Learn to Speak Japanese and Chinese

With the growth of the Chinese and Japanese economies expanding wildly compared to the west. The opportunity for business and employment in these countries should not be underestimated.

If you see your future, working in these countries it would be a valuable asset to learn how to speak the language. The obvious question before taking your next step would be which language should I learn first, Chinese or Japanese? I would say learn them both. Obviously, your first choice is going to based on what country you intend to work in.

The Japanese language, like all languages is about listening and repeating words and creating sentences. Also like many other languages, to learn Japanese correctly you must learn the grammar and with Japanese learning about the culture and Japanese writing is essential.

Learning to write in Japanese is going to be easier than with Chinese. Japanese words are a mixture of complex characters called kanji and simple characters called kana. Knowing a few of the most used kanji and a good understanding of kana will certainly enable you to speak to Japanese people and be understood in the way broken English sounds to English speaking people.

As far as the actual sounds of the words you are speaking, compared to speaking Chinese, Japanese is relatively easy to speak. There are no tones to learn like there are with the Chinese language and no difficult to pronounce words or sounds.

Chinese is definitely going to be a more challenging language to learn. As well as learning thousand of characters known as Hanzi you also have to learn to speak with different sounding tones and know what those specific tones mean and how to mix different tones together when speaking.

Each individual sound you make when you speak in Chinese can have many meanings and so you need to learn how different sounds interact with each other so as to communicate the correct meaning. On top of all that, there are hundreds of dialects to consider, which, because its a dialect will require a slightly different tone to the spoken sound.

Another thing to consider before you choose which of these two languages to learn is that in China, English is the second language and is taught in schools and Chinese people like to speak English to foreigners.

Japan does not promote the speaking of English and would prefer to promote the mother tongue.

So if you want a challenge then Chinese is the way to go. If you want to work in Japan then I would strongly recommend learning to speak the Japanese language. You can work in China with rudimentary knowledge of the Chinese language but if you want to know what the Chinese are saying about you, then learn the language.

The choice is yours.

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