okay so if you know me well enough, or maybe if you followed me on twitter for a verrrrry long time, you'd have known one fact about me:
i hate chinese a lot. not just hate hate, but the kind of hate where being asked to study chinese is equivalent to asking me to drive in a car with spoilt brakes. yes chinese kills me. (okay totally irrelevant example)
and again, if you know me, you'd know another fact about me:
i love japanese. i have a really, really strong passion for the language, the culture, the people, etc. no, my liking for jdramas/jpop did not influence my passion for japanese. i started learning japanese due to interest before i got hooked on the japanese entertainment sector.
after learning chinese ever since i started attending school and japanese since 2012 (did not attend lessons in 2013 because of o's but i self-studied occasionally), i can truthfully say japanese is easier than chinese (even though the people in my japanese class says chinese is easier lol. never understood them)
why?
firstly, you have to deal with the 4 tones in chinese.
pronounce a word wrongly and you have a totally different meaning. i wanted to insert an example here but i can't think of any chinese words at this moment so i'll leave it to your imagination.
but anyway, back to topic, the tones. for japanese you don't have specific tones for specific words, unlike chinese. you speak japanese like how you speak english. which makes it really simple to pick up. well that is true for me at least, since i never spoke chinese in a conversation with friends in my entire life, because i could never pronounce chinese properly in my entire life. (yay for english)
yeah, yeah. if you learnt mandarin since you started attending school, these pinyin tones won't bother you at all. but from a foreigner's perspective? that shit is hard. every single time i see a foreigner talk about difficulties in learning chinese, there's always bound to be this difficulty: the tones.
and you don't face this problem in japanese.
next, japanese has their own alphabet, hiragana and katakana.
these alphabets will never change. just like english's ABCs. yes, japanese has chinese characters called kanji too, which is currently my biggest problem because i hate chinese. but i'm working towards that (right now, the more kanji readings i learn, the lesser chinese readings i know) anyway to explain my point, here's an example sentence in japanese.
昨日ラーメンを食べた。
(I ate ramen yesterday)
^ See how in a japanese sentence, there will be hiragana for sure? and katakana occasionally. and of course kanji. but my main point is.. hiragana is there to save you from kanji, since all japanese students/japanese would know how to read all 46 hiragana and 46 katakana characters, just like how all english speakers know their alphabets for sure.
now, the chinese version would be
昨天我吃拉面
(I ate ramen yesterday)
*Please pardon my chinese if it's phrased wrongly or i typed wrong characters.
^ for chinese, a sentence would completely be in chinese characters. don't know how to read a chinese character? you're doomed.
in a way, hiragana is like the 'pinyin' in chinese. don't know kanji? simple. replace kanji with hiragana.
The japanese example above can be written in full hiragana as well.
きのうラーメンをたべた。
or let's say you only know limited kanjis? write those kanjis you don't know in hiragana, and those you know in kanji!
きのうラーメンを食べた。
as opposed to that, if you type pinyin in a chinese sentence.. that'd be plain weird.
zuo tian wo chi la mian
in a japanese paragraph, you can replace kanji with hiragana and it'll still fit perfectly. but now imagine a chinese paragraph with a mix of chinese characters and pinyin. imagine how weird and inconsistent it'd look.
and this is why japanese is easier than chinese.
for my third and last point, it's gonna be a rant about chinese. so it's not really a point at all.
i just can't express my thoughts in chinese, whereas in japanese it's way, way easier.
earlier today, i needed to text my Chinese supervisor regarding work. I needed to take an off day to settle my poly fees. i spent 20 minutes trying to translate myself into chinese, and i broke down. you may proceed to laugh at me because i cried just by typing chinese.
but anyway, i spent 7 minutes trying to figure out how to translate this phrase, 'by 13th March'. what i was trying to say was 'I need to complete the tasks by 13th March'. google translate was of no help. i felt so helpless and that triggered my tears. (I felt like crying before that though, but not that serious yet, until this part)
while brainstorming and killing brain cells trying to translate that phrase, the only translation that came to my head was japanese. i could only think of １３日まで (By the 13th) but nothing in chinese.
do you know how helpless i felt? i learnt chinese for 13 years (assuming i started school at the age of 3) and japanese for around 1 year (excluding self-study in 2013) but i could not even translate that damn phrase to chinese.
which reminds me, i have lost count of the number of times i broke down because of chinese. there were times after my chinese home tutor left, i broke down. because i did not understand a single shit in a chinese comprehension, and could not answer a single shitty question regarding the passage.
