Pokemon or Yu-gi-Oh

March 9, 2011 6:47 AM

Should i learn Mandarin or Japanese?

Important factors are:
how useful is the language in the workplace (or potential usefulness in 10-20 years time)

The sound of the language? Which one "sounds nicer"

How difficult is each one to learn?

Feel free to mention other factors i havent mentioned so far :)

Ive seen the other thread, but Id like some more (..up to date) opinions too!

posted by freddymetz to society & culture (29 answers total)

Mandarin. Japanese is only really useful in "the real world" if you regularly do business with Japanese, and even then they will want to speak to you in English anyway.

If you're an otaku and watch lots of anime as your main hobby, then Japanese is the way to go, obviously.

Japanese will be easier, though, to actually pronounce as it's not really tone based(a couple homophones here and there can be distinguished with tone, but it's a prosodic thing you pick up eventually). Mandarin's grammar is easier, though. Either way you'll have to learn lots of characters rote so the writing is going to be a bitch both ways.

I don't regret using Japanese, but the fact that I lived there for two years and majored in it and all I am using it for these days is Skyping with my old bandmates/friends and watching anime without subtitles makes me pretty sad.
posted by lettuchi at 6:53 AM on March 9, 2011

Mandarin is the most spoken native language on the planet. More native speakers speak Mandarin then the next two combined. Mandarin has 845 million native speakers, Japanese is 9th with 122 million native speakers. Source
posted by Grither at 7:06 AM on March 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Learn the one which excites you more, where you will be interested in putting in the significant effort it takes to get to proficiency. If you can't motivate yourself along the way it won't matter which language you half-learned.

And, in terms of which would be more useful, the odds are probably on Mandarin, but there is so much variation that unless you have a much more specific use in mind (e.g., what's better to work in XYZ industry) it's not worth worrying about. Learn one, and be proud of yourself for doing that much.

Read the first page of this essay from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" for a great anecdote explaining how choosing a language to study based on how "useful" it is can backfire...
posted by _Silky_ at 7:07 AM on March 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

how useful is the language in the workplace (or potential usefulness in 10-20 years time)

That depends on your workplace, but overall, I would place my bets on Mandarin. Japan is a much smaller country than China and has a smaller economy. We have more extensive trade relations with China due to the country's size and because of all of the manufacturing done there. There are also, I believe, more Chinese speakers than Japanese speakers in the USA.

(However, not all Chinese people speak Mandarin. It is the standard language and one which they are expected to learn, but not everyone speaks it as competently as their native dialect.)

The sound of the language? Which one "sounds nicer"

This is a highly subjective judgment. You have to answer this for yourself. Find some subtitled Japanese and subtitled Chinese entertainment; watch. Which do you prefer? Personally, I think that Mandarin is very pretty and Japanese just sounds kind of boring. Other people can't stand the sound of Mandarin and would prefer Japanese.

(I would suggest news broadcasts but in my experience, the Mandarin spoken in news broadcasts is much less appealing, possibly for stylistic reasons.)

How difficult is each one to learn?

Both will be very difficult to learn to use competently. They're difficult in different ways, however.

Mandarin is more difficult to pronounce than Japanese for most native English speakers because it's a tone language and has some "exotic" sounds. You will naturally suck at both Mandarin and Japanese, but getting to the "understandable" point in Japanese is IMHO easier.

You will have to learn Chinese characters in order to read both Chinese and Japanese, but Japanese also has syllabic alphabets, which can serve as a useful bridge for learners. Many learning materials (and materials for children) rely on these syllabic alphabets heavily, so you won't feel as totally illiterate.

In its favor, Mandarin doesn't have the complicated verbal conjugations of Japanese. Like English, what you mean is mostly word order.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:08 AM on March 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

China recently overtook Japan as the world's second largest economy, so Chinese will likely be more useful. Unfortunately, I found Chinese much more difficult than Japanese with the tones in speaking and the writing all in pictographs. Japanese has two phonetic alphabets that work in tandem with the pictographs, so you can make yourself understood (albeit at an elementary school level) without pictographs. Whether Chinese or Japanese "sounds nicer" is sort of in the eye of the beholder, but I did not love the sing-songiness of Chinese in comparison to the relatively flat intonation of Japanese, which I learned first. The hardest thing about Japanese was the grammar, but it has the best onomatopoetics of any language I'm familiar with.
posted by *s at 7:15 AM on March 9, 2011

The sound of the language? Which one "sounds nicer"

