Should I Learn Chinese or Japanese?

Choose by reason first. If your partner, family, job or planned move points to Taiwan, learn Mandarin. If it points to Japan, learn Japanese. If you have no destination yet and just want to pick the easier one, there is no clear winner, because the two are hard in opposite places. Mandarin is harder to pronounce and easier to put into sentences. Japanese is easier to pronounce and harder to put into sentences, and its writing mixes three scripts.

This guide compares them on what matters to an English-speaking adult. If you already know Japanese and are asking about characters, go instead to Chinese vs Japanese characters.

What the two have in common

Both are far from English. The US Foreign Service Institute places Mandarin and Japanese in the same most demanding category for English speakers, together with Korean and Arabic. Both take hundreds of hours before you can hold a simple conversation and thousands for professional use. Both reward steady study over bursts. Neither has many words that look like English, though Japanese has a large set of loanwords from English written in katakana, which gives it a head start on some vocabulary.

Sounds

Mandarin has tones. A syllable such as ma changes meaning with pitch: 媽 (mā, mother), 馬 (mǎ, horse). Most English speakers need a good while to hear and produce them. Beyond tones, there are a few consonants with no English equivalent, such as the retroflex zh, ch and sh.

Japanese has a small, regular set of sounds, which are close to Spanish or Italian vowels. There is a pitch accent, but getting it slightly wrong rarely stops you being understood the way a wrong tone can in Mandarin. On sounds alone, Japanese is easier for most English speakers.

Writing

Chinese uses one system: characters. In Taiwan these are Traditional characters, and the phonetic aid in schools is Zhuyin. Every word has to be learned in characters, and you cannot sound out a new one. It is a long road, but a single one.

Japanese uses three: two kana syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which are small and learnable in a few weeks, and kanji, which are characters borrowed from Chinese. Kanji often carry several readings, so you learn a character and then learn how it is read in different words. Japanese shortens some kanji from their Traditional forms, so even the character set differs from Taiwan’s: Japanese writes 學 as 学 and 體 as 体, the same as Simplified.

For a beginner, Japanese is easy to start, since you can read kana quickly, and slower to finish, since kanji readings are many. Chinese starts with pinyin or Zhuyin, which takes a few weeks, but characters follow at once and there is no shortcut through them.

Grammar

Chinese grammar is light. Verbs do not conjugate. There is no tense, gender or article, and no plural ending on most nouns. Word order follows English in the basic case: 我吃飯 (wǒ chī fàn, I eat). The difficulty is measure words and a set of particles. Our piece on whether Chinese has tenses shows how little changes.

Japanese grammar is heavier. Verbs conjugate for tense, politeness and mood. The verb comes at the end of the sentence, the word order differs from English, and particles mark the role of each noun. There are also layers of politeness that you have to choose between in every conversation. Adults often find the grammar the hardest part of Japanese.

How soon is each useful

This is where the languages differ most for a working adult.

• Japanese lets you read signs and menus in kana quickly and produce short polite sentences early. Reading real text takes much longer, because of kanji.
• Mandarin is slower to start because of tones and characters, but its grammar lets you build new sentences from a small set of patterns, so speaking progress can feel fast once the sounds are in place.

For Mandarin, TOCFL gives official suggested hours outside a Chinese-speaking region: 240 to 480 for Level 1 and 480 to 720 for Level 2. That is a useful yardstick for planning. We discuss the same question in how long it takes to learn Mandarin, and how hard each part is in is Chinese hard to learn.

A short note on Korean

Many readers searching for this are really choosing between three. Korean’s alphabet, hangul, can be learned in a few days. Its grammar is closer to Japanese than to Chinese: verbs come last and conjugate, and there are speech levels. So it combines the easy writing of kana with the heavy grammar of Japanese, and has none of Chinese’s tones, though its consonants have distinctions English lacks. If grammar frightens you more than sounds, Chinese suits you. If tones frighten you more than conjugation, Japanese may suit you better.

How to choose

Ask these questions in order.

1. Is there a person or place? A partner, in-laws, a job, a move. If yes, choose that language.
2. Which do you want to read? If you want to read Taiwanese literature, newspapers or signs, Chinese. If it is manga, games or Japanese novels, Japanese.
3. What do you tolerate better, tones or conjugation? Most people dislike one more than the other.
4. Is there a way to test cheaply? Spend two weeks on each with free resources and notice which you keep opening.

If you choose Mandarin for Taiwan, you will want Traditional characters. See Traditional vs Simplified Chinese for why that choice matters, and start with the pinyin chart or Zhuyin chart on your first day.

Related reading

• Is Chinese hard to learn?
• Chinese vs Japanese characters
• Traditional vs Simplified Chinese
• How long does it take to learn Mandarin?