how did i manage to do chinese examination papers for 4 years in secondary school then? well, i never understood what i was writing, lol. i picked my answers randomly for MCQs, and for open-ended comprehension questions, i copied an entire paragraph from the passage as my answer, and left questions that could not be copied from passages blank.
worst of all, my chinese teacher did not let me to drop to a lower standard of chinese, CLB. she said my standard is not that bad and i can handle o level chinese. lol so never understanding anything is called 'able to handle'.
there were times when i completed my chinese paper within 30-40 minutes, when the paper was 1h30mins long. and the rest of the class would only be completing their papers after 1h30mins. some even complained of the lack of time.
eventually, i scored a C5 for chinese o's which was in june. there was a retake in november as a second chance for everyone not pleased with their june results. i did not want to suffer anymore, so i decided not to register for the retake even though i scored a C. by the way, this C5 was the best result i ever scored. my school's chinese HOD called me and we talked for 30 minutes and i refused to take her advice about retaking the chinese examination. she gave up persuading me eventually, after i told her this: 'i rather see a C5 on my certificate (which would make my certificate ugly, by the way) than retake chinese'
oh and i never dared to order food from hawker centres/food courts till around 12 years old all because of one simple reason: chinese. being the no-confidence-girl i am, i was really scared people queuing behind me judged me for pronouncing chinese wrongly, and stuff like that.
even now, at the age of 16, i do not dare to buy laksa on my own because i have no idea how to tell the stall owner i don't want the stuff in laksa in chinese. sad thing is even when i'm craving laksa, i was never able to buy it because of the language barrier. and i've always stuck to the easy way out, which is forever buying chicken rice because all i needed to say was '白鸡饭，dabao' and nothing else. (yes i have no idea how to type dabao in chinese). if i don't eat chicken rice, i'd probably be buying malay/indian food because i can speak english to the stall owners.
to conclude,
yes japanese may be hard in the beginning (memorising hiragana and katakana, etc) but once you got the hang of it, everything just flows to you naturally. there are even some chinese characters where i have totally forgotten the chinese reading, and only knowing the japanese reading no matter how hard i try to recall the chinese reading.
right now, i totally do not read any Jeanette articles as long as it's in chinese, because i'd have no idea how to read them. i'm serious. i'll only think of the japanese reading. i'm sorry Jeanette, but i still love you depsite the language barrier.
i hate chinese a lot. not just hate hate, but the kind of hate where being asked to study chinese is equivalent to asking me to drive in a car with spoilt brakes. yes chinese kills me. (okay totally irrelevant example)
and again, if you know me, you'd know another fact about me:
i love japanese. i have a really, really strong passion for the language, the culture, the people, etc. no, my liking for jdramas/jpop did not influence my passion for japanese. i started learning japanese due to interest before i got hooked on the japanese entertainment sector.
after learning chinese ever since i started attending school and japanese since 2012 (did not attend lessons in 2013 because of o's but i self-studied occasionally), i can truthfully say japanese is easier than chinese (even though the people in my japanese class says chinese is easier lol. never understood them)
why?
firstly, you have to deal with the 4 tones in chinese.
pronounce a word wrongly and you have a totally different meaning. i wanted to insert an example here but i can't think of any chinese words at this moment so i'll leave it to your imagination.
but anyway, back to topic, the tones. for japanese you don't have specific tones for specific words, unlike chinese. you speak japanese like how you speak english. which makes it really simple to pick up. well that is true for me at least, since i never spoke chinese in a conversation with friends in my entire life, because i could never pronounce chinese properly in my entire life. (yay for english)
yeah, yeah. if you learnt mandarin since you started attending school, these pinyin tones won't bother you at all. but from a foreigner's perspective? that shit is hard. every single time i see a foreigner talk about difficulties in learning chinese, there's always bound to be this difficulty: the tones.
and you don't face this problem in japanese.
next, japanese has their own alphabet, hiragana and katakana.
these alphabets will never change. just like english's ABCs. yes, japanese has chinese characters called kanji too, which is currently my biggest problem because i hate chinese. but i'm working towards that (right now, the more kanji readings i learn, the lesser chinese readings i know) anyway to explain my point, here's an example sentence in japanese.
昨日ラーメンを食べた。
(I ate ramen yesterday)
^ See how in a japanese sentence, there will be hiragana for sure? and katakana occasionally. and of course kanji. but my main point is.. hiragana is there to save you from kanji, since all japanese students/japanese would know how to read all 46 hiragana and 46 katakana characters, just like how all english speakers know their alphabets for sure.
now, the chinese version would be
昨天我吃拉面
(I ate ramen yesterday)
*Please pardon my chinese if it's phrased wrongly or i typed wrong characters.
