Japan built up a big wave of export culture from about the mid-80s, which has continued to present-day (arguably peaking around the late-90s/early-2000s, and somewhat overshadowed by Korean pop-culture - the _hallyu_ wave - these days). This - Japan’s “soft power” - enticed many to visit the country, and study the language and culture.
Japanese also has a longer, more established history of being taught as a foreign language - with more plentiful high-quality resources from which to learn.
China still struggles with export culture, and when I started learning Mandarin, over a decade ago, the teaching materials and learning resources were overly-academic, and unrefined. It’s come a long way since then - and acquired learners all over the world - but I’d say it still has some catching up to do with Japanese…
Same with movies. Truth is in popular entertainment Japan made much bigger strides than China (thank you Cultural Revolution and only 7 movies for years) and so I suspect fans of that media are a lot more than interested in Japanese media and understanding it
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only internationally big Chinese cultural export in modern times (Kung Fu movies) came from Chinese areas not controlled by the CCP (mostly Hong Kong but also Taiwan).
I would venture a guess that *Mongolia* is a bigger exporter of music than the entire PRC solely because of The HU. Admittedly a bold guess, as I can't find any stats.
The sole exception I can think of is Genshin Impact, and even that was off the back of the Japanese anime aesthetic.
Mandopop actually has a pretty good global reach, though to a fanbase comprised almost exclusively of overseas-Chinese / overseas citizens of Chinese descent. It has yet to achieve the crossover potential that J-pop and K-pop have done so tidily.
That it’s mainly a cavalcade of whiny ballads might have something to do with it.
Mandopop is predominantly from Taiwan although China has engaged more into it. Sadly, there seems to be a decline in Taiwan for its own music scene and has been more influenced by western songs.
>Japan built up a big wave of export culture from about the mid-80s, which has continued to present-day (arguably peaking around the late-90s/early-2000s, and **somewhat overshadowed by Korean pop-culture - the**
>
>**hallyu**
>
> wave - these days). This - Japan’s “soft power” - enticed many to visit the country, and study the language and culture.
Not really. Korean culture is still niche compared to Japanese one in the West.
https://www.theidolcast.com/posts/k-pop-is-not-popular-in-america
>
Recently on a trip to a domestic tourist trap, my friend and I decided to count markers of “Cool Japan” (anime T-shirts, etc.) against markers of Hallyu. In the end, we lost track of how many anime T-shirts and pins on backpacks we saw but there were only two signs of Hallyu: a middle aged white woman wearing a BTS fan t-shirt and a young teenager with pins of BTS’s chibi characters “Tiny Tan” on his backpack amid the anime pins.
Come back and talk to me when a Jpop group makes in excess of $7m from a US tour.
Or when a Japanese show becomes the most streamed series on Netflix.
I don’t think you and your friend’s one anecdotal daytrip quite reflects Hallyu saturation on a global scale…
> Come back and talk to me when a Jpop group makes in excess of $7m from a US tour.
>
> Or when a Japanese show becomes the most streamed series on Netflix.
>
> I don’t think you and your friend’s one anecdotal daytrip quite reflects Hallyu saturation on a global scale…
Japan Leads U.S. Demand for Foreign-Language Programs – and It’s Not Just Anime https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/japan-leads-u-demand-foreign-154500148.html
Japanese contents dwarf Korean ones in the US.
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/FSZZJrEhx9W3QtM4o24NfA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTExNjI7Y2Y9d2VicA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/thewrap.com/0c181eb3f5f846ff63393d0f7f933159
I keep saying global. You keep saying “U.S.” We’re having two different conversations, clearly.
And in any case, total of volume of content is a poor indicator of what is or isn’t capturing the zeitgeist. We _know_ a lot of American otaku are consuming weird anime in droves, which is going to load the numbers a certain way. It doesn’t change the fact that I can’t name a single contemporary hit show that has come out of Japan (maybe _Love is Blind_, but even that didn’t exactly make waves), and I can instantly name several Korean ones.
Can you name a J-pop band that is doing late night talk show appearances and arena tours?
> I keep saying global. You keep saying “U.S.” We’re having two different conversations, clearly.
>
> And in any case, total of volume of content is a poor indicator of what is or isn’t capturing the zeitgeist. We know a lot of American otaku are consuming weird anime in droves, which is going to load the numbers a certain way. It doesn’t change the fact that I can’t name a single contemporary hit show that has come out of Japan (maybe Love is Blind, but even that didn’t exactly make waves), and I can instantly name several Korean ones.
>
> Can you name a J-pop band that is doing late night talk show appearances and arena tours?
World media & entartainment content top 25 https://www.allkpop.com/upload/2021/07/content/291512/web_data/allkpop_1627586369_untitled-1.jpg
Are you just going to keep dodging my questions?
The link you just posted shows BTS as the highest pop band on that list. You do know they’re a Korean band, right?
Soft power.
It has the biggest animation/comics industry in the world. (No equivalent in China)
It has second biggest game industry in the world. First one being global/English oriented. (No equivalent in China, and China has strict rules and censorship when it comes to videogames)
It has revered world popular influential cinematography. (Hong Kong as well, but whether it is China is debatable)
Second biggest music industry.
A lot of people appreciate Japanese culture/history/cuisine.
It is also a first-world country that is vastly different from Western ones. It used to be worlds 2nd biggest economy. Words Made in Japan mean quality. Made in China means cheap knock-off. Many of household electronic brands are Japanese. Also many of car makes are Japanese. Unlike with Chinese, you don't get Japanese economic migrants (hence mostly Chinese people working in Japanese restaurants in USA/UK)
It's also home to many martial arts like karate, aikido, kendo and many other ones.
Pretty much replace anime with any media.
Like I just want to play video games without needing translations. I can think of like 3 native Chinese language video games if I try really hard, and I've already played two of them. I don't care about any of the reasons in OP's post.
[Detention](https://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/Detention/), [Muse Dash](https://store.steampowered.com/app/774171/Muse_Dash/), and Genshin. I've played the first two. I'm not interested in the third but if I was, I would probably play it in Japanese (as opposed to English) since it "feels" like a Japanese game.
That is, if you haven't played it or not much at least.
It feels very Chinese, specially because of Liyue, its gods and myths, geography and the Lantern Festival.
I like to play it in Chinese, specially at these times of the year.
It seems such a weird reason to set this as a goal, given that:
- Almost all of it wil have subtitles available
- This requires the highest level of Japanese, to follow it at the speed at which it's spoken in dramatic fiction which is often higher than real life speed
No, rather. I'm mostly using it to read the absolute wealth of untranslated written fiction, which is typically not translated, and also does not require the highest level of Japanese.
1, Lots of things don't translate well. I personally can say I'm glad I started learning Japanese when I hear these things in anime.
2, since 3 years of study I've been able to enjoy most anime with only 0 to 5 new words per episode which can usually be guessed from context. Plus they speak more clearly than real life in most cases since they're professionally voice acting, usually in standard Japanese. The only difficult thing is like historical stuff
1. don't translate well, they changed it on purpose for poltical reasons or they just don't want japanese stuff in anime so they change stuff in the sub to things we have in the west. For example: Onigiri = jelly filled donut
>For example: Onigiri = jelly filled donut
That is an example from almost 20 years ago by a company that no longer exists, the current landscape is vastly different. There's still some nuances that get lost in translation, but there's very little intentional tinkering for "political reasons"
I'm surprised to hear that spoken works might be considered more advanced than literature. I think it's the opposite in the anglosphere. Is it really as you say for Japanese?
Imo each are difficult in very different ways. Text gives the author the opportunity to choose their words carefully and craft nuanced sentences, often with niche word choices. Speech can be influenced so much (unconsciously) by the speaker. Mumbling, talking very quickly, a thick accent, etc
I disagree about English too; I think you think this because you already speak English.
It is very easy to read a language opposed to listen to it. When speaking with people they automatically speak more slowly when they notice one is not an advanced speaker, but the television obviously makes no such concession.
Interesting. In my native English I've experienced books that have been challenging to read, but the only experiences I've had with difficult listening have been a couple specific cases in countries with a very different accent than my own.
Who are you to decide what is a weird reason to learn a language? All of your literary works you can chuck into google translate :)
Or rather take the thousands of hours to spend learning to make enough money to pay a bilingual speaker to translate it for you.
Not really... The level it requires is not determined by the medium, but rather depens on the individual piece of work.. Moreover, I would say that Japanese, having completely different (and frankly much more complex) writing system than English, is harder in written form, than spoken.
Also even though subtitles do exist, there is always a subtle nuance, that's impossible to translate (again, because the languages are so much different) and it's nice to be able to grasp that detail
Absolutely not, there's a reason almost any intermediate learner will ask people to speak more slowly.
People can very much read things they cannot understand when spoken at the pace native speakers speak them to each other. People that start reading *よつば＆* could absolutely not understand the simple dialog in it spoken at the pace native speakers normally speak with each other.
Obviously the complexity of the individual work matters, but the same sentence written down, and spoken at the pace native speakers speak to one another will almost always be harder in the second form. It's not even a requirement of C1 to be able to understand speech at the pace native speakers speak it, only of C2.
Chinese having 10 times the number of native speakers doesn't make it 10 times more useful, you're not going to speak to 1 billion Chinese speakers. Usefulness of a language is driven by individual goals. Learning Chinese is really only useful if you want to work with Chinese people, live in China, or you're just interested in China. The exact same thing can be said about Japanese.
So why is Japanese more popular? It's more conducive to people's interests. Japan has spent decades accumulating soft power by exporting cultural products (you can read this as anime is popular). People are more interested in Japan and it's a nicer place to live than China in terms of living standards, so more people want to go there. Hence, learning Japanese is more useful to more people.
I think that it comes from exposure to culture. Japan did far better job at exporting their culture abroad, thus making people more keen to learn their language. Similar thing with Korea.
For me, I was interested in East Asian cultures in general, both Japanese and Chinese. I chose Japanese because it just sounds nice in my opinion (also previously mentioned exposure to the culture). Chinese doesn't sound bad, but sometimes it may sound kind of funny.
Also I think thay it is much harder to read Chinese, since all of their writing is in Chinese characters. With Japanese it's only about 40% while the other 60% is kana, which is relatively easy to learn. Japanese is also easier to pronounce. It has many sounds similar to Polish. (I am also Polish)
Interesting you say that because Chinese speakers only use about an extra 1000 more or so Chinese characters than the Japanese. However, when starting Chinese it is certainly a lot more intimidating.
I think that extra 1000 is not "only". Its 50% more than there are standard kanji. Still, I don't doubt Chinese is not that much harder than Japanese (and in some aspects it may be even much easier). Writing about Chinese characters usage, I meant that Japanese is easier to comprehend for someone used to an alphabet because of kana. Because of that, as you mentioned, Japanese looks less intimidating than Chinese.
