Is Learning Chinese or Japanese Harder? Here's a breakdown of the differences.

Are you trying to decide whether to learn Chinese or learn Japanese? Both are popular languages to learn, and both are considered to be two of the hardest languages for native English speakers to earn. Each language presents its own set of challenges for language learners.

I've personally passed the JLPT N1, the highest-level proficiency test of Japanese, and the TOCFL 5, the second-highest proficiency test of Taiwanese Mandarin (roughly equivalent to an ~HSK 8). In this article, I'll break down the main differences between Chinese and Japanese, and also give advice for learning both of them—whether what's got you nervous is the tones of Mandarin Chinese or the complexities of Japanese kanji.

First... should you learn Japanese or Chinese?

This is a question only you can answer.

Whether you learn Japanese or learn Chinese, either language will give you tons of interesting content, a window into a new culture, and the potential for new career opportunities.

Similarly, both languages present their own difficulties:

Rather than worrying too much about which language is easier or harder, my advice would be to pick the language that you're actually interested in. Which culture do you see yourself living in or traveling to? Which culture's content do you find most interesting? Learning either language will be a time commitment of several thousand hours, so it's important that you look forward to and enjoy the time you spend with them.

(P.S. — We've actually got an entire post on what makes languages difficult.)

Japanese kanji vs Mandarin Chinese hanzi

Without a doubt, kanji are more difficult than hanzi.

You'll have to learn a few thousand characters whether you choose Japanese or Mandarin, but whereas the characters were designed for Mandarin, they were forced onto Japanese. The result is that Mandarin hanzi are much more consistent than Japanese kanji are.

For example:

This lack of consistency among kanji means that Japanese learners will have to learn each character in several different contexts, whereas Mandarin learners basically just need to learn each character once.

As if that weren't enough, Japanese actually juggles three different writing systems—kanji, hiragana, and katakana.

Japanese grammar vs Mandarin Chinese grammar

Generally speaking, Japanese is more difficult than Chinese when it comes to grammar.

To demonstrate what that means:

Simple as this "to eat" example is, you can see that Japanese takes a completely different approach to organizing sentences than English does, and this contributes to the language's steep learning curve.

Conversely, 吃 is 吃, no matter how you use it. If you want to add additional nuances into a Chinese sentence, you simply add more characters. This is the exact same approach English takes to building sentences, so it will feel very familiar to English learners of Mandarin.

In contrast, whereas Mandarin groups several different words together to create the above phrases, each Japanese phrase is actually just a different form of the word "to eat". In another blog post, we talked about sixteen different Japanese verb forms of a single verb, and that was only the basic verb forms. That's a lot of extra grammatical information that learners of Mandarin basically get to skip.

This isn't necessarily to say that Mandarin grammar is easy. Its total lack of verbal inflection means that sentence structure is very important in Mandarin, as it is in English... but some of Mandarin's sentence structures are quite different than English. Additionally, Mandarin's heavy use of verb complements, combined with the much more flexible placement of direct objects in Mandarin sentences, can lead to ideas being expressed in ways that don't feel intuitive to native English speakers.

Japanese pronunciation vs Mandarin Chinese pronunciation

Pronunciation is generally broken into two categories:

So, let's compare:

Japanese Phonetics vs Mandarin Chinese Phonetics

Phonetics is one area where Mandarin is definitively harder than Japanese.

Japanese does have some tricky pronunciation details hiding up its sleeves, but they're relatively non-critical. A day-one Japanese learner who knows nothing about Japanese pronunciation can read a Japanese sentence and will generally be understood just fine. They'll sound foreign, but Japanese people will understand them.

This is not the case for Mandarin. The language presents several new sounds to learn, and several of the sounds may initially be difficult for native English speakers to distinguish, let alone produce, such as the infamous three shown below:

The vowels also present some difficulties:

There are several more sounds we could talk about, but I think the point is already clear. Mandarin learners will need to make a pretty serious effort to reach a point where native speakers can reliably understand what they say, but Japanese learners have no such trouble.

Japanese Prosody vs Mandarin Chinese Prosody

Potentially surprising take, but this one's a tie for me.

Yes, Mandarin has the tones. They sound like this, if you haven't heard them before:

Indeed, those are five different words: mother, hemp, horse, to scold, and a sound you add to the end of a sentence to indicate that something is obvious. In Mandarin, simply changing the intonation of a particular syllable can cause it to mean something else.

That's tough, for sure, but there's only five tones, and because every single syllable of every single word has one, you're going to get a lot of practice making them. Tones will be a nightmare for the first few months, and then they just won't bother you anymore. They quickly become second nature.

