Japanese? Chinese? A personal view

As a Chinese speaker, I feel that I have an edge over other language speakers in terms of learning Japanese. First, both Chinese and Japanese contain Chinese characters. However, Japanese is not as intimidating as Chinese is, because it combines Chinese characters with Hiragana and Katakana, two simpler versions of alphabets in Japanese. This is much more learner-friendly than just pure character-structured languages like Chinese. Second, with regard to pronunciation, Japanese does not have such a strong emphasis on tones as does Chinese. Chinese has a wider range of syllables than Japanese does, which means you can spend less time mastering conversational Japanese. Third, governed by a delicate grammar system, you can easily understand the structure of a sentence in Japanese, whereas, in Chinese, you can easily get confused with its grammar due to its flexibility.

In a nutshell, I strongly recommend Japanese to language learners who are into oriental languages.

Hong Guo, Year 13