A very insightful article. In my experience though, having studied both; and also from a friend who is moderately fluent in both; I believe Japanese is more difficult than Chinese.
When it comes to the writing system, a Chinese character can have one pronunciation (two in very rare exceptions.) A Japanese character can have ten takes on how to pronounce the Chinese reading (onyomi), and be hammered into another ten Japanese-native words and verbs (kunyomi), and six ways they can be pronounced in names that your IME will refuse to ever recognize (nanori). The problem of not knowing how to pronounce what you are reading is made far worse in Japanese. With the one nice exception that material designed for young children sometimes have the syllables written above the characters for reference (furigana.)
Next up you have the SOV writing style instead of SVO. So unless you enjoy thinking and speaking like Yoda, you get to flip entire sentences in your head. In real-time.
And then you have particles that can mean a hundred different things based on context. Even some native speakers tend to have no idea when to use 'wa' or 'ga', it just becomes instinctual after a lifetime of language use.
Next, there's the verb conjugations. "They're simple, there's only one polite form, a handful of plain forms, and the two irregular verb forms!" ... and then they add on about a thousand possible verb endings that imply different meanings (-tai = to want, -takereba = to not want, -zu ni = another negative form like -nai but slightly more polite, etc.) And then you get the fun of stacking them! -saserareru (to be forced to do something) + -zu ni -> -saserarezu. And then you can extend that to be in the passive form, or to have it occur in the past ... and then you can just outright fuse two verbs together to form new ones! Tsuku + Nukeru -> Tsukinukeru + all your verb endings above = aneurysm to decipher in real-time conversation.
Then you have the polite language system (keigo, or alternate ways to say just about everything based on who you are talking to) where you have to practice for years before you won't either sound like a school girl or offend someone.
There are other hard parts (regional dialects, classical forms, synonyms, etc), but since Chinese shares them, I omit them here.
The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50.
When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words. And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...
Despite a lot of differences between how the Chinese and Japanese use the same characters, and in fact characters that only exist in one or the other ... horrifyingly, I find that I understand more when playing a Chinese game than a Japanese game, despite having studied Chinese for less than 1/20th as much as I have studied Japanese.
> a Chinese character can have one pronunciation (two in very rare exceptions.)
That isn't all that exceptional, if you measure by frequency of encountering multiple pronunciations; 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations. However, as obnoxious as chinese script is, it's still a syllabary -- you can read it (as in, know what sounds the characters make) perfectly well for the most part without knowing what anything means. I have essentially no knowledge or experience of Japanese, but I am given to understand that it's roughly the norm for the sound of a character to be determined by context rather than by which character it is.
> The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50.
People use this as an objection to spelling reform for Chinese too. How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them (given a hypothetical world where you can choose to read anything in kana).
> When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words.
Can, but if you have a decent grasp of the language and butcher the tones, nobody will misunderstand, for the same reason that they often don't bother to mark tones in pinyin.
> And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this
That poem was written specifically for a political battle, to make the argument that characters shouldn't be reformed. There are no actual poems like that; notably, that poem, when read aloud, is not intelligible Chinese. So all it's really doing is showing that Chinese characters can indicate a superset of the language.
> 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations.
Ah, see I only know around 30 readings for Chinese characters (since I don't trust any Japanese onyomi at all.) Those are indeed some common ones to have two.
But let me show you how horrifying Japanese can be: 生 can be read as セイ, ショウ, い.きる, い.かす, い.ける, う.まれる, う.まれ, うまれ, う.む, お.う, は.える, は.やす, き, なま, なま-, な.る, な.す, む.す, -う, いき, いく, いけ, うぶ, うまい, え, おい, ぎゅう, くるみ, ごせ, さ, じょう, すぎ, そ, そう, ちる, なば, にう, にゅう, ふ, み, もう, よい, りゅう -- and there's more, if you count nanori. 生糸 is kii-to (silk thread), 生絹 is su(tsu)-shi -> suzushi (silk product), 生理 is sei-ri (physiology), 生温い is nama-nuru-i (lukewarm), 生き方 is i-ki-kata (way of life), 生得 is shou-toku (inherit), on and on. So now try and guess how to read 芝生 (lawn) ... give up? shiba-fu, of course.
> How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them
I definitely get what you're saying here. I'm not defending hanzi/kanji, but I think it helps a lot that speech is usually in person. And in modern times. On a Game Boy game, it's on a 160x144 screen with four colors, and the king is asking you to "Go find <XYZ>", where XYZ can mean 20 different things, and could be any of those in this fantasy world. If your boss at work asked you to find XYZ, you could immediately rule out the fishing net, the broadsword, and the carburetor as being unlikely items your boss would ask you for. It's probably either the pen or the sign. Worst case if you can't guess, you can ask him which one he means, "the writing XYZ (pen) or the shop XYZ (sign)?" I definitely enjoy when the kanji in written form rules out synonyms for me, even if I can't see kanji in speech.
The usual pro-kanji argument, which I do believe holds up a bit, is that it makes reading a lot faster, and allows you to condense a lot more text into the same visual area. Great for old video games and comics, at least. The downside to me as a learner is that I find myself saying the kanji in their English meaning because I don't remember the proper pronunciation, but know what that kanji by itself means.
But yeah, it would certainly be a lot more approachable to have the languages written in pinyin or hiragana+katakana, so long as they used spaces between words (and sadly, written Japanese without kanji do not.) And technically, with digital works, you can certainly transform text like that. There are some nice Firefox plugins where you can hover over Chinese characters to see their readings.
> That poem was written specifically for a political battle
Oh, that's unfortunate. I thought they were just being silly, like English alliterations where every first letter in a sentence starts with 'A' or whatever.
