somewhere in time

Conjugations

Because Chinese has nothing but Chinese characters, there are no conjugations of any kind whatsoever. This means that you miss out on all the fun you get to have with okurigana.

For instance, if you want to negate something, just add 「不」. It doesn’t matter if it’s an adjective, verb, or noun. It’s almost too easy.

Chinese
好。- Good.
不好。- Not good.

In contrast, Japanese has separate rules for two types of adjectives, nouns, and two types of verbs. You also have two exception verbs and two exception adjectives. English is probably even worse because you need to match the right tense to the subject and other stuff I probably couldn’t even explain.

This tacking on character trick works for all sorts of things that would be complicated grammar in any other language. You want to say something is “too much”? Just add 太. So since “small” is 小, too small becomes 太小. You want to say, “not too small”, just add 不: 不太小! You want to say that you’re in the process of doing something? Add 在. With Chinese, using a character based writing system actually makes sense! You can’t make this stuff any easier folks. You don’t have to conjugate and then conjugate the conjugation, and then conjugate the conjugated conjugation like you do in Japanese.

Language gone wrong

行きたくなくもないけど、行けなくならなかったら、行かないよ。
- I wrote this and even I don’t know what it means.

Still, I’m expected the other shoe to drop as I learn more Chinese. There has to be a price to pay for not having conjugations. For example, I’m already confused about 了 because it supposedly expresses a completed action but I see it in non-completed actions as well. I’ve also seen past actions without 了. I don’t get it.

Tones

A number of people have told me about how tones are so difficult in Chinese. Now that I’m actually learning them, I don’t think tones are that difficult. I mean there’s only four and I have a sneaking suspicion that the second is pretty much the same as the third. I heard that Taiwanese has 7 tones. Now that sounds difficult. I don’t even know how that is possible. Is tone 7 like the chromatic scale or something? I can see the teacher saying, “No, idiot! Your tone is completely wrong! It’s supposed to be a harmonic minor, not melodic! And the third is flat!”

Anyway, I think having all the tones decided makes things clearer than Japanese in many ways. Japanese people have this strange belief that Japanese is completely flat but in reality, if you don’t get the intonation right, you sound like crap. If Japanese is completely flat, how come you can get an accent dictionary that shows the pitches for each word? With Japanese, the only way to get that perfect native intonation is to just imitate native speakers. Not very helpful, I know, which is why Chinese is easier to understand because it’s all laid out for you.

Even so, to make the comparison fair, I need to mention that tones in Chinese can sometimes change. I’ve figured out that while 不 is usually fourth tone, if the next character is fourth tone too, it changes into the second tone. I don’t know if this is a rule, just something I’ve noticed along the way.

不知道。- bù zhī dao.
不是。- bú shì.

Kanji

Aaaahhh, kanji, my favorite topic. With a language like Chinese, it actually makes sense!

I think a small number of characters have maybe a max of 2 readings. Even then, it’s because it means something completely different like 觉, which is “jiào” when it means “to sleep” and “jué” when it means “to think”. Let’s compare that to Japanese, which for instance has like a million readings for 「生」. What the hell, 「なま」 doesn’t even originate from Chinese! Why do you write it in Chinese?!

Chinese is so much simpler. The only beef I have with Chinese is simplified, traditional, blah blah, blah… just pick one! Don’t make me have to learn both! The Japanese government successfully mandated a new set of characters.

Counters

Whoever invented counters should be shot. They add nothing useful to the language yet is such an enormous pain. The worst part is, all the counters, for some reason, are all completely different for each language. For clothes, it’s 件 for Chinese and 着 for Japanese. It’s insane.

Still, if I had to compare, I would say Japanese is worse because they have all those crazy irregular readings like 「ついたち」, 「ひとり」, and 「はたち」. But then Chinese has 两, which is not as bad but still really annoying. I can never tell whether its going to be ニ or 两.

Conclusion

In my opinion, Chinese is really easy and approachable for beginners as long as you’re not tone-deaf. I can say with confidence that it’s a lot easier than Japanese in the beginning. There are so many traps that you can fall into with Japanese in the beginning that just doesn’t seem to exist in Chinese. Common pitfalls include learning only hiragana/katakana or even just romaji, overusing the topic particle, learning the polite and dictionary forms backwards, thinking that 「だ」 is the same as 「です」, etc., etc., etc.

With Chinese, while you have Pinyin, I think Chinese teachers are much better at making sure students learn kanji. Plus, I haven’t seen too much regarding politeness levels outside of 你 vs 您 (so far). I doubt that Chinese has about 10 different ways of saying “sorry” like Japanese. （ごめん、ごめんなさい、すまん、すまない、すいません、すみません、申し訳ない、恐縮です、恐れ入ります）

Still, I’m going to hold off on making any definite conclusions because I have the sneaking suspicion that Chinese seems easy only in the beginning. If it’s one thing I learned, it’s that there’s no free lunch in language. If one thing is easy, it’s going to make something else hard.

Here are some replies to the post.

I believe Chinese is harder to learn, a few of my friends who is learning Japanese and decided to give Chinese a go, all failed horribly. The reason for this is, at least I believe is, that Chinese characters doesn’t really have any written law for them, and in order to write fluent Chinese, you need to memorizes 10k characters. Japanese hiragana provides an alternative to that. And there is more then 10 ways to say hello in Chinese, if you count the different dialects (54 of them in total I believe).

Well, I’ve studied Japanese and some Mandarin, and I can tell you that, for the most part, Mandarin is indeed easier. Like you’ve mentioned, most characters have only one pronunciation, very few with two. Not only that, but the characters tend to be much easier to read and understand through the use of radicals, as use of phonetic and lexical components is far more common. The grammar also seems a bit simpler, and much closer to English as times than Japanese, especially with the focus on word order. 了, though. I have never hated a character like I’ve hated 了. I suspect it’s the reason I’m dropping Mandarin for Korean as my third language. As for tones, don’t be deceived. Second and third tones are most definitely not the same. The phenomenon you noted with fourth tone changing to second, as well as any other tone changes, is known as tone sandhi, and there are definite rules to how it functions. And finally, as far as counters go, most languages are crazy with them, even English, upon examination. It’s just kind of something to get used to, I suppose.