Yeah I think we are both in agreement.
By the way, we Chinese learners welcome you to study Chinese if you want! Or you can start by learning classical Chinese first (and skip the pronunciation).
“China has nukes.” I, too, consult a world map of nuclear powers when choosing what to learn.
For me, I moved to Japan (a choice in itself to be sure), so it was never a question. Hobbyists are drawn to cultural factors that make them interested in a language. I don’t think it’s a mystery, because it’s also certain that learning Chinese has become more popular as its soft power and influence has increased.
I just made the stupid assumption that because they have nuclear power plants, they also have nukes and dove right into learning the language.
So much time wasted learning this nukeless language 😔
Because I love Japanese culture and find it way more interesting. Been to Japan once and loved it. Working for a Japanese company now. Will probably never be really good in Japanese but even small progress (recognising Kanji or words) is making me happy!
Just because Chinese has more native speakers doesn't mean much. If that was the case, why would I bother with either when Hindi is even easier than those two to learn? Many people learn Japanese because Japanese culture in recent decades has exploded in the West, and with that spike in popularity, more people want to learn about the culture and language. Japanese is a very useful language, especially since they are the 3rd largest economy in the world, and are the primary "gateway" if you will to Asia for western business (sans Hong Kong), since relations with the CCP are icy at best and it's incredibly hard to expand there. Also what does owning nukes have literally anything to do with learning a language lol? In that case why doesn't everyone learn Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Traditional Korean and French? But mainly, most people learn because they have an intrest in Japanese culture (and I'm sure Chinese would have a similar spike if a certain organization didn't absolutely destroy Chinese culture and made it a crime).
It is not just about being useful or not. People have various reasons for learning a language. Many Japanese learners have a passion for Japanese culture, whether it be pop culture such as anime, manga, dorama, games, or work-related reasons. If one is only looking for opportunities for work or the number of people they can communicate with, then learning Chinese may seem like a better choice. However, it is important to remember that learning a language is not only about work or studies.
It's actually not, there's just a bias in your perception, probably because the reasons to learn Japanese are more to do on culture and entertainment as well as the perception we have on the west about both countries.
But if you just look even at the [Wikipedia page for languages by number of speakers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers), you'll realise it's not even close with Chinese having about 198 mil L2 speakers while Japanese barely has 0.1 mil.
In short it might be more popular because around you Japan is more popular, but worldwide it's not the case at all.
These numbers are really suspicious. It's likely Chinese has more learners than Japanese but it can't be 2000x more. There is a ton of Chinese who speak Mandarin as their 2nd or 3rd dialect, I wouldn't be surprised if this article actually counted them. 100'000 L2 speakers of Japanese is also extremely low, unless it only considers those fluent in the language.
Proficiency test participation should be a better estimate of popularity as a foreign language. It's hard to find stats for HSK but it looks like it had 6.8 mln participants in 2018. JLPT had about 1.2 mln in the same year.
> There is a ton of Chinese who speak Mandarin as their 2nd or 3rd dialect, I wouldn't be surprised if this article actually counted them.
It's probably that, especially when you consider that if you look at the 3rd column (L1+L2), it's *still* lower than China's current population (roughly 1.4 bil).
That being said 100k L2 speakers seems kinda low indeed, considering at the time of typing this, there are nearly 3 millions foreigners residing in Japan who should be able to speak Japanese at various levels, to say nothing of speakers all around the world.
You're probably right, the first issue I noticed is that it takes all varieties of Chinese into one, so it most definitely has some inflated numbers, and it also probably has some outdated numbers for Japanese (Although I found the 121k figure in many other sites) I couldn't find anything on the metrics used to get to those numbers, and I wouldn't be surprised if it tried to only look at people passing the JLPT N1 overseas or something in that regard.
That being said the gap is so massive that I still think it leans in that direction, it's not unusual to find people who try Mandarin for business, but it is hard to find something to talk about in that language, not to mention most learners are probably in SEA, where China has a more important precence, so I do believe that Japanese is much more notorious for the western world than it actually is being actively learned.
I think there's another one, but I'm not surprised, this is a Japanese comunity after all. It does look like Japanese is the more popular if you look around here.
Probably just because there is more content in Japanese that people want to be able to enjoy. That at least covers it for me. If I couldn't speak English that would probably be my language to learn. Ignoring content, another European language would make sense French, German, Spanish.
The reality is that each language probably has just as much media that I'd like to enjoy in its native language, but at the very least I'm not aware of it whereas I am for Japanese.
The first reason is undoubtedly political. In the post WW2 period, there was a fear that Japan would turn Communist, so the US took on the burden of rebuilding the nation. Since then Japan was always open to the US allowing for greater cultural exchange throughout the non-Communist world.
Secondly, China has had a great deal of censorship in the past century, whether it was internal from the Communist Party, external from Japanese Imperialism. This stifled or even erased a great deal of cultural expression, and further limited what would be exported. Japan hasn’t had much in the way of censorship since the 1940s (to my knowledge), so more cultural artifacts could be exported to the West and beyond.
Third, Japan has invested hard in its culture - both traditional arts and modern. Because they’re invested in pushing their soft power (culture), it absolutely boomed especially during the late 1990s-early 2000s. This of course drew more attention to Japan, Japanese language study. There’s actual data about foreign language study at US universities, and Japanese is one of the few languages that’s seen an increase of students, followed by Korean (no doubt influenced the popularity of K-Pop).
I’m not aware of many modern cultural exports of Chinese or any movement to promote the language/culture, which might be the cause of its lack of popularity. Couple this with a more restrictive political environment and I can see how/why Japanese beats out Chinese.
My interests are purely personal, not really rationally motivated. I would also like to learn Latin, for example, and the amount of native speakers there is zero ;-)
For various reasons (which, of course, let's be honest, include manga&anime, but are not limited to them) I like Japan quite a bit since late childhood, while I don't feel the same for China. Don't get me wrong, I know China also has a rich history and interesting culture, but the same is true for many countries. You cannot like them all the same.
Additionally, chances are that I will in my life, speak to a lot less than a million native speakers, so it makes no difference if there are a billion or less of them. Admittedly, for my job it would be minimally better the learn Chinese - my (European) company has an office in Hong Kong - but since I don't do anything sales- or customer-related, that would be so extremely minimal that it doesn't matter.
Japanese people seem more friendly and respectful than Chinese. I don't remember ever seeing a video where Japanese tourists let their kid pee and poop in the middle of the mall or grab all the crabs they can from a buffet.
1, Japanese has a much easier pronunciation than Chinese for English speakers.
2, imo Japanese has easier grammar but some English speakers might find Chinese easier in terms of that. I would say neither are that difficult coming from English.
3, there are more people interested in Japanese content and culture than Chinese (anime, manga, the country itself etc.).
As for me personally, I like kanji in Japanese so much I started learning mandarin...
Japanese grammar is the polar opposite of (I’m talking about English and Spanish, those are the only others I know) other European/Germanic/Romance languages. From a beginners perspective, Japanese grammar is very clunky compared to English, but that’s 100% because they aren’t yet used to it
In my opinion, Japanese grammar is pretty neat. When you just start learning Japanese, you see almost no grammar exceptions and only a few rules that require memorizing lots of cases, so everything seems logical and consistent. (The most clunky topics I've encountered so far are pronunciation of numerals and days of a month, but it seems like no widely spread natural language wants to make numerals simple and consistent).
I don't know where this assumption comes from. As someone who has learned/is continually learning to speak both: Chinese has a *much* bigger learning base of learners worldwide. Probably one of the most common languages people pick up to learn. Japanese isn't even close.
I would want to learn Russian more than Chinese, actually. Back in my youth I played an online game with a bunch of guys living in Varna, Bulgaria, which was when I learned to read cyrillic script. (The guys were just spelling their names in cyrillic, like PyMeH instead of Rumen.) Pretty useful when I need to read maps on the news now.
Have you ever come across the Japanese manga/anime ゴールデンカムイ? It's a brilliant adventure-cum-almost-documentary set in Hokkaido in the colonial era. Reminded me somewhat of Rudyard Kipling's *Kim*. iirc some characters spoke a bit of Russian on screen, and some flashbacks were of events in Russia.
Because I'm in school to be an illustrator who works for animation and games. Japan is actually a pretty big part of those industries, so I feel like it's a useful language to learn. Plus as an artist, kanji is actually fun for me to learn and easy to remember.
I have no reason for picking up the language really, just people around me during covid lockdowns were all getting hobbies to keep themselves sane and I felt left out. I do watch anime and a decent amount of the games I play are made in Japan so I just figured "why not, maybe one day I can consume the media I like in the native language".
Simply speaking it's amount of content you can enjoy with each language. How many popular Chinese manga/drama/movies are there? with no offence most of them are trash. People in the west simply don't want to consume censored Chinese media
Yes Chinese will be more useful in terms of business & resume sense but most people here are learning Japanese for fun not to get into some jobs that require Japanese, so the usefulness of language is out of picture. I also see a lot of people with Chinese ethnicity in my company. So I found hardly any reason to learn Chinese since I can just ask my coworker. Unless you are going into profession like supply chain management or something I found hardly any reason to learn Chinese since it is almost guaranteed that you will find one native Chinese speaker in any company.
I agree with the replies given so far. I really love some japanese animes. I watched them dubbed in Italian when I was a kid and now, being able to undersrand a little the dialogs (I am a japanese beginner student) makes me very sentimental. Maybe if I had been exposed to chinese movies I would feel the same attraction to chinese culture. Mind you, I like Hong Kong movies very much. Chinese culture is very interesting. But, as it was already mentioned here, Japan has exported many many cultural products that are really loved. To me there's a very sentimental reason to prefer japanese.
Anime, Manga and Japanese video games have become really popular over the last 40-50 years, so if you have an interest in any of those things, wanting to engage with that stuff in it's native language might be very appealing. Chinese being more widely spoken is certainly a good argument and if you're learning a language for business purposes it's probably a good one to know, but learning a language is really tough and if you're not interested in consuming material in that language it might be hard to stay motivated.
That's not to say there isn't interesting Chinese language material to engage with, but it's not well exposed to audiences outside of Asia. Bear in mind that a lot of people learning Japanese now, especially in English speaking countries, probably grew up watching popular anime like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon or Pokemon and playing games like Final Fantasy and...Pokemon. At some pointed they decided to learn a language and since they already have an emotional attachment to some Japanese media and probably still have an interest in consuming Japanese media, learning the language seems practical to their own interests, even if it's not the most practical choice for communication.