^ for chinese, a sentence would completely be in chinese characters. don't know how to read a chinese character? you're doomed.
in a way, hiragana is like the 'pinyin' in chinese. don't know kanji? simple. replace kanji with hiragana.
The japanese example above can be written in full hiragana as well.
きのうラーメンをたべた。
or let's say you only know limited kanjis? write those kanjis you don't know in hiragana, and those you know in kanji!
きのうラーメンを食べた。
as opposed to that, if you type pinyin in a chinese sentence.. that'd be plain weird.
zuo tian wo chi la mian
in a japanese paragraph, you can replace kanji with hiragana and it'll still fit perfectly. but now imagine a chinese paragraph with a mix of chinese characters and pinyin. imagine how weird and inconsistent it'd look.
and this is why japanese is easier than chinese.
for my third and last point, it's gonna be a rant about chinese. so it's not really a point at all.
i just can't express my thoughts in chinese, whereas in japanese it's way, way easier.
earlier today, i needed to text my Chinese supervisor regarding work. I needed to take an off day to settle my poly fees. i spent 20 minutes trying to translate myself into chinese, and i broke down. you may proceed to laugh at me because i cried just by typing chinese.
but anyway, i spent 7 minutes trying to figure out how to translate this phrase, 'by 13th March'. what i was trying to say was 'I need to complete the tasks by 13th March'. google translate was of no help. i felt so helpless and that triggered my tears. (I felt like crying before that though, but not that serious yet, until this part)
while brainstorming and killing brain cells trying to translate that phrase, the only translation that came to my head was japanese. i could only think of １３日まで (By the 13th) but nothing in chinese.
do you know how helpless i felt? i learnt chinese for 13 years (assuming i started school at the age of 3) and japanese for around 1 year (excluding self-study in 2013) but i could not even translate that damn phrase to chinese.
which reminds me, i have lost count of the number of times i broke down because of chinese. there were times after my chinese home tutor left, i broke down. because i did not understand a single shit in a chinese comprehension, and could not answer a single shitty question regarding the passage.
how did i manage to do chinese examination papers for 4 years in secondary school then? well, i never understood what i was writing, lol. i picked my answers randomly for MCQs, and for open-ended comprehension questions, i copied an entire paragraph from the passage as my answer, and left questions that could not be copied from passages blank.
worst of all, my chinese teacher did not let me to drop to a lower standard of chinese, CLB. she said my standard is not that bad and i can handle o level chinese. lol so never understanding anything is called 'able to handle'.
there were times when i completed my chinese paper within 30-40 minutes, when the paper was 1h30mins long. and the rest of the class would only be completing their papers after 1h30mins. some even complained of the lack of time.
eventually, i scored a C5 for chinese o's which was in june. there was a retake in november as a second chance for everyone not pleased with their june results. i did not want to suffer anymore, so i decided not to register for the retake even though i scored a C. by the way, this C5 was the best result i ever scored. my school's chinese HOD called me and we talked for 30 minutes and i refused to take her advice about retaking the chinese examination. she gave up persuading me eventually, after i told her this: 'i rather see a C5 on my certificate (which would make my certificate ugly, by the way) than retake chinese'
oh and i never dared to order food from hawker centres/food courts till around 12 years old all because of one simple reason: chinese. being the no-confidence-girl i am, i was really scared people queuing behind me judged me for pronouncing chinese wrongly, and stuff like that.
even now, at the age of 16, i do not dare to buy laksa on my own because i have no idea how to tell the stall owner i don't want the stuff in laksa in chinese. sad thing is even when i'm craving laksa, i was never able to buy it because of the language barrier. and i've always stuck to the easy way out, which is forever buying chicken rice because all i needed to say was '白鸡饭，dabao' and nothing else. (yes i have no idea how to type dabao in chinese). if i don't eat chicken rice, i'd probably be buying malay/indian food because i can speak english to the stall owners.
to conclude,
yes japanese may be hard in the beginning (memorising hiragana and katakana, etc) but once you got the hang of it, everything just flows to you naturally. there are even some chinese characters where i have totally forgotten the chinese reading, and only knowing the japanese reading no matter how hard i try to recall the chinese reading.
right now, i totally do not read any Jeanette articles as long as it's in chinese, because i'd have no idea how to read them. i'm serious. i'll only think of the japanese reading. i'm sorry Jeanette, but i still love you depsite the language barrier.
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