If you're a dedicated student, achieve fluency in the language, speak it in the target country, and begin to dream and think in it, well, it won't sound like anything. It will simply exist, and the aesthetic qualities of the sound will be neutral. Essentially, your brain, as it rapidly processes speech, will become deadened to the aspects of sound that seduce (or deter) you as a non-speaker. Think: does English (if that's your native tongue) sound "nice"? If you're aiming for full fluency, I don't think sound should be taken into account.

how useful is the language in the workplace (or potential usefulness in 10-20 years time)

Keep in mind that you have the option of learning both Mandarin and Japanese. It's not an either-or decision, necessarily. Many people study both languages, achieving fluency. They're both immensely interesting languages, and trilingual speakers can profit highly now that trade between Japan and China is thriving. You might start with Mandarin, to get a solid grounding in kanji, and then add Japanese a few years down the road. One of the two will be your stronger language, of course, but you can choose this after years of study and living in or visiting the two countries.
posted by Gordion Knott at 7:25 AM on March 9, 2011 [2 favorites]

How "difficult" a language is supposed to be shouldn't put you off, nor how "useful" it will be in 10-20 years. Learning a foreign language is hard. It takes years of hard work. The real question is, do you want to learn a foreign language? If you do, why? What interests you about learning a language? The thing is, when you learn a different language you are also learning to be a different person.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:28 AM on March 9, 2011 [3 favorites]

I agree: learn whichever one excites you more. "Sounds nicer" is too subjective to answer.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Japanese is harder. Even setting aside the orthography (which is much more confusing for Japanese), Japanese has a more complicated grammar that is more counter-intuitive from the perspective of an English speaker. I didn't get far enough with my Chinese learning to say authoritatively, but I also get the impression that the "head space" you need to get into with Chinese is not as different as it is with Japanese.
posted by adamrice at 8:06 AM on March 9, 2011

Feel free to mention other factors i havent mentioned so far :)

You won't learn any language unless you want to, so learn the language that interests you most. If both interest you, learn both! I mean, if your time frame is 10-20 years and your main concern is verbally doing business (rather than, say, gaining a deep appreciation of the literary tradition, or discussing politics or history, or vetting your own contracts), you have plenty of time to learn a sufficient amount of Mandarin and Japanese for those purposes. And Korean, and Cantonese. As long as you can fit in becoming proficient in some valuable, portable skill as well, of course...
posted by No-sword at 8:07 AM on March 9, 2011

how useful is the language in the workplace (or potential usefulness in 10-20 years time)
Obviously, this depends on where you'll be working. If you want a loose estimate, Mandarin is the clear winner, due to China's economic surge (expected to top the USA soon) as well the monumental population. Again, this depends on where you'll be working. You may likely get by 10-20 years knowing neither language (a lot of people will), and if you end up working somewhere Japan-related, Japanese might be a lot more useful. Work out your priorities.

The sound of the language? Which one "sounds nicer"
I find Japanese a lot better sounding myself. Chinese tends to sound too fast and twitchy. Learning Japanese's sound is fairly easy if you imitate accents in Japanese movies and TV (anime, not so much). In Chinese however, tones dominate the language. You can't afford to screw up the tones, or you'll screw up the language.

How difficult is each one to learn?
Surprisingly, this is also subjective. Learning the characters for both is a difficult task, it requires months of patience, dedication and study. It's not impossible, but tough.

If you can't deal with tones, dump Mandarin ASAP, because you can't do anything in Chinese unless you master the spoken tones. Japanese by comparison is drop-dead easy to get speaking.

I don't know this for sure, but from what I've read, Chinese has super-easy grammar. It's almost ridiculously easy. Japanese by comparison has a full-fledged grammar difficulty, conjugations, sentence orders, inflections and on and on. It's no Sanskrit, but yeah.

Feel free to mention other factors i havent mentioned so far :)
Learning a language is *all* about how dedicated you are to it. If you're asking which one to learn, you might not make it. I've wanted to quit studying Japanese a bazillion times, and this will happen to you as well. I keep pushing myself though, because I know that every time I struggle, the closer I get to watching movies, anime, music, books all in native Japanese. I don't have enough interest in another culture to warrant learning their language that obsessively (this is why I abandoned French).

Learning a language is a commitment. If you "pick" one, embrace it because you're getting married to it, warts and all.
posted by Senza Volto at 8:10 AM on March 9, 2011

Are you willing to work to gain literacy in either language? Both languages have writing systems that are extremely labor-intensive to learn (schoolchildren are learning new characters for years in China/Taiwan/Japan, and that's in an environment when 95% of what you see/hear are those languages). While oral proficiency is of course useful, if you're not able to read or write the language, my feeling is that the effective usefulness of Mandarin/Japanese in the workplace will be greatly reduced. As in, I imagine it'd be troublesome to be able to talk to business contacts, but not be able to read a contract, for example.