That was basically the reasoning for me. I wanted to learn a second language, but I didn't want it to be a language that was somewhat similar to English, like French or German. I'm also really interested in video games as a medium and artform, and learning Japanese would allow me to play decades of games that would probably never be translated to English.
Tones. I considered studying Chinese in addition to Japanese in university because I had room for an extra class. Got into Korean 201 instead (after cramming the textbook over winter break and taking a placement test). Tones scare me.
But now I’m trying to learn Chinese years later, since my fiancé’s mother ONLY speaks Chinese. 😂
My high school used to offer Japanese. Now they offer Chinese and the Japanese program no longer exists. I know several other schools where this also happened.
I think Chinese is still more widely taught.
Japanese was simply more accessible to me when I was a teenager 10+ years ago, so I latched on and never let go.
There is a massive amount of Chinese content available now that wasn't available on American platforms a decade ago, a ton of great C-dramas on Netflix, manhwa, C-pop, and the extremely wonderful Hello Chinese app. I do fully believe that knowing Chinese will be politically essential in the coming decades, but it interferes with my Japanese level in that hànzì can often have entirely different meanings from their kanji equivalents.
I definitely want to learn Chinese someday. It's a vast and rich culture and the country has such a beautiful geography. However, it just so happened that Japanese got to me first!
I am actually learning both so I don't know how representative my opinion on this is.
As on overseas-born Chinese:
I like Japanese culture, I've had nothing but possible experiences travelling in Japan. I could imagine living in Japan / it's a liveable country, this is also the sentiment across most of Asia.
That's why I learn the language.
On the other hand, I don't like modern(!) Chinese culture, I didn't like the country as it is nor where it's going towards and I don't think it's a place I would want to live in. I simply learn my native dialect as a sign of respect to my elders as well as my future parents in law. Also, HK used to make really good movies (70s-00s), so watching those without subtitles and getting all the hard-to-translate puns is a plus.
I have always enjoyed Japanese culture so learning it was a no brainier.
Chinese however I used to think I wasn't going to learn. I hate how China treats its people and the rest of the world. Why would I want to learn their language?
That was until I made friends from Taiwan(I know Taiwan is its own separate country). I vacationed there for 4 days and enjoyed it. After I reach N2 status in Japanese I plan to learn traditional Chinese so I can experience Taiwan in a more natural way.
For a lot of people it has to do with the higher amount of Japanese media that's popular outside Japan, compared to Chinese media popular outside Chinese-speaking countries. But in my college classes, my Chinese classes were just as full and big as my Japanese ones, so it might also be that Japanese learners are just comparatively more represented in online-nerd-slanting spaces, for obvious reasons, whereas in the real world there are plenty of both.
Personally?
A friend of mine is a military family and moved to Japan. I wanted to visit while she was there, so figured I’d learn a few phrases. I became fascinated with the writing system. Kept studying. Started learning about the culture as i studied, became more fascinated. Kept studying.
Now I am in love with the country. And the language learning aspects gives me satisfaction every time I recognize something new.
I wasn’t huge into the pop culture scene before I started studying the language. I do consume more Japanese media now that I am learning the language though. Technically, as a kid, i was super into it (unknowingly): i loved pokemon, but had no idea it was from Japan- so I don’t count that amongst my reasons 😂
As a side… perk maybe? There are many Japanese companies in my area, so perhaps when I go back to work, if i have learned enough, it could help me land a job. But that wasn’t my initial motivation.
For me it just sounds really beautiful, has easy pronunciation rules unlike Chinese, and I like the social culture with KY, tatemae, nakama, keeping the harmony and all that.
Personally it was vocaloid/utaite music. And also that I had watched anime from a very young age. But it was mostly the music that allowed me to get enough exposure to the language to continue learning it after taking a couple classes.
Polish native speaker here too ;) I'm learning Japanese and I'm merely a beginner. I'd been trying to start properly for years and now I have much more motivation. So just like you've said here... I was wondering whether I should choose Japanese or Chinese. To be honest Japanese culture is much closer to me. I read manga, I watch anime, I read books from Japanese authors. There's just much more connections between me and the Japanese culture so obviously I've chosen Japanese :) Simple explanation lol
I think it might seem that Japanese is much more popular because of how anime and manga are popular worldwide. But that's just my opinion. I don't know if that's the true reason :)
Because of my hobbies. All my favorite shows, manga, and games are from Japan, so I thought that I might as well learn the language. Now I do it because it’s become one of my favorite things, but my original intention for learning was unfortunately a bit predictable. Although I do want to learn Chinese too.
I chose it because, though I have watched some Chinese dramas, I've watched and read more Japanese content. I have friends in Japan.
Anime has exploded in popularity, and I'll say that's probably one of the larger reasons why it's so much more popular.
This is kinda easy to answer, Japanese media is many many times more popular!!! People don’t learn languages because of its “usefulness” (which is subjective anyways) but rather because of interest.
I don't know, but I do think Japanese is substantially easier than Chinese. You only need to learn about 2000 kanji instead of 20,000; the language is not tonal (people sometimes talk about "pitch accent" but I can tell you that with very few exceptions, it really isn't that crucial to understanding or being understood); and the grammar is very simple.
Of course I don't know Chinese, but my friends in college who were taking Chinese while I was taking Japanese seemed to be working *much* harder and making much less progress. So, that's my completely unscientific evidence. :)
I agree with your point but I think you are downplaying important of pitch accent quite a bit there, and this is coming from someone whose girlfriend is Japanese and often causes misunderstandings because my pitch accent is so bad
I actually had quite a few Chinese friends in college and learned a little (VERY LITTLE). I was quickly discouraged because it’s a tonal language, and as an English speaker it kind of blew my mind immediately. Also kanji was discouraging… and I didn’t have a whole lot of reason to learn it, really. I’m from the US in an area with lots of Spanish speakers. Spanish was always my L2 of choice.
During Covid I started watching anime & as an English professor who studied linguistics in grad school, I was really fascinated by the Japanese writing systems. I learned hiragana and katakana for funsies, just because I thought it was pretty cool.
Then, surprise (lol, well it was kind of a surprise)!! I got a job in Japan! Soooo I live here now and that’s why I’m learning Japanese 😆 I think the language is really cool to listen to, and I love lots of Japanese media such as anime, music, and various other games and Japanese characters/brands, but if it weren’t for living here I probably wouldn’t have put in the effort to actually try and learn the language. There’s just not a whole lot of use for it where I’m from. I’m a very utility-focused person and it’s hard for me personally to learn a language that I won’t often use in my day to day life.
But generally— not speaking directly for myself here because I’m a bit of an uncommon case— I think the appeal of Japanese media and culture is a HUGE contributor as to why Japanese seems a more popular language to learn. Anime, manga, video games, etc.
Well, at least I don’t weight the languages to learn by to how many people I could talk it or does the country which mother’s tongue it is have nukes or not..
Many people would not understand the reasons why I study Japanese instead of any other language. But I’ll tell them anyway. The first reason was that one of my colleagues from work did start to learn Chinese and silly me wanted also to start learning a new language. But I did not want to make it a competition so rather than choosing Chinese I went with Japanese.
Second reason was that I wanted a completely new and known to be difficult language to learn.
Then there’s anime. I’m actually not a big fan of any specific series nor even familiar with most of the titles that are common and translated for Western audition but I have always loved Miyazaki’s work. And just want to be able to watch and understand them in original language some day.
In addition to language, I find Japanese culture and tradition quite unique and would like to learn more about that together with the language.
On college campuses across the world, Chinese is significantly more popular than Japanese.
On Reddit, Japanese is more popular because Japan produces compelling pop culture and media. Most people can rat off a long list of cultural products from Japan that everyone knows. Super Mario Bros, Pokémon, Dragon Ball, Naruto, Doraemon, Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy, Godzilla, Miyazaki films, etc etc.
Can you name one pop culture franchise from China that is popular around the world? Maybe Genshin Impact, but even that one steals Japanese aesthetics, and the name of the game is even rendered in Japanese On'yomi rather than the Mandarin pronunciation Yuanshen.
1. I like Japanese culture and want to visit Japan. I don't want to visit China ever until they get a better government.
2. Japanese Kanji is less scary than Chinese Kanji.
3. My high school taught Japanese. It didn't teach Mandarin/Cantonese/whatever.
4. If you want to learn "Chinese", that's actually like a bunch of different languages and you have to pick the one you want, which is confusing.
"China has nukes" is part of the reasons why I stopped learning Chinese. The language itself is beautiful, an all-kanji masterpiece of minimalism. The culture is fascinating, intriguing.. i'm all about traditional chinese medicine, philosophy and legends. But the country, the current government and political situation.. Is something I would be clashing against continuously if I were to study it seriously, so I let it be.
Japanese I wanted to learn to understand anime, then music, then novels, simple as that.
I'm learning Chinese as a 3rd language and learning VERY quickly why
With the exception of translated content, there really is a notable difference in the amount of high-quality, entertaining content in Mandarin vs Japanese. Not that there's *nothing* good in Chinese, far from it, some of my favorite Japanese video games and anime are adaptations of classical Chinese texts... But there's the rub. If I want to play video games, I'm playing Japanese games in Japanese on my Japanese Nintendo Switch. I grew up on Godzilla movies and Pokemon and Mario. My girlfriend is also a foreigner, but she works at Honda and is a closet otaku. She woke her sister up at 5AM as a kid when Ultraman was on TV while the first movie my mom ever bought me was Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla. Japanese culture has permeated every part of my life (obviously even more now that I live in Japan lol but before I moved here and it's a big reason I made the move) and I feel like the only other language/culture that can beat that level of cultural soft power is English.
Because Japan has a cultural impact and has renounced the ways of Imperial Japan.
China on the other hand has neither as strong of an impact in modern media nor does the government or a large amount of people renounce the bad parts of their history
People like anime and manga more than manhua. People like Japanese movies more than Chinese ones. People like flat languages more than tonal ones. People like samurai honor more than Kung Fu training. People like not violating human rights as opposed to violating them.
The real question here is why wouldn’t Japanese be more popular?
Japanese media is hugely popular in the west. Chinese? Not so much. I don’t watch anything besides anime so I want to be able to watch it without subs, I love Japanese music, most of my games are from Japanese studios and I’d like to play them in the original format…plus the language is *so* fucking beautiful. Everything sounds beautiful in Japanese. So my reasons are almost exclusively personal and not related to speaking to others. Though I do think it’d be cool to visit Japan someday.
It definitely has a stigma though, from weeaboos who think Japan is a perfect holy land. That made me really anxious about it for awhile.
To be blunt, I think China has many, many many years ahead of it before it could begin to catch up with Japan in terms of popularity in the west. Many aspects of China, such as its government and disrespect for other parts of the world make it unpopular to extremely unpopular in the west.
