Name: Should You Learn Chinese OR Japanese?
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T18:14:04.000Z
Duration: 8 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

So, if you clicked on this video, chances are you want to learn an East Asian language.

Both Chinese and Japanese are completely fascinating languages to the eyes of a westerner.

I mean, they both sound and especially look completely different.

But yet, we're still seeing more examples of them reaching into our pop culture, like Chinese being used in memes more and more and Chinese songs becoming popular.

I don't think I even need to talk about anime, where the appeal isn't just cool-looking cartoons, you know, but even more so, I would say how the language sounds, how, you know, elegant it is.

罪を受けて当然な悪人が心臓麻痺で死んでいく裏で、そうすれば、確実に世界は良い方向に進んでいく。そして僕は、新世界の神となれ。

Now, if you ever thought about studying an East Asian language, you know, you might have also wondered, which one of these should I choose?

Now, I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna try to give you a fair comparison that might help you choose between them.

So, first of all, the writing systems, which is something that immediately catches the eye of anyone who's ever come to contact with either Chinese or Japanese.

The writing system in both of these languages requires you to know between 1,500 and 2,500 characters to understand, for example, 95% of what you read on the internet, 90% of what you read in the newspapers, provided that it's not a highly specialized topic, which, I mean, 1,500 and 2,500 both can sound like a lot, but I can assure you, though, the characters aren't random.

The more characters you memorize, the easier it becomes to learn new ones and recognize patterns between them.

Like, for example, the Japanese character for sea, 海, and the Japanese character for pond, 池, both have these three dots, which symbolizes water, that it has something to do with water.

Or that the Chinese characters, 海 and 江, both sound similar because of this part of the character.

My point is, though, you will need to learn roughly the same amount of characters in both languages if you want to become fluent, so don't think that you need to learn less in one and more in the other, it's roughly the same amount of daily use characters.

However, rest your mind, and I feel like this is one of the things that a lot of people don't realize, is that you don't actually need to learn how to write them, because usually, you know, even native speakers, they type out the characters, you know?

You can just download a Chinese or Japanese keyboard and type it out in Roman letters, and then the keyboard will automatically, like, let you choose.

You don't need to remember the strokes, you know, like, when's the last time you wrote somebody a letter?

The one difference, though, between Japanese and Chinese writing systems is that Japanese also has hiragana and katakana, which are syllabaries, you know?

It's basically a writing system in which you can sound out the words without having to use Chinese characters, because, you know, both Japanese and Chinese use Chinese characters, but you can't actually read any coherent text unless it's something specifically written in a simplified way for children.

For Chinese, Taiwan has something similar, which is called bo pu mo fu, which is also, like, roughly, like, 40 symbols representing each letter, but that is only used in Taiwan and not in mainland China or Hong Kong or Singapore, okay?

Moving on to something that actually does make a big difference, which is Chinese tones and Japanese pitch accent.

The pronunciation in Chinese for beginners is oftentimes difficult to grasp because of each word having a tone.

Now, change the tone, and you also change the meaning of the word.

For example, shì with a flat tone means poem, but shì with a falling and rising tone means shit.

As you can see, the meaning can change quite drastically.

Some people would argue that when you're a foreigner speaking to Chinese people, your tones don't matter as much, because the Chinese people, they'll just take your words with a grain of salt and try to, you know, guess what you mean based on context, but I feel like that is the case only when talking about simple topics, because when you start talking about more difficult topics, that's when you really need to start using and listening for tones to avoid miscomprehension, you know?

With Japanese, there is something similar but far less important than in Chinese, and it's called pitch accent.

That can also sometimes change the meaning of the word.

Like, for example, amē with a low-high pitch accent means rain, but amē with a high-low pitch accent means candy.

However, distinguishing the meaning of individual words based on what pitch accent you put on them is far less common in Japanese than it is in Chinese.

Every word still has its own proper way to be pronounced with pitch accent, so if you want to be fluent and sound like a Japanese speaker, you will need to pay attention to it.

However, you can go in your Japanese learning journey past N1, which is the highest level, without ever learning pitch accent.

During my years of studying both languages, and I would say most learners would agree with me, I have concluded that

Japanese is easier to get into because of, let's say, easier pronunciation, but gets harder as you study on an intermediate or more advanced level because of grammar.

On the other hand, Chinese is a lot tougher to get into because of, you know, the intricate pronunciation, not only the tones but also the consonants, but once you get a hang of the pronunciation, it actually gets easier because the grammar is not that hard and it's pretty intuitive.

On top of that, Chinese doesn't use honorifics, so the sentences don't change based on what kind of politeness level you want to express to the listener, it's just always the same, very similar to English, whereas in Japanese, you know, honorifics, the level of how much polite you want to be affect the word choice, affect the sentence endings, affect the way you start talking to someone, you know, it has all of these different nuances based on your age, your position in the company, your position in school,

I mean, like, if you're a junior or a senior, you know, if you're a boy or a girl, you know, those are all things that affect in which way you should speak Japanese, so people don't look at you weird like, what the hell did he just say?

Now that I've given you three aspects of these languages, I want to get down to brass tacks, okay?

I want to emphasize that what really matters when choosing a language is how interested you are in the particular language.

It's a very personal choice, and it also depends on what you want to use the language for.

If you are naturally more interested in Japanese, you want to, for example, travel to Japan multiple times throughout your life, or you want to read manga, you know, in the original print, or whatever it may be, don't choose Chinese simply because, for example, it has easier grammar.

On the other hand, because of how limited Japanese is, you know, it's only spoken in one country, and the population is declining, let's be real, don't learn it just because it's popular right now.

Like, if you're not inherently interested in Japanese, don't learn it just because it's the popular language.

You know, it really depends on what you want to use the language for.

So, for example, if you're just interested in learning another East Asian language, you know, China is becoming a global economic superpower, so it could, you know, help you in many ways in your career.

It's like, at the end of the day, it is your interests that are going to be the thing that motivates you to persist in learning the language, because, to be honest, both of these languages are a pain in the ass to learn.