Grammar-wise, I think that Chinese grammar is superficially extremely easy -- no tenses, no plurals, no gender, etc -- but at a more advanced level it can be a bit more difficult than expected. Word order carries a lot of nuance and it's surprisingly easy to construct awkward, somehow incorrect sentences, and it's a lot easier to explain an incorrect conjugation than a "feeling" that it's wrong.

I do want to point out that it's more global/geographical spread, rather than raw numbers, that is a useful metric. Sure, Mandarin has 845 million speakers, but the vast majority of those speakers are Chinese people living in humble-to-poor circumstances that you will probably never come in contact with. Similarly, Bengali is the 6th-most-spoken language by count of native speakers at ~180 million, ahead of Portuguese, German and French (and Japanese), but I'd venture to say most would say any of those European languages is on-the-whole (i.e. you aren't doing business solely in India) more useful than Bengali.

[Warning: linguistics geek filter]

Chinese characters, by and large, should not be described as pictographs/ideograms. Only a very small subset of characters, such as 日月山 'sun', 'moon' and 'mountain' can truly be described as pictographs (and even these have meanings, albeit related, such as 'day' and 'month' which you can't exactly draw a picture of.) There's nothing pictographic about 街 'street' or 玫瑰 'rose' or particles such as 的 'possessive particle.' Rather, Chinese characters are logograms, representing words or morphemes, and not ideas or pictures. The contortions that Japanese goes through to fit kanji into its writing system attest to this!
posted by andrewesque at 8:19 AM on March 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Upon re-reading, I realize I come across as a bit negative-sounding. There's totally nothing wrong with learning either language -- I just want to point out that if you have specific goals, you should be aware of the effort involved. I'm a heritage Mandarin speaker (with pretty rusty speaking skills from living away from home); if I weren't, I don't think I would have the time/energy to teach it myself from scratch, so I have lot of respect for people who do so!
posted by andrewesque at 8:23 AM on March 9, 2011

I've been actually pondering the very same question - shall I learn Japanese or Mandarin? - and while I can't tell you what's best for you, I can tell you how I arrived at my decision.

I personally wanted to study the language that I thought I would enjoy learning the most and would be most likely to excel at. The potential utility of it was also a consideration, but a distant one compared to the first two.

Therefore I chose Mandarin because of the following:

+ My understanding of Japanese is that it is more grammatically complex than Mandarin for a native English speaker. I tend not to like learning complex grammatical rules.

+ The potential "downside" of Mandarin is that it is, as others have mentioned, a tonal language. However, as someone musical who enjoys singing and imitating sounds and voices / accents, the challenge of learning a tonal language actually appeals to me.

+ From a utility standpoint, I foresee having more business dealings related to China than Japan.

As with everything, YMMV, but at least this gives you some ideas about how you personally might approach the decision.
posted by ladybird at 8:24 AM on March 9, 2011

All other things being equal, the challenges of each language are roughly equivalent, so if you don't have a preexisting interest in Japan or China, you should go with Mandarin. It will be more useful down the road.

And just to be clear, the dichotomy set up in your "Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh" question title is false, as both are from Japan.
posted by pts at 9:04 AM on March 9, 2011 [3 favorites]

Throwing in my 2 cents with the already excellent comments so far. I studied both in college and ended up choosing Mandarin as my major and Japanese my minor. While many companies have existing partnerships and business in Japan, much much more are expanding into China. The demand for Mandarin speakers seem to be higher. Even the Japanese are learning Mandarin. My friends in Japan have told me Mandarin has overtaken English as the popular choice for a second language.

Difficulty wise, Mandarin is much easier to learn in my opinion. Not only is Japanese grammar more complex, I find the different politeness levels hard to get used to. While Mandarin can initially be more difficult to pronounce, a good system/teacher can get you up to a comfortable level in a couple of months. I know plenty of people who struggled at first but now have pretty good accents.

Should you choose to pursue both (if you have the interest, I find learning both to be very fun!), learning to read could be a challenge. The Japanese borrowed a lot of Chinese characters but after hundreds of years, these characters don't necessarily mean the same thing in both languages today.
posted by vilandra at 9:16 AM on March 9, 2011

As for usefulness, this will probably depend on what you do for a living and where in the US you live. I mean, if you're an animator living in Seattle or Portland, and your work is informed a lot by Anime/Manga, then yeah, go learn Japanese! If you're an accountant in New York doing a lot of deals with Shanghai, then yeah, go learn Mandarin!