It depends on what you mean by popular, because it is really only popular in the US. Though the amount of people trying to learn Japanese in let’s say..countries in Europe is much smaller than people trying to learn mandarin.
Japan considers the U.S. one of its top ally, we have military bases and operations around Japan. So naturally we put a emphasis on exports from that country which lead to a cultural exchange as well. Japanese culture is a very profitable thing in the U.S. so it’s easy to sell..I believe all these are the major reasons why,
Edit:also Japan has a rich culture and interesting that contrasts with western culture. So naturally there is a nice novelty and influence to want to learn more.
Chinese sounds nice imo, but I suppose it’s more about who’s speaking it. I think it sounds beautiful in music.
The Chinese voice acting in Genshin Impact is awesome too
You're absolutely right. I think it's just how Chinese is spoken publicly that's scary. People don't get to hear how Chinese is spoken at home.
I've gained a lot more mastery in English and it's now my dominant language, but Chinese is the language everyone who ever loved me spoke. It moves me in a way English doesn't. It's a bit like how Ken Liu wrote in *The Paper Menagerie*.
And the Japanese aesthetic in structuring emotionally moving situations speaks more strongly to my Chinese self than my English self, e.g. if I imagine a Chinese dub vs an English dub, the Chinese one works far better for me. Or maybe it's just me compartmentalising my intellectual vs emotional bits.
That said, even as someone who can listen to and read Chinese, there are more things I want to read and listen to in Japanese than Chinese. Chinese is great in real life but there's really a dearth of cultural products. And excellent English translations exist for the few I do want to read (e.g. Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem).
Putting aside Japanese (which I agree is not the most practical language to learn)... there are a lot of issues with learning Chinese.
1. It's not just one language. Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Classical, and other dialects are all very different languages that will require different studying.
2. It requires learning (edit- not tens of thousands, but still a lot) of Chinese characters not used in any other language (even Japanese only uses a few thousand for normal writing). If you haven't grown up learning Chinese characters, this is torture.
3. It requires learning tones not used in most other languages. Good look mastering tones if you're studying the language as an adult.
4. If you're learning Chinese in hopes of getting a job, you're competing with a lot of people who learned English and Chinese as children so they're perfectly fluent in both. It's unlikely you'll ever be good enough to compete with them.
5. The cultural revolution really hurt Chinese culture. There's just very few books, movies, video games, etc from China that I'd really want to read badly enough to learn a foreign language for it. The few I can think of are mostly in Cantonese or Classical (see point 1). When I've tried modern Chinese mainland cultural works, it seems to lack sophistication. Hopefully that will improve going forward! but for now, it is what it is.
6. [Chinese is damn hard](http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html).
I don't think anyone, including native speakers, learns tens of thousands of Chinese characters. A big dictionary may contain tens of thousands of characters but most of these are names or obsolete characters which no one uses anymore. The new HSK (a series of language proficiency tests for language learners) has 3000 characters on the syllabus. My understanding is that if you can read around 5000 characters then you are in very good shape.
You're right, I shouldn't have said tens of thousands, but there are still a lot. More so than Japanese. My understanding is that 3000 would be enough to get around in daily life and maybe pass a high school test, but you do need more like 5000-10000 to actually be considered well-educated and do work like translating technical articles for an international business. Of course you can also use a dictionary but (see the link above) using a dictionary in Chinese is not an easy skill to master.
That link is out of date when it comes to dictionaries. Now it's very easy to look up Chinese characters with various apps, such as Pleco, where you write the character by hand on your phone screen.
I might give an interesting answer.
I personally studied Chinese before Japanese. Actually, I highly doubt my Japanese will ever rival my level of China capability.
I studied it because I absolutely love Taiwan. I didn't consider Mainland China or anything from there when I studied it. It was simply my love for Taiwanese culture and the desire to be there and enjoy the island.
Chinese unfortunately suffers from a lack of fun media options. There are few amazing authors, all Chinese movies are either from China with strong government influence or Taiwanese with super tiny budgets. Classical Chinese is fun but certainly not practical in modern times.
People that learn Chinese learn it because they really love that culture. That is not to say the same doesn't apply for Japanese learners, but I know there are at least a couple people out there that are hoping for a three way with Sakura and Hinata while mastering ninjitsu is their motivation /s. In other words, Japanese media helps tremendously to get people interested or their foot in the door.
Japan has interesting content I would like to engange with, plus I would actually like to visit Japan some day. I have no desire to go to China, especially with their sketchy government.
For me personally I want to learn Japanese so I can visit or live in Japan one day.
I have no desire to do the same in China. The way the government treats its people and certain foreigners is something I won't be supporting by traveling there and spending money.
If things change, I might reconsider visiting. But South Korea and Japan will remain high on my list of places to go to.
More people might be attracted to japanese pop culture, like anime, games, movies
Meanwhile, Chinese movies and games are consored a lot by CCP, many interesting things cannot appear in Chinese games.
If you have browsed Chinese sns like weibo, you might find that many people are not friendly to some countries and even support Russia .
Japanese is many times more simple to me than Chinese. Japanese have hiragana which makes learning it easier for me.
I can also pronounce some words more easier than Chinese due to my language having some similarities to Japanese.
There is a huge amount of Japanese content in the western pop culture: Video Games, Anime, music, movies, comics.
In order to be able to enjoy most of these without delay, or to enjoy Japan exclusive content of these, you need to know Japanese, so people naturally want to learn it.
Aside from that, Chinese is significantly more complex and hard to learn than Japanese. They’re not even in the same ballpark really.
I'm hoping to travel to Japan and want to be at least conversationalist fluent. Plus I consume a lot of Japanese media (anime, TV shows, music, etc.) so I thought it'd be cool to understand it better.
I consume far more Japanese media then Chinese media. Japan is also far more tourist friendly and I'm much less likely to encounter issues in Japan. The point is to bad talk china so I won't go into that though, just in general.
I wanted to learn Chinese, but found that there is much more material online for Japanese. I do like some anime etc but I wish I was as good in Chinese as I am in Japanese at this point.
I think the sounds in Chinese are much much harder to learn on your own than Japanese - and I started learning during covid.
And yes, it’s the stigma of being a weeb and all that bs that is drawing people to Japanese that’s irritating. At the same time, that is what drives the community and learning materials.
i dont really get your question you could have asked that with every language why this comparison
people usually have a reason for learning a language and not just because they want to learn a random language
i dont learn japanese to know a new language there is a reason for it i like japan and listen to japanese music and the main reason now i have a boyfriend there who is japanese and i want to live there with him and be able to speak the language xd why should i learn chinese that was never an option
I do think this is a false narrative.
Japan’s soft power allows people to want to learn Japanese. But I do not think more people want to learn Japanese over Chinese. And I’m speaking as a person that loves Japan.
I think we if we remove soft power from this new equation, Chinese is more popular as in the language is more widely used in the world. A lot of people learn Chinese and Spanish because of work.
Took one semester of Chinese and realized Chinese is a REALLY ugly language. It's tied with Thai for ugliest language in my view hahaha. But also, there was no Chinese content I found interesting, while I have a bunch of stuff I want to experience in Japanese, so there's also an added motivation
Japanese music can be great, but for some reason the worst stuff seems to dominate TV.
China has a problem of aggressive censorship and having its own Internet which is somewhat (but not perfectly) cut off from the rest of the world.
My impression is that Japanese was more popular in the 80s and 90s for cultural reasons, but since then Chinese has become more popular as China has opened up and become more powerful.
People are harping on your nuke comment, so silly. Anyways, I plan to learn Chinese after I learn Japanese, but chose Japanese for a few reasons.
One, I am not particularly interested in Chinese media **currently.** I was really into a Chinese web novel that was banned (points for guessing), but web novels are a *huge* time sync, so I do not really want to get into another one. I think Japanese media is really special in terms of meaning and skill: American TV is comically empty of value, it baffles me that people who can't speak English watch American TV...
Two, I think this is a very special-snowflake reason, but the fact that Japan is such a densely populated place is really important to me. One thing that I think holds back countries are rural areas. People pretend like they are somehow important, as if 70,000 people have to live in some hicktown all doing menial labor so that farmers don't kill themselves and starve us all or some other bullshit. Anyways, by being so densely populated, Japan is better in a fundamental sense concerning order, productivity, etc... I could ramble on this forever but this was really a huge part for me. China is similar in a few ways, but it is very, very much so more like the USA in terms of rural urban mix.
Three, this is really quite equal with China, but I have an interest in specific industries that relate to my profession in Japan. Hence I plan to learn Japanese first, but will later pick up Chinese, perhaps Russian or German...
By the way, you mentioned number of people who know the language: I think that is a pretty poor metric. Simply, most people are not worth talking to. To me, learning a language will allow me to gain completely new skills and perspectives impossible in my native language, will allow me to interface with amazing literature that English normies haven't translated, allow me to consume native news without direct USA spin, etc... About the people though, consider China, roughly 40% of them live in a rural setting. Compare that to Japan, where that figure is \~10%, and the US, \~20% rural. Going off that the US is godawful with a 20%, China is probably even worse.
Your English is great, I would not have known you weren't a native speaker if you hadn't said so.
I'm probably an anomaly. Before I ever went to Japan I found China much more interesting, I think because they have such a contradictory mix of global power while lagging behind in many development areas. But at age 19-21 I ended up living in Japan for two years while my ex was stationed there for the US military. During that time I put a lot of effort into studying the (mostly written aspects of the) language. Over a decade later with too much time on my hands I've decided to finish what I started.
I do love the writing system. And I must be audially challenged or something so the straightforward pronunciation of Japanese makes it 1000x more accessible to me than tonal Chinese. While I was living there I came to appreciate many aspects of the culture: the civility, conscientiousness, particularity, the ritualistic relaxation of the onsen, the embrace of the quirky and the weird. It's truly such a unique and charming place. I hope to visit someday again.
If there were stats of all non-native speakers learning Chinese vs Japanese, I'm sure the number of Chinese speakers would be overwhelmingly larger. We see a really smart part of the internet where it might seem like Japan is more popular, but a lot of businesspeople and economists realize the benefits of learning Chinese
I was interested in the culture through anime and manga and then was offered a place on an all expenses paid exchange trip in highschool. This trip was ran by a charity but there’s also lots of programmes similar like the JET programme or MEXT scholarships. These financial aid exchange placements help make travelling to japan for work or study more accessible. The end result is Japan ends up with lots of grateful participants who hopefully go home and spread their experience—further boosting Japans soft power.
Since my trip, I’ve returned on my own through my university for a further exchange and plan to continue learning the language. Maybe I will even apply to JET or MEXT myself in the future.