I think we're agreeing back and forth on the qualities of hanzi vs kanji. As far as I've ever learned, Japanese has far and away the worst writing system in the world. I want to say a little more about the poem.
I went looking for the place I originally learned about it, and didn't find it. Wikipedia has some things to say about it, but I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. :/
Specifically, WP states that the poem was written to make the political point that ancient Chinese shouldn't be transcribed but should be written in characters forever. It makes the extremely reasonable argument that the poem's author was in fact backing a scheme to romanize modern Mandarin. However, it also says that the poem is written in ancient Chinese, which doesn't seem right to me. In written form, this poem is perfectly intelligible to modern Chinese people, whereas actual classical poems are just as intelligible as a passage from Beowulf would be to you (I'm assuming you're not trained in Old English). Then again, the only thing I know about ancient Chinese (that 是 is a demonstrative meaning "this") does appear to be true within the poem.
Regardless of the author's motivations, it's still a cool piece of text. It's been quite popular with the Chinese people I've shown it to; they especially like to try to read it aloud (although I've never heard anyone actually get through the whole thing).
Yes, I remember in Japanese class where we had a student teacher (both native Japanese) observing the teacher teaching the class to help train her how to teach. The two spent a lot of time bickering about which particle should be used in a sentence. They usually never came to an agreement. That and the repeated explanations that what was in the book really would never be said in real life due to conjugations and keigo.
I've been learning Vietnamese for about three years now. In many ways it's a fairly easy language to learn. The grammar is very simple and it uses the Latin alphabet.
But learning to hear and speak the various tones has been a real struggle. Even now I still have a hard time picking them out and carefully enunciating them. It doesn't help that there's a huge amount of regional variation in pronunciation and vocabulary. I've had to work hard to unlearn some habits from English, particularly raising my tone slightly at the end of sentences.
> Even some native speakers tend to have no idea when to use 'wa' or 'ga'
Glad you said this, so I can stop pounding my head over it. Just today I was thinking "doko wa kami desu ka? wait, no, doko ga kami desu ka... doko wa... doko ga... whatever."
Which kami I was thinking about is for me to know and you to guess incorrectly.
I heard an anecdote about some guy telling his Japanese girlfriend, who had made him dinner, "Kore wa oishii!". Turns out he should have said "ga", as "wa" is often used to emphasize contrast, so what the girlfriend heard was "This was delicious [in contrast to your usual cooking]".
And this is why I won't even say a single word of Japanese when I go the local Japanese restaurant (and yes, they definitely speak it as I can hear them talking to each other and their Japanese patrons.)
I think the more grammatically correct question sentences would be "kami wa doko desu ka" (as for kami, where is it?) or "doko ga kami ga (ar)imasu ka" (where does kami exist?).
> Which kami I was thinking about is for me to know and you to guess incorrectly.
Well, if you used the kanji then we wouldn't have to guess ;)
One note: Korean is soo much easier. The alphabet is uber phonetic, and there's much fewer tenses than English (it's generally obvious in context what you mean).
Thai is strictly phonetic as well, with only 44 consonants and some easy vowel constructs. I and many others mastered the script in a week. Tones are easy after you learned your first tonal language as well.
I am tending to learn Korean and not Chinese because the Chinese logographs are pointlessly making the whole learning process unrewardingly slow.
I like tonal languages but I also like phonetic scripts like Thai or Korean. Why did the PDRC abandon Bopomofo :( It would make it so much more fun to learn Mandarin or other Chinese languages!
Or let's use IPA for every language. Semantics would be lost, and a mandarin text couldn't be understand by a cantonese speaker, but I don't care. (Just kidding)
Well there's always hanja, but I know 99.99% of Korean is written in hangul (beautiful system, by the way.)
The only major downside I see to Korean is that it joins only Japanese and Mongolian in being an SOV language. "As for the store, father regarding, milk buy to went." >_<
When it comes to the writing system, a Chinese character can have one pronunciation (two in very rare exceptions.) A Japanese character can have ten takes on how to pronounce the Chinese reading (onyomi), and be hammered into another ten Japanese-native words and verbs (kunyomi), and six ways they can be pronounced in names that your IME will refuse to ever recognize (nanori). The problem of not knowing how to pronounce what you are reading is made far worse in Japanese. With the one nice exception that material designed for young children sometimes have the syllables written above the characters for reference (furigana.)
Next up you have the SOV writing style instead of SVO. So unless you enjoy thinking and speaking like Yoda, you get to flip entire sentences in your head. In real-time.
And then you have particles that can mean a hundred different things based on context. Even some native speakers tend to have no idea when to use 'wa' or 'ga', it just becomes instinctual after a lifetime of language use.
Next, there's the verb conjugations. "They're simple, there's only one polite form, a handful of plain forms, and the two irregular verb forms!" ... and then they add on about a thousand possible verb endings that imply different meanings (-tai = to want, -takereba = to not want, -zu ni = another negative form like -nai but slightly more polite, etc.) And then you get the fun of stacking them! -saserareru (to be forced to do something) + -zu ni -> -saserarezu. And then you can extend that to be in the passive form, or to have it occur in the past ... and then you can just outright fuse two verbs together to form new ones! Tsuku + Nukeru -> Tsukinukeru + all your verb endings above = aneurysm to decipher in real-time conversation.
Then you have the polite language system (keigo, or alternate ways to say just about everything based on who you are talking to) where you have to practice for years before you won't either sound like a school girl or offend someone.
There are other hard parts (regional dialects, classical forms, synonyms, etc), but since Chinese shares them, I omit them here.
The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50.
When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words. And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...
Despite a lot of differences between how the Chinese and Japanese use the same characters, and in fact characters that only exist in one or the other ... horrifyingly, I find that I understand more when playing a Chinese game than a Japanese game, despite having studied Chinese for less than 1/20th as much as I have studied Japanese.