I am a conversational Japanese language speaker in that I am able to converse with other Japanese speakers at a normal pace in common cadence. As a non-native speaker, however, I don’t consider myself fluent, although to non-Japanese language speakers it may seem that I am. Having to slog through my brain for the right word from time to time during conversation attests, at least to me, to my deficient fluency.
The above stated, my Japanese in standard Tokyo-ben () is good enough for what I use it for, and I have a passable standard accent. I plan to take the final level (N1) of the Japanese language proficiency test (JLPT) sometime in 2014, but then that will be it.
Lately, I have begun to feel that Japanese has become less useful in the business world than Mandarin, and am therefore considering learning Mandarin.
At my age (52) and sitting here at this moment, learning another difficult language doesn’t fill me with as much joy as it used to; this may change once I get into it as I do love learning languages.
My questions to those here who do speak Mandarin, and preferably those who speak both Mandarin and Japanese (even sven, is that you??) are:
Do you think it is easier or more difficult for someone who has spent the last 8 to 10 years learning Japanese to pick up Mandarin?
Is the structure of Mandarin similar to Japanese?
Off-hand, I presume learning to write Mandarin would be simpler than learning to write Japanese because of the single syllabary of Mandarin as opposed to the 4 (kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji) that I use every day when writing Japanese, but is that so?
Are there certified proficiency exams for Mandarin as there are for Japanese?
Can you recommend an institution for learning Mandarin? I don’t care for online courses or digital audio courses. Live, face-to-face classes work best for me.
Mods, I didn’t know where to place this, so move if you must.
I don’t speak Japanese, but I can give some advice.
Learning a third language is always easier than the second, so your Japanese will help there. It will also help with the writing. Chinese grammar is a LOT easier than Japanese grammar, but pronunciation is harder.
There are exams- the HSK is the big one.
That said, I don’t really think speaking Chinese (beyond greetings and polite phrases) offers the edge in employment that people think it does. It is very useful if you actually live in China, but outside of that it’s mostly a novelty. There are millions and millions of English speaking Chinese people.
In my experience, Chinese was extremely difficult at the beginning, primarily because of the reading/writing as well as the tones. Reading and writing got a little easier but was always a challenge for me; tones took quite a while to really grasp but it simply sinks in after a while and becomes a non-issue. I found Mandarin a slog at the start but that it got significantly easier to increase my proficiency later, whereas my superficial impression of Japanese is that it starts off as a slog and becomes just slightly less of a slog later.
Are you looking for places where you could move to for classes in Mandarin, or places near you? Based on my experience, I think starting off in a Western school to get the basics followed by immersion may be the best strategy. I was not really impressed by the teaching methods in China for beginners.
In my business, we have a number of Japanese pharmaceutical companies as clients. It has benefited us immensely (ie, allowed us to cut through a lot of red-tape and politics) that I speak Japanese.
Recently, a number of our American clients have begun to partner with Chinese agencies and labs, and others are simply not renewing contracts with Japanese equivalents. I am sensing a trend, and although I estimate 4 years before I am equipped with the necessary language skills to take advantage of it, I figure there’s no time like the present to get started.
Yes, I am looking for local schools, preferably.
Immersion is primarily how I learned Japanese, and it definitely sped up my pace of learning, so I’d plan to do this again if I decide to move forward with learning Mandarin.
I studied Madarin pretty intensively in college, through upper division courses. Did a study abroad in Beijing, then later lived in Japan for a year and learned enough Japanese to get by handily.
The languages are not related, so the grammar and sounds of one language don’t translate to the other. There is no syllabary in Mandarin – it’s all characters.
I found the grammar and pronunciation of Madarin to be straightforward and easy to learn. The really foreign thing about Madarin is the tonal nature. In Mandarin, a word is a sound + a tone. This is the major stumbling block for speakers of non-tonal languages (like English and Japanese) for learning Mandarin. It was a slog at first, but I remember the specific moment in Beijing when it sort of “clicked” in my brain, and it got somewhat easier after that.
Chinese characters will be easy to learn because you already know the radicals from Kanji, and the meaning is often the same or similar, and Chinese characters have been simplified from the Kanji style, (but use radicals that will already be familiar to you).
As **even sven **pointed out, and it’s absolutely true, there are millions of Chinese who speak fluent English, so it won’t necessarily be an advantage in business.
That said, it’s a fun language to learn (if you, like me, are the sort of person who simply enjoys learning a new language for its own sake) and I have been able to impress party crowds and co-workers by rattling off seemingly fluent Chinese, reading characters, or translating snatches of Chinese from TV or movies.
Sorry about that. I am in New Jersey.