The thing is, you know that Mandarin has tones when you go into it. It's a challenge you're expecting, and that you mentally prepare yourself for.

The reason I give Japanese and Mandarin a tie in the prosody department is because Japanese actually presents a few prosodic challenges of its own... but they take you by surprise. Japanese textbooks don't usually mention them, and Japanese teachers don't talk about them.

Your mileage may vary, but, personally, prosody is something I still struggle with in Japanese after ten years, but not something I worry about in Mandarin after five.

Japanese culture vs Mandarin Chinese culture

I lived in Japan for two years during university and have lived in Taiwan for 6 years. Posts like this usually skip the cultural side of things, but I'd like to mention them briefly, as I feel they contribute meaningfully to the difficulty of Mandarin and Japanese.

Japanese honorific language vs Mandarin Chinese honorific language

Honorific language is language that makes apparent the social status of the speaker and/or the listener in a conversation. We don't really use honorifics in English.

This is an aspect of language in which Japanese takes the cake: the language contains multiple registers of polite language. The language you use when speaking to a close friend is physically (grammatically) different than the language you use when speaking to a stranger. For example, here's five versions of the word "to eat":

Importantly, using honorific language isn't an "optional" thing in Japanese, akin to how we can choose to be more or less polite in English. In Japanese, politeness is "obligatory", similar to how in English it's obligatory to add an S in the third-person singular form of a verb (I run vs he runs). In other words, in pretty much every single Japanese sentence you utter, you'll be indicating whether you think the listener is significantly above you in terms of status, somebody that you should speak politely with, or somebody that you can speak informally with.

In contrast, Mandarin learners get to ignore honorifics pretty much completely. There are a few special words you'll need to learn, but that's about the extent of it. For example, 你 (ni3) is the normal word for you, whereas 您 (nin2) is a more respectful version of you that would be used by, say, waiters toward customers. This isn't too bad, though. It's akin to saying "sir" or "ma'am" in English.

Japanese communication vs Mandarin Chinese communication

Japanese is a high-context culture, which means that Japanese speakers prefer indirect means of communication. Whereas low-context cultures like the US see value in explicitly and clearly communicating one's thoughts, Japanese people feel that it is better to let adults put two and two together themselves.

As an example of this, in the book I Had That Same Dream Again by Sumino Yoru, the main character (a girl in elementary school) makes a comment along these lines: "Saying your thoughts in the same way they come to you is the least beautiful/intelligent way to communicate."

Furthermore, as discussed in our article on Japanese particles, Japanese speakers tend to omit from their sentences information that they deem is rendered obvious by context. As such, whereas we'd say "I ate it" in English, a Japanese speaker would usually jut say "ate".

Combining these two factors means that, to understand Japanese, it isn't enough to simply understand the words on the page or the words that come out of somebody's mouth. You also need to understand the context those words exist in, and to peek a bit underneath their surface. The result is that, sometimes, you'll understand every word and grammar point in a Japanese sentence... but still not understand what, exactly, is being said.

In contrast, Mandarin Chinese is a pretty straightforward language, and it's OK to simply say what's on your mind. This is another entire dimension of difficulty in Japanese that basically just doesn't exist in Mandarin.

Japanese Resources vs Mandarin Chinese resources

For whatever reason, Japanese as a language and culture tends to attract people who are good with technology. In their attempt to learn the language, these people make cool tools. As a result, Japanese has a wider variety of resources than Mandarin does—in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it has more and better resources than any other language does.

I'll talk about a few Japanese and Mandarin resources I personally find cool in a bit, but while we're here, I want to introduce you to Migaku—a language learning toolkit that's useable for Japanese and Mandarin (and several other languages).

Our core product loop is pretty straightforward:

Boot up your favorite TV show (or anything with text—videos with subtitles, a web page, an ebook, and so forth.) We'll add functionality to the text of that content, making it look like this:

In the above screenshot, the learner doesn't know the word . If you click on the word, you'll see this:

And if you decide that word is useful, you can click the flashcard button (the orange button in the top-right corner of the dictionary definition) to automatically create a flashcard of it. This only takes a few seconds, and the flashcard looks like this:

The audio is taken from the television show, and if you flip the card over, you'll see the scene where this word and sentence was taken from:

These flashcards can be sent to our proprietary app, Migaku Memory, or to Anki, a third-party open-source flashcard software.

