seidensticker, Keene, and many others have proved.
- adrianN 9y ago
  "Truly" learning any language probably can take a decade or more. I'd wager that many native speakers reach the level of "truly" understanding their native language. The Oxford English dictionary for example lists more than 150000 words in current use. If you want to learn them from scratch in just ten years you need to learn forty new words a day. That's not a sustainable rate. If you want to be able to read old texts (Shakespeare?) you probably need at least the 50k obsolete words that the dictionary also lists.
DonaldFisk 9y ago
Cantonese is unusual. It's seldom written down. Standard Chinese (i.e. the written form of Mandarin) is used instead. So there are two comparisons. Spoken Cantonese + Yale vs. spoken Japanese + Romaji. Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers (correction: honorifics), so it would be easier to learn to speak. Spoken Cantonese + Written Chinese vs. spoken Japanese + Kanji + Kana. Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. There's no such hard limit on the number of Hanzi you need. (But there's the complication of On-yomi and kun-yomi pronunciations of the same kanji.) The other issue is the quality and quantity of learning material. Japanese wins by a country mile.
- fiblye 9y ago
  >Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. Students are taught around 2136 kanji in school, and there are a couple hundred more that aren't taught in school yet pretty much every adult knows and uses regularly. e.g., 嘘, the character for "a lie". The fact kanji average over 2 readings each vs Chinese's average 1 reading each also makes Japanese quite difficult. When factoring in usage in names and extremely common kanji like 生, you can have well over a dozen possible readings which you can only learn through long exposure and living in the country. There are so many times where I think, "Oh, I've never seen that word but I can guess the pronunciation since I know the kanji", only to be shut down and told it's some weird exception.
- martalist 9y ago
  > Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers, so it would be easier to learn to speak. Registers being different levels of formality (informal, formal, slang, etc)? If so, Cantonese has that in spades. Your answer also ignores the tonal nature of Cantonese/Mandarin. Most guides can't event agree to how many tones there are. I get by with 7, but it can range from 6 to 10 depending on who you speak to (in contrast to 4 in Mandarin).
  - megaman22 9y ago
    As an English speaker, the entire concept of tones is more than a little daunting. On a lesser scale, the hardest thing about learning German, as, again, an English speaker, but one who had poor grammar instruction and no grounding in Latin, the idea of cases for verbs and pronouns was... weird.
closed 9y ago
I started learning Cantonese recently, and the thing that struck me is how insane it is just to get started. Half of my books use Yale romanization, but others use jyutping, so I had to pick up both. Add to that that written Cantonese is Mandarin, but most speakers use traditional characters, and it's a hot stew of pain. (the grammar is a lot of fun though)
- martalist 9y ago
  I ended up making my own notation early on, for exactly the same reason. Adding to the difficulty is that some native speakers will enthusiastically correct your tone by over emphasiszing and embellishing their words (with trailing tones, ah's and lah's, etc). There are some people that I simply can't learn words from because I can never pick the tone. Luckily after a while you can pick those people fairly quickly!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
malloryerik 9y ago
Chinese grammar is simple, and the grammatical structure is similar to English. What's more, each character tends to have one pronunciation, whereas with kanji there are many surprises.
KennyCason 9y ago
I saw a few similar comments so added a separate response on my opinion on Japanese vs Chinese.

cbhl 9y ago

Japanese has fewer phonemes than Canto or Mando, which always gave me the impression that it was easier to learn. Maybe the added difficulty comes from needing to understand the grammar (particles) and the different forms of speech for different levels of politeness (after a few years, it now weirds me out when a white dude calls himself 'watashi'). Edit: Actually, if the methodology is "average time spent to learn" another possibility is that the average is slower because the barrier to learning the language is just low enough to attract a bunch of slow learners that wouldn't be interested in Chinese or Korean. (Reminds me of a study where decreasing page weight in KBs increased average page load time because users on the slowest connections were now able to load the page and skewed the average upward.)