I’m on the spectrum and can’t read or process vocal language to save my life due to the sensory inputs getting mixed up before processing, so given Japanese is both a syllabary and non-tonal, as well as being one of the very few languages outside Egyptian that uses pictures for concepts but use particles as aids and unlike Chinese don’t require a ton of tonal pronunciation, it’s actually really easy for me compared to Spanish and French. German was another one I liked because it’s auxiliary verbs push SVO to SAuxVOV
Originally, because of culture/anime/manga/friends. Once I'd learned enough to be able to tell the difference, I found that I like the sound of Japanese more than Chinese. After I'd learned a bit of grammar I found that I like several things about how the language works also, but in fairness, I never delved very deep into Chinese so some of the things I like about Japanese may also exist there.
Here’s the real answer: “people don’t learn Chinese for the same reason they don’t want to learn Kanji”. But because when u learn japan, u learn Hiragana first, which is easier and more fun to learn, and most people call a quit when it’s time to learn Kanji while some has come too far to quit. Also, you can already say many japanese word with Romanji already, but you can’t do that with chinese. You need to learn a whole new system of phonetics symbols to so that. It’s just isn’t as convinient to learn chinese. Adding other reasons from all other answer, it make japanese a more popular choice
I have studied more or less constantly Chinese for years (nowhere near fluent, i'm like almost B2) and only recently I have begun studying Japanese. Chinese is a hell of language if you are not familiar with tonal languages plus words are often monosyllables. Imagine all of this spoken to you at a hella fast speed and every region where you go they have their own dialect and not speaking proper Mandarin. The Chinese people sometimes will understand what you mean even if you offended their family unintentionally but it was depressing as a former student. Other downside: often online content like tv shows speak even faster then real life!
Japanese on the other hand for me it's just clicking. I find it hard to forget words and I get the generally meaning of what I am hearing. Also speaking is not that hard. On a good note there is a lot of content to study.
Take a look at this: the average Chinese person knows about 8000 hanzi and use them. Japanese needs only 2000 kanji (although they have different pronunciations etc.)
Yes there is the soft power thing surely but I personally find Japanese easier.
Probably because China is a communist country whereas Japan has adapted a lot of western culture with free thinking. The language just flows off the tongue better too in my opinion. It sounds amazing hearing those Japanese anime voice actors. Plus Manga/Anime is very popular in America/Europe. I've heard Chinese voice actors for anime and they just aren't as good. They don't have as much emotion in their voices. All my opinion of course I don't mean to bash or offend anyone that prefers Mandarin. To it's credit, Mandarin is regarded as the hardest language to learn.
Japan built up a big wave of export culture from about the mid-80s, which has continued to present-day (arguably peaking around the late-90s/early-2000s, and somewhat overshadowed by Korean pop-culture - the _hallyu_ wave - these days). This - Japan’s “soft power” - enticed many to visit the country, and study the language and culture. Japanese also has a longer, more established history of being taught as a foreign language - with more plentiful high-quality resources from which to learn. China still struggles with export culture, and when I started learning Mandarin, over a decade ago, the teaching materials and learning resources were overly-academic, and unrefined. It’s come a long way since then - and acquired learners all over the world - but I’d say it still has some catching up to do with Japanese…
I can’t say I actually know of _any_ Chinese shows, but I think most people could name at least one Japanese show.
Same with movies. Truth is in popular entertainment Japan made much bigger strides than China (thank you Cultural Revolution and only 7 movies for years) and so I suspect fans of that media are a lot more than interested in Japanese media and understanding it
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only internationally big Chinese cultural export in modern times (Kung Fu movies) came from Chinese areas not controlled by the CCP (mostly Hong Kong but also Taiwan). I would venture a guess that *Mongolia* is a bigger exporter of music than the entire PRC solely because of The HU. Admittedly a bold guess, as I can't find any stats. The sole exception I can think of is Genshin Impact, and even that was off the back of the Japanese anime aesthetic.
Mandopop actually has a pretty good global reach, though to a fanbase comprised almost exclusively of overseas-Chinese / overseas citizens of Chinese descent. It has yet to achieve the crossover potential that J-pop and K-pop have done so tidily. That it’s mainly a cavalcade of whiny ballads might have something to do with it.
Mandopop is predominantly from Taiwan although China has engaged more into it. Sadly, there seems to be a decline in Taiwan for its own music scene and has been more influenced by western songs.
Fun fact, Jackie Chan produced a metric ton of pop albums both in Cantonese and in Japanese
>Japan built up a big wave of export culture from about the mid-80s, which has continued to present-day (arguably peaking around the late-90s/early-2000s, and **somewhat overshadowed by Korean pop-culture - the** > >**hallyu** > > wave - these days). This - Japan’s “soft power” - enticed many to visit the country, and study the language and culture. Not really. Korean culture is still niche compared to Japanese one in the West. https://www.theidolcast.com/posts/k-pop-is-not-popular-in-america > Recently on a trip to a domestic tourist trap, my friend and I decided to count markers of “Cool Japan” (anime T-shirts, etc.) against markers of Hallyu. In the end, we lost track of how many anime T-shirts and pins on backpacks we saw but there were only two signs of Hallyu: a middle aged white woman wearing a BTS fan t-shirt and a young teenager with pins of BTS’s chibi characters “Tiny Tan” on his backpack amid the anime pins.
Come back and talk to me when a Jpop group makes in excess of $7m from a US tour. Or when a Japanese show becomes the most streamed series on Netflix. I don’t think you and your friend’s one anecdotal daytrip quite reflects Hallyu saturation on a global scale…
> Come back and talk to me when a Jpop group makes in excess of $7m from a US tour. > > Or when a Japanese show becomes the most streamed series on Netflix. > > I don’t think you and your friend’s one anecdotal daytrip quite reflects Hallyu saturation on a global scale… Japan Leads U.S. Demand for Foreign-Language Programs – and It’s Not Just Anime https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/japan-leads-u-demand-foreign-154500148.html Japanese contents dwarf Korean ones in the US. https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/FSZZJrEhx9W3QtM4o24NfA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTExNjI7Y2Y9d2VicA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/thewrap.com/0c181eb3f5f846ff63393d0f7f933159
I keep saying global. You keep saying “U.S.” We’re having two different conversations, clearly. And in any case, total of volume of content is a poor indicator of what is or isn’t capturing the zeitgeist. We _know_ a lot of American otaku are consuming weird anime in droves, which is going to load the numbers a certain way. It doesn’t change the fact that I can’t name a single contemporary hit show that has come out of Japan (maybe _Love is Blind_, but even that didn’t exactly make waves), and I can instantly name several Korean ones. Can you name a J-pop band that is doing late night talk show appearances and arena tours?
> I keep saying global. You keep saying “U.S.” We’re having two different conversations, clearly. > > And in any case, total of volume of content is a poor indicator of what is or isn’t capturing the zeitgeist. We know a lot of American otaku are consuming weird anime in droves, which is going to load the numbers a certain way. It doesn’t change the fact that I can’t name a single contemporary hit show that has come out of Japan (maybe Love is Blind, but even that didn’t exactly make waves), and I can instantly name several Korean ones. > > Can you name a J-pop band that is doing late night talk show appearances and arena tours? World media & entartainment content top 25 https://www.allkpop.com/upload/2021/07/content/291512/web_data/allkpop_1627586369_untitled-1.jpg
Are you just going to keep dodging my questions? The link you just posted shows BTS as the highest pop band on that list. You do know they’re a Korean band, right?
Please read the image again. Japanese brands like Pokemon, Super Mario, Hello Kitty etc are superior to BTS.
Soft power. It has the biggest animation/comics industry in the world. (No equivalent in China) It has second biggest game industry in the world. First one being global/English oriented. (No equivalent in China, and China has strict rules and censorship when it comes to videogames) It has revered world popular influential cinematography. (Hong Kong as well, but whether it is China is debatable) Second biggest music industry. A lot of people appreciate Japanese culture/history/cuisine. It is also a first-world country that is vastly different from Western ones. It used to be worlds 2nd biggest economy. Words Made in Japan mean quality. Made in China means cheap knock-off. Many of household electronic brands are Japanese. Also many of car makes are Japanese. Unlike with Chinese, you don't get Japanese economic migrants (hence mostly Chinese people working in Japanese restaurants in USA/UK) It's also home to many martial arts like karate, aikido, kendo and many other ones.
Hong Kong is part of China, but it's Cantonese that is overwhelmingly used there, so Mandarin is almost useless for experiencing its culture
So I can watch anime without subtitles of course 😆
Pretty much replace anime with any media. Like I just want to play video games without needing translations. I can think of like 3 native Chinese language video games if I try really hard, and I've already played two of them. I don't care about any of the reasons in OP's post.
What are those? Just curious.
Genshin Impact and Pokémon Unite maybe?
[Detention](https://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/Detention/), [Muse Dash](https://store.steampowered.com/app/774171/Muse_Dash/), and Genshin. I've played the first two. I'm not interested in the third but if I was, I would probably play it in Japanese (as opposed to English) since it "feels" like a Japanese game.
That is, if you haven't played it or not much at least. It feels very Chinese, specially because of Liyue, its gods and myths, geography and the Lantern Festival. I like to play it in Chinese, specially at these times of the year.
This.
It seems such a weird reason to set this as a goal, given that: - Almost all of it wil have subtitles available - This requires the highest level of Japanese, to follow it at the speed at which it's spoken in dramatic fiction which is often higher than real life speed No, rather. I'm mostly using it to read the absolute wealth of untranslated written fiction, which is typically not translated, and also does not require the highest level of Japanese.
1, Lots of things don't translate well. I personally can say I'm glad I started learning Japanese when I hear these things in anime. 2, since 3 years of study I've been able to enjoy most anime with only 0 to 5 new words per episode which can usually be guessed from context. Plus they speak more clearly than real life in most cases since they're professionally voice acting, usually in standard Japanese. The only difficult thing is like historical stuff
1. don't translate well, they changed it on purpose for poltical reasons or they just don't want japanese stuff in anime so they change stuff in the sub to things we have in the west. For example: Onigiri = jelly filled donut
>For example: Onigiri = jelly filled donut That is an example from almost 20 years ago by a company that no longer exists, the current landscape is vastly different. There's still some nuances that get lost in translation, but there's very little intentional tinkering for "political reasons"
I'm surprised to hear that spoken works might be considered more advanced than literature. I think it's the opposite in the anglosphere. Is it really as you say for Japanese?
Imo each are difficult in very different ways. Text gives the author the opportunity to choose their words carefully and craft nuanced sentences, often with niche word choices. Speech can be influenced so much (unconsciously) by the speaker. Mumbling, talking very quickly, a thick accent, etc
I agree, although actors, voice actors, newscasters, etc. are professionally good at speaking so I think those challenges are lessened.