As a result, learning Japanese or Mandarin with Migaku looks like this:

If you're not quite ready to consume content yet, we also have two courses for each language—Migaku Fundamentals and Migaku Academy—that will teach you to read and pronounce your target language, then teach you the most common ~1,500 words and a few hundred basic grammar points. These weren't just randomly selected, either—each sentence contains only one new word, so the learning curve is super smooth. By the time you finish, you'll understand 80% of the words you see in Netflix subtitles.

Japanese Resources

If learning Japanese by watching anime and reading light novels doesn't sound cool to you, here's a few other resources you might appreciate:

MaruMori, like Duolingo but for Japanese

I haven't personally used MaruMori, but if I were a beginner and I were convinced that I needed to study grammar in a structured fashion, MaruMori is where I'd start. It's kind of like Duolingo, but it's entirely focused around Japanese.

MaruMori teaches Japanese in a structured format, so it's kind of like a virtual textbook. What's cool is that everything you learn on MaruMori gets tracked by a spaced-repetition system, just like in Migaku, meaning that the system will automatically nudge you to review in the future the things you learn today.

WaniKani, for people who are scared of kanji

We talk more about WaniKani in our article on how to learn the kanji, but, in essence, it's a modern way to learn the kanji.

If you take the most optimal path through WaniKani, you'll end up learning ~2,000 kanji and ~6,000 vocabulary words in just over a year. Like MaruMori and Migaku, everything you study in WaniKani is backed up by spaced repetition, so you'll eventually commit the things you learn into your long-term memory—so long as you stay consistent.

Satori Reader, for people who want to learn Japanese by reading

Satori Reader is similar in spirit to Migaku—we both believe that the way to make progress in a foreign language is to use that language to consume content you enjoy.

Whereas Migaku provides tools that help you learn from native content, Satori Reader took a different approach: the team works with real Japanese authors, voice actors, and teachers to create engaging stories for Japanese learners. There are dozens of series available, spanning multiple genres. You simply pick what you're interested in and read. If you don't know a word, you can click on it to see a dictionary definition—or, for trickier phrases, a hand-written explanation from Brian, the bilingual founder.

Mandarin Chinese resources

If you don't like the idea of learning Mandarin by reading webtoons and watching C-dramas, you might like these resources:

DuChinese, to learn Chinese by reading graded readers

DuChinese is kind of like Satori Reader, but for Chinese. The platform has amassed over 2,000 stories and organized them into levels, from HSK1–HSK6. The idea is pretty simple: if you read a lot of things in Mandarin, you will improve.

There are two things I find particularly cool about DuChinese:

Pleco, the dictionary app I wish every language had

Pleco is an incredible Chinese dictionary. It comes with several free dictionaries, and you can also pay to download some technical and professional dictionaries. The app has incredible handwriting recognition—you can basically just scribble the shape of a hanzi, and Pleco will understand.

I'm listing Pleco partially because, unlike Japanese, there just aren't that many apps I personally feel comfortable recommending to people. While Pleco won't teach you Chinese, it will help you with anything you do with Chinese. I've used it daily for about six years, and consider its paid dictionaries bundle to be one of the best investments I've made, so far as paid Chinese learning resources go.

Can You Learn Both Mandarin and Japanese at the Same Time?

Well, yes, you can... but you can also work 97 hours a week while balancing an apple on your head. It's possible, but unless you have to, why would you do that to yourself?

I personally recommend:

In this way, you're only ever studying one language, but you may be maintaining multiple languages. This is personally the approach that I've taken through Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and Mandarin, and I'm now working on Korean.

The reason it works so well is twofold:

If you're particularly interested in Japanese and Mandarin, you're also in luck:

So the result is that you aren't really losing time by focusing on one language. If you take the time to reach a solid intermediate level in Japanese or Mandarin, you'll enjoy a major head start when you eventually turn your attention to the other one.

Key Takeaways:

To loosely recap our napkin math:

In my personal opinion, then, Japanese is a bit more difficult than Mandarin Chinese.

Nevertheless, they're both challenging! The US Government lists both Japanese and Mandarin as being category 5 "super-hard" languages, meaning that it takes diplomats ~2,200 in-class hours and ~4,400 out-of-class hours to learn them well enough to use them professionally. This is a significant enough time investment. If you don't find the journey to be intrinsically enjoyable—i.e., you're actually interested in Japanese, but picked Mandarin Chinese because it's supposedly a little easier or has better job prospects—you'll likely burn out before reaching a level where the language is of any practical use to you.

If you've made it this far and are still sure you want to learn both languages, then click that "Get Started" button at the top of this page to look into Migaku. We can help you learn both languages, so you'll get double the value out of your investment.

頑張ってね！
加油喔！
Good luck!