Unless you work in international business (or some other international community like the arts, diplomacy, etc.), your best bet for a useful second language would be a language that is widely spoken in the US. Which, out of your two, neither would be particularly useful. If you wanted to learn an Asian language in particular, Cantonese is probably your best bet if you are in a career where you anticipate dealing a lot with the Chinese immigrant community.

In fact, I'd even venture to say that in many parts of the country, the only really useful language to learn, in terms of general utility, is Spanish - quite a few of my friends who live in places like Texas or California and work with the general public (especially medical personnel) pretty much have to know Spanish. And that demand is probably going to grow before it declines. Spanish is also a lot easier for English speakers to learn than any Asian language.
posted by Sara C. at 9:53 AM on March 9, 2011

I have learned a little bit of both Mandarin and Japanese.

My tiny tiny datapoint is when I watch Jeopardy!, I find my Japanese knowledge more helpful.

That said, if I decided to continue learning - I would pick Mandarin because I am Chinese American and I am culturally made to feel like a heel.
posted by spec80 at 10:03 AM on March 9, 2011

Agreed that Mandarin is more generally useful, unless you have some specific affinity for or business tie to Japanese.

How hard? Depends...for me, spoken Mandarin proved impossible. I was never able to develop an ear for the tonal variations. Obviously, others have less problems. That said, they would both require a lot of work and dedication.

Echoing Sara C, consider Spanish. It's want I've found useful as a USAan.
posted by kjs3 at 10:06 AM on March 9, 2011

I've studied both, and I think which one you want to learn depends on which one is really going to motivate you. Which one has media you're going to want to consume? (TV shows, animation, novels, comic books, movies, etc.) The people I know who are successful language learners in a foreign-language environment--that is, where they are NOT surrounded by speakers of the language--are the ones who've really gotten into the language's media.

That said, I found that Chinese was really hard for me, because I am NOT very aural (tones are difficult for me to reproduce) and I get really frustrated by not being able to write things down (the barrier to literacy in Chinese is really high, and no matter what PRC-raised folks will tell you, things written in pinyin, the romanization system, are meaningless to most Chinese speakers around the world). So for me, Japanese is a better fit -- I'm more motivated by the media, and the writing system means that I can at least limp by in kana (syllabary) while working on my kanji (characters--though I admit that studying Chinese first gave me a nice head start on kanji). I've also found that I seem to be better understood by native listeners when I bumble on in Japanese than in Chinese; I don't know if it's a phonological thing (productive or receptive) or a cultural thing, but it definitely helps me.

For similar reasons, I know a couple people who decided to study Korean, because the writing system is the most straightforward of C/J/K (it's an actual alphabet), and they were into Korean dramas and music.

*If) you are just attempting to learn either language out of no genuine interest, based purely out of a pragmatic decision that the language will be hypothetically useful in the future, I doubt you'll get very far. It's a steep learning curve to try to tackle with no real drive.

Anyway, I don't think anyone can actually answer this for you, but at least people can point out some things for you to think about. :) Good luck.
posted by wintersweet at 10:47 AM on March 9, 2011 [2 favorites]

This also depends how far into the language you want to go.

In terms of usefulness, China is probably a little more useful if you're talking about being useful in a business setting. Difficulty will be roughly equivalent for a native English speaker.

In my anecdotal experience, I would recommend Chinese if you're planning on attaining a beginning or advanced level in the language, and Japanese if you're aiming for something like conversational proficiency.

The usefulness of Chinese is why I'd recommend it at the beginner level. Knowing a few words and phrases always makes a strong first impression, especially in business settings. Given China's economic strength, you're more likely to find yourself doing business with the Chinese in the future when compared with the Japanese.

If you're planning on intermediate level / conversational fluency, I would recommend Japanese instead. In my anecdotal experience, I've found that Chinese have much better levels of spoken English than the Japanese. In business settings, I've had to use my Japanese more often to facilitate conversation. I've never had to resort to my Mandarin when dealing with Chinese in a business setting. A middling level of Chinese brings you less benefit since most likely at this point your spoken Chinese will not be better than their spoken English, while with the Japanese there is a greater possibility that your spoken Japanese may be better than their spoken English.

If you're talking about an advanced level (being able to say, conduct high-level business deals completely in the language), then I would say the usefulness of Chinese once again brings it to the forefront. You won't be limited to larger organizations that are English-friendly and you may be able to find more hidden opportunities. There will most likely be more of these kind of opportunities in China than there will be in Japan.