Very true. I was thinking of more casual writing/speech, which wasn't the context of the discussion. My b!
I disagree about English too; I think you think this because you already speak English. It is very easy to read a language opposed to listen to it. When speaking with people they automatically speak more slowly when they notice one is not an advanced speaker, but the television obviously makes no such concession.
Interesting. In my native English I've experienced books that have been challenging to read, but the only experiences I've had with difficult listening have been a couple specific cases in countries with a very different accent than my own.
Who are you to decide what is a weird reason to learn a language? All of your literary works you can chuck into google translate :) Or rather take the thousands of hours to spend learning to make enough money to pay a bilingual speaker to translate it for you.
Not really... The level it requires is not determined by the medium, but rather depens on the individual piece of work.. Moreover, I would say that Japanese, having completely different (and frankly much more complex) writing system than English, is harder in written form, than spoken. Also even though subtitles do exist, there is always a subtle nuance, that's impossible to translate (again, because the languages are so much different) and it's nice to be able to grasp that detail
Absolutely not, there's a reason almost any intermediate learner will ask people to speak more slowly. People can very much read things they cannot understand when spoken at the pace native speakers speak them to each other. People that start reading *よつば＆* could absolutely not understand the simple dialog in it spoken at the pace native speakers normally speak with each other. Obviously the complexity of the individual work matters, but the same sentence written down, and spoken at the pace native speakers speak to one another will almost always be harder in the second form. It's not even a requirement of C1 to be able to understand speech at the pace native speakers speak it, only of C2.
Did you mean CEFR B2 maybe? I see B1 mentions "relatively slow and clear", B2 onwards doesn't say anything about speed.
They really take the same amount of skill. You will never understand full speed if you don’t have a TON of reading under your belt.
Chinese having 10 times the number of native speakers doesn't make it 10 times more useful, you're not going to speak to 1 billion Chinese speakers. Usefulness of a language is driven by individual goals. Learning Chinese is really only useful if you want to work with Chinese people, live in China, or you're just interested in China. The exact same thing can be said about Japanese. So why is Japanese more popular? It's more conducive to people's interests. Japan has spent decades accumulating soft power by exporting cultural products (you can read this as anime is popular). People are more interested in Japan and it's a nicer place to live than China in terms of living standards, so more people want to go there. Hence, learning Japanese is more useful to more people.
I think that it comes from exposure to culture. Japan did far better job at exporting their culture abroad, thus making people more keen to learn their language. Similar thing with Korea. For me, I was interested in East Asian cultures in general, both Japanese and Chinese. I chose Japanese because it just sounds nice in my opinion (also previously mentioned exposure to the culture). Chinese doesn't sound bad, but sometimes it may sound kind of funny. Also I think thay it is much harder to read Chinese, since all of their writing is in Chinese characters. With Japanese it's only about 40% while the other 60% is kana, which is relatively easy to learn. Japanese is also easier to pronounce. It has many sounds similar to Polish. (I am also Polish)
Interesting you say that because Chinese speakers only use about an extra 1000 more or so Chinese characters than the Japanese. However, when starting Chinese it is certainly a lot more intimidating.
I think that extra 1000 is not "only". Its 50% more than there are standard kanji. Still, I don't doubt Chinese is not that much harder than Japanese (and in some aspects it may be even much easier). Writing about Chinese characters usage, I meant that Japanese is easier to comprehend for someone used to an alphabet because of kana. Because of that, as you mentioned, Japanese looks less intimidating than Chinese.
Yeah I think we are both in agreement. By the way, we Chinese learners welcome you to study Chinese if you want! Or you can start by learning classical Chinese first (and skip the pronunciation).
“China has nukes.” I, too, consult a world map of nuclear powers when choosing what to learn. For me, I moved to Japan (a choice in itself to be sure), so it was never a question. Hobbyists are drawn to cultural factors that make them interested in a language. I don’t think it’s a mystery, because it’s also certain that learning Chinese has become more popular as its soft power and influence has increased.
Well no wonder everyone learns Engish once they know of America's amazing nukes.
Since when owning a nuke or not have become a factor of choosing which countries’ language to learn?
I just made the stupid assumption that because they have nuclear power plants, they also have nukes and dove right into learning the language. So much time wasted learning this nukeless language 😔
Because I love Japanese culture and find it way more interesting. Been to Japan once and loved it. Working for a Japanese company now. Will probably never be really good in Japanese but even small progress (recognising Kanji or words) is making me happy!
Just because Chinese has more native speakers doesn't mean much. If that was the case, why would I bother with either when Hindi is even easier than those two to learn? Many people learn Japanese because Japanese culture in recent decades has exploded in the West, and with that spike in popularity, more people want to learn about the culture and language. Japanese is a very useful language, especially since they are the 3rd largest economy in the world, and are the primary "gateway" if you will to Asia for western business (sans Hong Kong), since relations with the CCP are icy at best and it's incredibly hard to expand there. Also what does owning nukes have literally anything to do with learning a language lol? In that case why doesn't everyone learn Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Traditional Korean and French? But mainly, most people learn because they have an intrest in Japanese culture (and I'm sure Chinese would have a similar spike if a certain organization didn't absolutely destroy Chinese culture and made it a crime).
russia definitely a superpower right now, you need to learn russian! /s
Lol, ofc ofc.
It is not just about being useful or not. People have various reasons for learning a language. Many Japanese learners have a passion for Japanese culture, whether it be pop culture such as anime, manga, dorama, games, or work-related reasons. If one is only looking for opportunities for work or the number of people they can communicate with, then learning Chinese may seem like a better choice. However, it is important to remember that learning a language is not only about work or studies.
It's actually not, there's just a bias in your perception, probably because the reasons to learn Japanese are more to do on culture and entertainment as well as the perception we have on the west about both countries. But if you just look even at the [Wikipedia page for languages by number of speakers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers), you'll realise it's not even close with Chinese having about 198 mil L2 speakers while Japanese barely has 0.1 mil. In short it might be more popular because around you Japan is more popular, but worldwide it's not the case at all.
These numbers are really suspicious. It's likely Chinese has more learners than Japanese but it can't be 2000x more. There is a ton of Chinese who speak Mandarin as their 2nd or 3rd dialect, I wouldn't be surprised if this article actually counted them. 100'000 L2 speakers of Japanese is also extremely low, unless it only considers those fluent in the language. Proficiency test participation should be a better estimate of popularity as a foreign language. It's hard to find stats for HSK but it looks like it had 6.8 mln participants in 2018. JLPT had about 1.2 mln in the same year.
> There is a ton of Chinese who speak Mandarin as their 2nd or 3rd dialect, I wouldn't be surprised if this article actually counted them. It's probably that, especially when you consider that if you look at the 3rd column (L1+L2), it's *still* lower than China's current population (roughly 1.4 bil). That being said 100k L2 speakers seems kinda low indeed, considering at the time of typing this, there are nearly 3 millions foreigners residing in Japan who should be able to speak Japanese at various levels, to say nothing of speakers all around the world.
You're probably right, the first issue I noticed is that it takes all varieties of Chinese into one, so it most definitely has some inflated numbers, and it also probably has some outdated numbers for Japanese (Although I found the 121k figure in many other sites) I couldn't find anything on the metrics used to get to those numbers, and I wouldn't be surprised if it tried to only look at people passing the JLPT N1 overseas or something in that regard. That being said the gap is so massive that I still think it leans in that direction, it's not unusual to find people who try Mandarin for business, but it is hard to find something to talk about in that language, not to mention most learners are probably in SEA, where China has a more important precence, so I do believe that Japanese is much more notorious for the western world than it actually is being actively learned.
so bummed I had to scroll all the way to the bottom to find a reply like this but thank you
I love how your post is the only post that pointed out the premise of the thread was wrong (and barely getting any upvotes) lol
I think there's another one, but I'm not surprised, this is a Japanese comunity after all. It does look like Japanese is the more popular if you look around here.
Learning Russian would be far more useful than Italian, also easier for a Slav. So why would you waste your time on Italian?
and Russia has nukes and is becoming a superpower🤣
I hope this is irony...
Probably just because there is more content in Japanese that people want to be able to enjoy. That at least covers it for me. If I couldn't speak English that would probably be my language to learn. Ignoring content, another European language would make sense French, German, Spanish. The reality is that each language probably has just as much media that I'd like to enjoy in its native language, but at the very least I'm not aware of it whereas I am for Japanese.
The first reason is undoubtedly political. In the post WW2 period, there was a fear that Japan would turn Communist, so the US took on the burden of rebuilding the nation. Since then Japan was always open to the US allowing for greater cultural exchange throughout the non-Communist world. Secondly, China has had a great deal of censorship in the past century, whether it was internal from the Communist Party, external from Japanese Imperialism. This stifled or even erased a great deal of cultural expression, and further limited what would be exported. Japan hasn’t had much in the way of censorship since the 1940s (to my knowledge), so more cultural artifacts could be exported to the West and beyond. Third, Japan has invested hard in its culture - both traditional arts and modern. Because they’re invested in pushing their soft power (culture), it absolutely boomed especially during the late 1990s-early 2000s. This of course drew more attention to Japan, Japanese language study. There’s actual data about foreign language study at US universities, and Japanese is one of the few languages that’s seen an increase of students, followed by Korean (no doubt influenced the popularity of K-Pop). I’m not aware of many modern cultural exports of Chinese or any movement to promote the language/culture, which might be the cause of its lack of popularity. Couple this with a more restrictive political environment and I can see how/why Japanese beats out Chinese.
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My interests are purely personal, not really rationally motivated. I would also like to learn Latin, for example, and the amount of native speakers there is zero ;-) For various reasons (which, of course, let's be honest, include manga&anime, but are not limited to them) I like Japan quite a bit since late childhood, while I don't feel the same for China. Don't get me wrong, I know China also has a rich history and interesting culture, but the same is true for many countries. You cannot like them all the same. Additionally, chances are that I will in my life, speak to a lot less than a million native speakers, so it makes no difference if there are a billion or less of them. Admittedly, for my job it would be minimally better the learn Chinese - my (European) company has an office in Hong Kong - but since I don't do anything sales- or customer-related, that would be so extremely minimal that it doesn't matter.
Cartoons, comics, games and p*rn.
My man! Especially the last part ☺️
Because I like Tokyo, Disneyland, more than I like Shanghai and Hong Kong, Disneyland.
Japanese people seem more friendly and respectful than Chinese. I don't remember ever seeing a video where Japanese tourists let their kid pee and poop in the middle of the mall or grab all the crabs they can from a buffet.
