Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Tiger Beer]

Okay, all you linguists.

What's your take? What's easier?

Mandarin or Japanese?

[CentralCali]

I'm of the opinion that all natural languages are equally hard to learn. And, yes, I got my degree in Linguistics.

[mistermasan]

speaking chinese is easy. it is built for assimilation. tense is a snap. no gender words. ignore the tones and chat away. they have a way of self regulating themselves. it IS the world's most spoken language for a reason.

japanesegrammar is as jacked up as english or korean. with three writing systems.

over 1 billion speak some kinda chinese. japanese? nice local dialect.

for me it was a no brainer.

[laogaiguk]

Chinese.

The grammar is more like ours (even easier too, they drop a lot of stuff). The pronunciation is hard at first, but once you get it, there are no assimilations or any crap like that, so it's pretty easy.

And since Japanese has the characters anyway (Kanji), it doesn't matter. But the Chinese characters are
1) easier to learn (unless you study in Hong Kong or Taiwan which use the old characters).
2) have only one pronunciation (99% of the time), unlike Kanji (Japanese characters), which usually have 2 or three but can have up to 9 I think.

I've studied both. Japanese grammar is much like Korean.

[laogaiguk]

[pugwall]

[laogaiguk]

[pugwall]

[Fresh Prince]

Out of the the three languages:

Mandarin=
-easiest to speak: Grammar is very similar to English but with less verb conjugations and sounds are easily approximated with English.
-hardest to write

Japanese=
-easier to write than Mandarin: If you can't read kanji then you can at least write the word in hiragana.
-easier to speak than Korean: Sounds are easily approximated with English.

Korean=
-hardest to speak: Very few sounds are easily approximated with English.
-easiest to write.

[mistermasan]

don't worry about the tones. they will come over time. most every mandarin teacher over emphasizes tones at first and scares away students. three weeks of ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4? seen it. she lessened her students by half before we ever got to "ni hao ma?" nothing is worse than seeing 20 new students eager to learn chinese arguing over the intonation of "wo hen hao" (i'm fine). this one simply cannot be misunderstood.

schools stateside will make mandarin sound like the boogie man. but i have seen Filipina workers arrive in taiwan with 0 mandarin skills and be up and chatting with the locals full on in two months. immersion is great if you can afford it.

have a good attitude and everything will come together.

[Kuros]

I don't speak Japanese, but Mandarin must be easier.

Tones are a challenge at first, but you get used to them pretty quickly. Grammar is pretty straightforward. Its a primitive language, Mandarin.

[CentralCali]

There's no such thing as a primitive language.

[Tiger Beer]

Let's throw in Vietnamese.

How would learning Vietnamese be compared to say Mandarin?

[Easter Clark]

Japanese=easiest

Chinese=hardest

Korean=in the middle (but gets easier each day)

I've lived in all three countries and spent about the same time in each...trips across the water are no problem for me these days!

Hey, this is for me. It may be different for you guys!

[Kuros]