A lot of what's been said already is also very relevant, ie your interests and where your professional focus is. As someone who's decently fluent in both languages, this has been my experience. Good luck!
posted by C^3 at 12:50 PM on March 9, 2011

I'd recommend Mandarin over Japanese. I live in Japan, so I'm learning Japanese, but there's really not another place in the world where it would be useful. As mentioned above, from a work standpoint, Japan is in decline, having been surpassed by China this year in economic terms. With the conditions as they are, the population of the country is expected to plummet in the next fifty years. China, on the other hand, shows no signs of waning anytime soon. Being able to speak Chinese is most likely going to be a better job skill than being able to speak Japanese.

One difficulty, though, is, as mentioned above, Mandarin is the national language, but it's not, strictly speaking, a common tongue. It's essentially the Beijing dialect of a very, very loosely related group of languages that share the same characters. Pretty much every region in China has a significantly different dialect than Mandarin, though, as mentioned above, everyone supposedly can speak and understand Mandarin as well.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:44 PM on March 9, 2011

Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen.
posted by squalor at 9:59 PM on March 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Japanese major here. You should focus on what language interests you rather than what you think will be the most useful. Asian languages are hard. You're going to need a lot more than a passing interest.

Which one do you want to learn?
posted by reductiondesign at 10:36 PM on March 9, 2011

The OP hasn't responded, but I will point out that his profile says he's in Germany, so the US-relevant advice to learn Spanish (which I do agree is more useful than either Mandarin or Japanese in the US) may not be all that useful to him.
posted by andrewesque at 5:57 AM on March 10, 2011

If you are in a position to take both concurrently for the first semester, do it! There's a lot that's cross-applicable between the languages and it will give you an idea about which you truly love. (I did this and ended up learning Mandarin, BTW.) It'll be a bit more work, but you'll come out knowing what makes you excited, which is the best indicator of gaining real fluency.

Just as a general note: Taking the summers off from learning either Japanese or Mandarin will be much more detrimental than you expect. Since neither is Germanic or Romantic the sounds drop out of your mind much more quickly. Even if it's just watching programming in the language, make sure you keep it up over any breaks you have.
posted by stoneweaver at 8:56 AM on March 10, 2011

thanks for all the great responses! and for what its worth, i already speak fluent spanish!
posted by freddymetz at 8:58 AM on March 10, 2011

And how come nobody has recommended Korean as an alternative? :)
posted by freddymetz at 8:59 AM on March 10, 2011

My bad, wintersweet did mention it once ;)
posted by freddymetz at 9:00 AM on March 10, 2011

In your title, both Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh are Japanese! Am I not following something?

Japanese words are definitely a lot easily to pronounce, however, to get the rhythm/intonation right, it still requires some practice. Japanese grammar, as I've heard from both Germanic/Latin-based language speakers and Chinese speakers, gets harder and harder the more you learn it. And the sentence structure is very different from SVO form in English, though you might be a German or French speaker. Since you speak Spanish fluently, you'll find it very pleasant to omit pronouns when speaking both Japanese and Chinese.

Although many say Chinese is hard to learn because of the accents and pronounciations, but you wouldn't believe how many anglophones/francophones, I have encountered, who have above-average accent. The key to that was they were surrounded by Chinese speakers for a few months.

As a native Mandrin speaker (was learning a bit of Japanese on my own for a while), my skewed opinion is that Chinese grammar can't get any simpler (compared to English, French and Spanish, no verb conjugations, no tenses, no gender nouns, etc.). Alternatively, you could choose Cantonese (good to use in all chinatowns worldwide!!!). It might be slightly easily for foreigners to pronounce since there are less exotic sounds, however 6 (or 9, to be a perfectionist jerk) tones compared to standard mandarin, only 4 (or 5 if you may, the fifth is the easiest). Yet, it remains a mystery why there are a lot of non-Chinese speaking people excel Cantonese better than Mandarin.

For Japanese characters, conservatively speaking, the most commonly used 1,000 Kanji (2,000 if you are ambitious) + 50 hiraganas + 50 katakanas.

For Chinese, roughly 2,000 to 3,000, and I say reading newspapers, novels are a piece of cake.

If you think that's a vast set of vocab, think about the for ever expanding English set (tens times to that, you probably need to know at least 6000 words to be able to communicate well enough)!!!

I can't predict economical use of the language, just pick the one that sounds cooler to you / interests you the most. Cultural wise, both are rich and very worthwhile to discover.
posted by easilyconfused at 4:29 PM on March 18, 2011