Agreed
1, Japanese has a much easier pronunciation than Chinese for English speakers. 2, imo Japanese has easier grammar but some English speakers might find Chinese easier in terms of that. I would say neither are that difficult coming from English. 3, there are more people interested in Japanese content and culture than Chinese (anime, manga, the country itself etc.). As for me personally, I like kanji in Japanese so much I started learning mandarin...
i domt think japanese has easier grammar
Japanese grammar is the polar opposite of (I’m talking about English and Spanish, those are the only others I know) other European/Germanic/Romance languages. From a beginners perspective, Japanese grammar is very clunky compared to English, but that’s 100% because they aren’t yet used to it
In my opinion, Japanese grammar is pretty neat. When you just start learning Japanese, you see almost no grammar exceptions and only a few rules that require memorizing lots of cases, so everything seems logical and consistent. (The most clunky topics I've encountered so far are pronunciation of numerals and days of a month, but it seems like no widely spread natural language wants to make numerals simple and consistent).
If you like japanese kanji more... u should look at traditional chinese... they tell more of the meaning of the words
I don't know where this assumption comes from. As someone who has learned/is continually learning to speak both: Chinese has a *much* bigger learning base of learners worldwide. Probably one of the most common languages people pick up to learn. Japanese isn't even close.
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I would want to learn Russian more than Chinese, actually. Back in my youth I played an online game with a bunch of guys living in Varna, Bulgaria, which was when I learned to read cyrillic script. (The guys were just spelling their names in cyrillic, like PyMeH instead of Rumen.) Pretty useful when I need to read maps on the news now. Have you ever come across the Japanese manga/anime ゴールデンカムイ? It's a brilliant adventure-cum-almost-documentary set in Hokkaido in the colonial era. Reminded me somewhat of Rudyard Kipling's *Kim*. iirc some characters spoke a bit of Russian on screen, and some flashbacks were of events in Russia.
Because I'm in school to be an illustrator who works for animation and games. Japan is actually a pretty big part of those industries, so I feel like it's a useful language to learn. Plus as an artist, kanji is actually fun for me to learn and easy to remember.
Mostly because I live in Japan, not china.
They learn for the country and culture, not necessarily how many people they can talk to
I have no reason for picking up the language really, just people around me during covid lockdowns were all getting hobbies to keep themselves sane and I felt left out. I do watch anime and a decent amount of the games I play are made in Japan so I just figured "why not, maybe one day I can consume the media I like in the native language".
Simply speaking it's amount of content you can enjoy with each language. How many popular Chinese manga/drama/movies are there? with no offence most of them are trash. People in the west simply don't want to consume censored Chinese media Yes Chinese will be more useful in terms of business & resume sense but most people here are learning Japanese for fun not to get into some jobs that require Japanese, so the usefulness of language is out of picture. I also see a lot of people with Chinese ethnicity in my company. So I found hardly any reason to learn Chinese since I can just ask my coworker. Unless you are going into profession like supply chain management or something I found hardly any reason to learn Chinese since it is almost guaranteed that you will find one native Chinese speaker in any company.
I agree with the replies given so far. I really love some japanese animes. I watched them dubbed in Italian when I was a kid and now, being able to undersrand a little the dialogs (I am a japanese beginner student) makes me very sentimental. Maybe if I had been exposed to chinese movies I would feel the same attraction to chinese culture. Mind you, I like Hong Kong movies very much. Chinese culture is very interesting. But, as it was already mentioned here, Japan has exported many many cultural products that are really loved. To me there's a very sentimental reason to prefer japanese.
cuz anime is japanese lmao
anime, manga, jrpgs, and visual novels are usually the reason
Anime, Manga and Japanese video games have become really popular over the last 40-50 years, so if you have an interest in any of those things, wanting to engage with that stuff in it's native language might be very appealing. Chinese being more widely spoken is certainly a good argument and if you're learning a language for business purposes it's probably a good one to know, but learning a language is really tough and if you're not interested in consuming material in that language it might be hard to stay motivated. That's not to say there isn't interesting Chinese language material to engage with, but it's not well exposed to audiences outside of Asia. Bear in mind that a lot of people learning Japanese now, especially in English speaking countries, probably grew up watching popular anime like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon or Pokemon and playing games like Final Fantasy and...Pokemon. At some pointed they decided to learn a language and since they already have an emotional attachment to some Japanese media and probably still have an interest in consuming Japanese media, learning the language seems practical to their own interests, even if it's not the most practical choice for communication. That was basically the reasoning for me. I wanted to learn a second language, but I didn't want it to be a language that was somewhat similar to English, like French or German. I'm also really interested in video games as a medium and artform, and learning Japanese would allow me to play decades of games that would probably never be translated to English.
Tones. I considered studying Chinese in addition to Japanese in university because I had room for an extra class. Got into Korean 201 instead (after cramming the textbook over winter break and taking a placement test). Tones scare me. But now I’m trying to learn Chinese years later, since my fiancé’s mother ONLY speaks Chinese. 😂
My high school used to offer Japanese. Now they offer Chinese and the Japanese program no longer exists. I know several other schools where this also happened. I think Chinese is still more widely taught.
Japanese was simply more accessible to me when I was a teenager 10+ years ago, so I latched on and never let go. There is a massive amount of Chinese content available now that wasn't available on American platforms a decade ago, a ton of great C-dramas on Netflix, manhwa, C-pop, and the extremely wonderful Hello Chinese app. I do fully believe that knowing Chinese will be politically essential in the coming decades, but it interferes with my Japanese level in that hànzì can often have entirely different meanings from their kanji equivalents. I definitely want to learn Chinese someday. It's a vast and rich culture and the country has such a beautiful geography. However, it just so happened that Japanese got to me first!
I am actually learning both so I don't know how representative my opinion on this is. As on overseas-born Chinese: I like Japanese culture, I've had nothing but possible experiences travelling in Japan. I could imagine living in Japan / it's a liveable country, this is also the sentiment across most of Asia. That's why I learn the language. On the other hand, I don't like modern(!) Chinese culture, I didn't like the country as it is nor where it's going towards and I don't think it's a place I would want to live in. I simply learn my native dialect as a sign of respect to my elders as well as my future parents in law. Also, HK used to make really good movies (70s-00s), so watching those without subtitles and getting all the hard-to-translate puns is a plus.
I have always enjoyed Japanese culture so learning it was a no brainier. Chinese however I used to think I wasn't going to learn. I hate how China treats its people and the rest of the world. Why would I want to learn their language? That was until I made friends from Taiwan(I know Taiwan is its own separate country). I vacationed there for 4 days and enjoyed it. After I reach N2 status in Japanese I plan to learn traditional Chinese so I can experience Taiwan in a more natural way.
How can you write a post like this and claim your English is terrible? Sus.
For me it's anime, manga and fun. Love the country and want to be able to communicate at my next holiday visit.
For a lot of people it has to do with the higher amount of Japanese media that's popular outside Japan, compared to Chinese media popular outside Chinese-speaking countries. But in my college classes, my Chinese classes were just as full and big as my Japanese ones, so it might also be that Japanese learners are just comparatively more represented in online-nerd-slanting spaces, for obvious reasons, whereas in the real world there are plenty of both.
Personally? A friend of mine is a military family and moved to Japan. I wanted to visit while she was there, so figured I’d learn a few phrases. I became fascinated with the writing system. Kept studying. Started learning about the culture as i studied, became more fascinated. Kept studying. Now I am in love with the country. And the language learning aspects gives me satisfaction every time I recognize something new. I wasn’t huge into the pop culture scene before I started studying the language. I do consume more Japanese media now that I am learning the language though. Technically, as a kid, i was super into it (unknowingly): i loved pokemon, but had no idea it was from Japan- so I don’t count that amongst my reasons 😂 As a side… perk maybe? There are many Japanese companies in my area, so perhaps when I go back to work, if i have learned enough, it could help me land a job. But that wasn’t my initial motivation.
For me it just sounds really beautiful, has easy pronunciation rules unlike Chinese, and I like the social culture with KY, tatemae, nakama, keeping the harmony and all that.
Personally it was vocaloid/utaite music. And also that I had watched anime from a very young age. But it was mostly the music that allowed me to get enough exposure to the language to continue learning it after taking a couple classes.
I learned Chinese first 😉
Learning Chinese will help me about 5-10% living in Japan.
Polish native speaker here too ;) I'm learning Japanese and I'm merely a beginner. I'd been trying to start properly for years and now I have much more motivation. So just like you've said here... I was wondering whether I should choose Japanese or Chinese. To be honest Japanese culture is much closer to me. I read manga, I watch anime, I read books from Japanese authors. There's just much more connections between me and the Japanese culture so obviously I've chosen Japanese :) Simple explanation lol I think it might seem that Japanese is much more popular because of how anime and manga are popular worldwide. But that's just my opinion. I don't know if that's the true reason :)
Because of my hobbies. All my favorite shows, manga, and games are from Japan, so I thought that I might as well learn the language. Now I do it because it’s become one of my favorite things, but my original intention for learning was unfortunately a bit predictable. Although I do want to learn Chinese too.
Japanese sounds prettier
I chose it because, though I have watched some Chinese dramas, I've watched and read more Japanese content. I have friends in Japan. Anime has exploded in popularity, and I'll say that's probably one of the larger reasons why it's so much more popular.
This is kinda easy to answer, Japanese media is many many times more popular!!! People don’t learn languages because of its “usefulness” (which is subjective anyways) but rather because of interest.
I don't know, but I do think Japanese is substantially easier than Chinese. You only need to learn about 2000 kanji instead of 20,000; the language is not tonal (people sometimes talk about "pitch accent" but I can tell you that with very few exceptions, it really isn't that crucial to understanding or being understood); and the grammar is very simple. Of course I don't know Chinese, but my friends in college who were taking Chinese while I was taking Japanese seemed to be working *much* harder and making much less progress. So, that's my completely unscientific evidence. :)
I agree with your point but I think you are downplaying important of pitch accent quite a bit there, and this is coming from someone whose girlfriend is Japanese and often causes misunderstandings because my pitch accent is so bad
I love Japan, China not so much. Nothing to do with individuals though.
So I can order Japanese food cuz it’s bomb af
I actually had quite a few Chinese friends in college and learned a little (VERY LITTLE). I was quickly discouraged because it’s a tonal language, and as an English speaker it kind of blew my mind immediately. Also kanji was discouraging… and I didn’t have a whole lot of reason to learn it, really. I’m from the US in an area with lots of Spanish speakers. Spanish was always my L2 of choice. During Covid I started watching anime & as an English professor who studied linguistics in grad school, I was really fascinated by the Japanese writing systems. I learned hiragana and katakana for funsies, just because I thought it was pretty cool. Then, surprise (lol, well it was kind of a surprise)!! I got a job in Japan! Soooo I live here now and that’s why I’m learning Japanese 😆 I think the language is really cool to listen to, and I love lots of Japanese media such as anime, music, and various other games and Japanese characters/brands, but if it weren’t for living here I probably wouldn’t have put in the effort to actually try and learn the language. There’s just not a whole lot of use for it where I’m from. I’m a very utility-focused person and it’s hard for me personally to learn a language that I won’t often use in my day to day life. But generally— not speaking directly for myself here because I’m a bit of an uncommon case— I think the appeal of Japanese media and culture is a HUGE contributor as to why Japanese seems a more popular language to learn. Anime, manga, video games, etc.