fiblye 9y ago
Many, many learners wish Japanese had more available phonemes. One of the biggest problems with Japanese is it imported batches of tens of thousands of Chinese words and forced them into a language with only a fraction of the sound complexity. The result is loads of words with the same pronunciation but completely different meaning. "Shoushin" can mean a work promotion or cowardice. "Shinkou" can mean attack, (military) invasion, progress, encouragement, pickles, or religious faith. None of these usages are rare. If English had half the available consonants and vowels it had now, it'd be far more difficult to learn rather than easy. Japanese has the same problem.
mikesickler 9y ago
What's weird about a white dude referring to himself as 'watashi'? I'm a white dude and I have done that plenty of times.
- kirerukaze 9y ago
  "watashi" is the more feminine form of "I/me". "boku" or "ore" is more masculine. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns
  - mikesickler 9y ago
    yeah I get that. But it's not unusual for a man to use it in a formal setting.

hamstercat 9y ago

I can't comment on Cantonese, but I've heard that most people never truly learn Japanese unless they went to school in Japan. Apparently you can learn the basic in a year or two if you immerse, but learning the more complex stuff can take a decade or more.

alphonsegaston 9y ago
This is the kind of mythical chauvinism that some Japanese people like to espouse, but it’s by no means true. Fluency is entirely possible as people like Seidensticker, Keene, and many others have proved.
adrianN 9y ago
"Truly" learning any language probably can take a decade or more. I'd wager that many native speakers reach the level of "truly" understanding their native language. The Oxford English dictionary for example lists more than 150000 words in current use. If you want to learn them from scratch in just ten years you need to learn forty new words a day. That's not a sustainable rate. If you want to be able to read old texts (Shakespeare?) you probably need at least the 50k obsolete words that the dictionary also lists.

DonaldFisk 9y ago

Cantonese is unusual. It's seldom written down. Standard Chinese (i.e. the written form of Mandarin) is used instead. So there are two comparisons. Spoken Cantonese + Yale vs. spoken Japanese + Romaji. Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers (correction: honorifics), so it would be easier to learn to speak. Spoken Cantonese + Written Chinese vs. spoken Japanese + Kanji + Kana. Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. There's no such hard limit on the number of Hanzi you need. (But there's the complication of On-yomi and kun-yomi pronunciations of the same kanji.) The other issue is the quality and quantity of learning material. Japanese wins by a country mile.

fiblye 9y ago
>Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. Students are taught around 2136 kanji in school, and there are a couple hundred more that aren't taught in school yet pretty much every adult knows and uses regularly. e.g., 嘘, the character for "a lie". The fact kanji average over 2 readings each vs Chinese's average 1 reading each also makes Japanese quite difficult. When factoring in usage in names and extremely common kanji like 生, you can have well over a dozen possible readings which you can only learn through long exposure and living in the country. There are so many times where I think, "Oh, I've never seen that word but I can guess the pronunciation since I know the kanji", only to be shut down and told it's some weird exception.
martalist 9y ago
> Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers, so it would be easier to learn to speak. Registers being different levels of formality (informal, formal, slang, etc)? If so, Cantonese has that in spades. Your answer also ignores the tonal nature of Cantonese/Mandarin. Most guides can't event agree to how many tones there are. I get by with 7, but it can range from 6 to 10 depending on who you speak to (in contrast to 4 in Mandarin).
- megaman22 9y ago
  As an English speaker, the entire concept of tones is more than a little daunting. On a lesser scale, the hardest thing about learning German, as, again, an English speaker, but one who had poor grammar instruction and no grounding in Latin, the idea of cases for verbs and pronouns was... weird.

closed 9y ago

I started learning Cantonese recently, and the thing that struck me is how insane it is just to get started. Half of my books use Yale romanization, but others use jyutping, so I had to pick up both. Add to that that written Cantonese is Mandarin, but most speakers use traditional characters, and it's a hot stew of pain. (the grammar is a lot of fun though)

martalist 9y ago
I ended up making my own notation early on, for exactly the same reason. Adding to the difficulty is that some native speakers will enthusiastically correct your tone by over emphasiszing and embellishing their words (with trailing tones, ah's and lah's, etc). There are some people that I simply can't learn words from because I can never pick the tone. Luckily after a while you can pick those people fairly quickly!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

malloryerik 9y ago

Chinese grammar is simple, and the grammatical structure is similar to English. What's more, each character tends to have one pronunciation, whereas with kanji there are many surprises.

KennyCason 9y ago

I saw a few similar comments so added a separate response on my opinion on Japanese vs Chinese.