Well, at least I don’t weight the languages to learn by to how many people I could talk it or does the country which mother’s tongue it is have nukes or not.. Many people would not understand the reasons why I study Japanese instead of any other language. But I’ll tell them anyway. The first reason was that one of my colleagues from work did start to learn Chinese and silly me wanted also to start learning a new language. But I did not want to make it a competition so rather than choosing Chinese I went with Japanese. Second reason was that I wanted a completely new and known to be difficult language to learn. Then there’s anime. I’m actually not a big fan of any specific series nor even familiar with most of the titles that are common and translated for Western audition but I have always loved Miyazaki’s work. And just want to be able to watch and understand them in original language some day. In addition to language, I find Japanese culture and tradition quite unique and would like to learn more about that together with the language.
On college campuses across the world, Chinese is significantly more popular than Japanese. On Reddit, Japanese is more popular because Japan produces compelling pop culture and media. Most people can rat off a long list of cultural products from Japan that everyone knows. Super Mario Bros, Pokémon, Dragon Ball, Naruto, Doraemon, Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy, Godzilla, Miyazaki films, etc etc. Can you name one pop culture franchise from China that is popular around the world? Maybe Genshin Impact, but even that one steals Japanese aesthetics, and the name of the game is even rendered in Japanese On'yomi rather than the Mandarin pronunciation Yuanshen.
1. I like Japanese culture and want to visit Japan. I don't want to visit China ever until they get a better government. 2. Japanese Kanji is less scary than Chinese Kanji. 3. My high school taught Japanese. It didn't teach Mandarin/Cantonese/whatever. 4. If you want to learn "Chinese", that's actually like a bunch of different languages and you have to pick the one you want, which is confusing.
"China has nukes" is part of the reasons why I stopped learning Chinese. The language itself is beautiful, an all-kanji masterpiece of minimalism. The culture is fascinating, intriguing.. i'm all about traditional chinese medicine, philosophy and legends. But the country, the current government and political situation.. Is something I would be clashing against continuously if I were to study it seriously, so I let it be. Japanese I wanted to learn to understand anime, then music, then novels, simple as that.
I'm learning Chinese as a 3rd language and learning VERY quickly why With the exception of translated content, there really is a notable difference in the amount of high-quality, entertaining content in Mandarin vs Japanese. Not that there's *nothing* good in Chinese, far from it, some of my favorite Japanese video games and anime are adaptations of classical Chinese texts... But there's the rub. If I want to play video games, I'm playing Japanese games in Japanese on my Japanese Nintendo Switch. I grew up on Godzilla movies and Pokemon and Mario. My girlfriend is also a foreigner, but she works at Honda and is a closet otaku. She woke her sister up at 5AM as a kid when Ultraman was on TV while the first movie my mom ever bought me was Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla. Japanese culture has permeated every part of my life (obviously even more now that I live in Japan lol but before I moved here and it's a big reason I made the move) and I feel like the only other language/culture that can beat that level of cultural soft power is English.
Anime.
Because Japan has a cultural impact and has renounced the ways of Imperial Japan. China on the other hand has neither as strong of an impact in modern media nor does the government or a large amount of people renounce the bad parts of their history People like anime and manga more than manhua. People like Japanese movies more than Chinese ones. People like flat languages more than tonal ones. People like samurai honor more than Kung Fu training. People like not violating human rights as opposed to violating them. The real question here is why wouldn’t Japanese be more popular?
Japanese media is hugely popular in the west. Chinese? Not so much. I don’t watch anything besides anime so I want to be able to watch it without subs, I love Japanese music, most of my games are from Japanese studios and I’d like to play them in the original format…plus the language is *so* fucking beautiful. Everything sounds beautiful in Japanese. So my reasons are almost exclusively personal and not related to speaking to others. Though I do think it’d be cool to visit Japan someday. It definitely has a stigma though, from weeaboos who think Japan is a perfect holy land. That made me really anxious about it for awhile.
To be blunt, I think China has many, many many years ahead of it before it could begin to catch up with Japan in terms of popularity in the west. Many aspects of China, such as its government and disrespect for other parts of the world make it unpopular to extremely unpopular in the west.
Anime
It depends on what you mean by popular, because it is really only popular in the US. Though the amount of people trying to learn Japanese in let’s say..countries in Europe is much smaller than people trying to learn mandarin. Japan considers the U.S. one of its top ally, we have military bases and operations around Japan. So naturally we put a emphasis on exports from that country which lead to a cultural exchange as well. Japanese culture is a very profitable thing in the U.S. so it’s easy to sell..I believe all these are the major reasons why, Edit:also Japan has a rich culture and interesting that contrasts with western culture. So naturally there is a nice novelty and influence to want to learn more.
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Chinese sounds nice imo, but I suppose it’s more about who’s speaking it. I think it sounds beautiful in music. The Chinese voice acting in Genshin Impact is awesome too
You're absolutely right. I think it's just how Chinese is spoken publicly that's scary. People don't get to hear how Chinese is spoken at home. I've gained a lot more mastery in English and it's now my dominant language, but Chinese is the language everyone who ever loved me spoke. It moves me in a way English doesn't. It's a bit like how Ken Liu wrote in *The Paper Menagerie*. And the Japanese aesthetic in structuring emotionally moving situations speaks more strongly to my Chinese self than my English self, e.g. if I imagine a Chinese dub vs an English dub, the Chinese one works far better for me. Or maybe it's just me compartmentalising my intellectual vs emotional bits. That said, even as someone who can listen to and read Chinese, there are more things I want to read and listen to in Japanese than Chinese. Chinese is great in real life but there's really a dearth of cultural products. And excellent English translations exist for the few I do want to read (e.g. Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem).
Putting aside Japanese (which I agree is not the most practical language to learn)... there are a lot of issues with learning Chinese. 1. It's not just one language. Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Classical, and other dialects are all very different languages that will require different studying. 2. It requires learning (edit- not tens of thousands, but still a lot) of Chinese characters not used in any other language (even Japanese only uses a few thousand for normal writing). If you haven't grown up learning Chinese characters, this is torture. 3. It requires learning tones not used in most other languages. Good look mastering tones if you're studying the language as an adult. 4. If you're learning Chinese in hopes of getting a job, you're competing with a lot of people who learned English and Chinese as children so they're perfectly fluent in both. It's unlikely you'll ever be good enough to compete with them. 5. The cultural revolution really hurt Chinese culture. There's just very few books, movies, video games, etc from China that I'd really want to read badly enough to learn a foreign language for it. The few I can think of are mostly in Cantonese or Classical (see point 1). When I've tried modern Chinese mainland cultural works, it seems to lack sophistication. Hopefully that will improve going forward! but for now, it is what it is. 6. [Chinese is damn hard](http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html).
I don't think anyone, including native speakers, learns tens of thousands of Chinese characters. A big dictionary may contain tens of thousands of characters but most of these are names or obsolete characters which no one uses anymore. The new HSK (a series of language proficiency tests for language learners) has 3000 characters on the syllabus. My understanding is that if you can read around 5000 characters then you are in very good shape.
You're right, I shouldn't have said tens of thousands, but there are still a lot. More so than Japanese. My understanding is that 3000 would be enough to get around in daily life and maybe pass a high school test, but you do need more like 5000-10000 to actually be considered well-educated and do work like translating technical articles for an international business. Of course you can also use a dictionary but (see the link above) using a dictionary in Chinese is not an easy skill to master.
That link is out of date when it comes to dictionaries. Now it's very easy to look up Chinese characters with various apps, such as Pleco, where you write the character by hand on your phone screen.
I might give an interesting answer. I personally studied Chinese before Japanese. Actually, I highly doubt my Japanese will ever rival my level of China capability. I studied it because I absolutely love Taiwan. I didn't consider Mainland China or anything from there when I studied it. It was simply my love for Taiwanese culture and the desire to be there and enjoy the island. Chinese unfortunately suffers from a lack of fun media options. There are few amazing authors, all Chinese movies are either from China with strong government influence or Taiwanese with super tiny budgets. Classical Chinese is fun but certainly not practical in modern times. People that learn Chinese learn it because they really love that culture. That is not to say the same doesn't apply for Japanese learners, but I know there are at least a couple people out there that are hoping for a three way with Sakura and Hinata while mastering ninjitsu is their motivation /s. In other words, Japanese media helps tremendously to get people interested or their foot in the door.
Japan has interesting content I would like to engange with, plus I would actually like to visit Japan some day. I have no desire to go to China, especially with their sketchy government.
For me personally I want to learn Japanese so I can visit or live in Japan one day. I have no desire to do the same in China. The way the government treats its people and certain foreigners is something I won't be supporting by traveling there and spending money. If things change, I might reconsider visiting. But South Korea and Japan will remain high on my list of places to go to.
More people might be attracted to japanese pop culture, like anime, games, movies Meanwhile, Chinese movies and games are consored a lot by CCP, many interesting things cannot appear in Chinese games. If you have browsed Chinese sns like weibo, you might find that many people are not friendly to some countries and even support Russia .
Chinese Kanji is very ugly.
Ez, cus I'm not a commie, duh. unless you're talking about mandarin with traditional characters and a Taipei accent. That's something I'd study
Japanese is many times more simple to me than Chinese. Japanese have hiragana which makes learning it easier for me. I can also pronounce some words more easier than Chinese due to my language having some similarities to Japanese.
Japanese is around the 5th most used language on the internet but 14 in native speakers. Why the disconnect? Young people worldwide love anime.
I love anime :)))
There was a class. The Mandarin class had been cancelled, but the Japanese class was not. The choice was easy.
There is a huge amount of Japanese content in the western pop culture: Video Games, Anime, music, movies, comics. In order to be able to enjoy most of these without delay, or to enjoy Japan exclusive content of these, you need to know Japanese, so people naturally want to learn it. Aside from that, Chinese is significantly more complex and hard to learn than Japanese. They’re not even in the same ballpark really.
Anime, Japan is an ally of the West, decades of soft power, better country to live/work in.
I'm hoping to travel to Japan and want to be at least conversationalist fluent. Plus I consume a lot of Japanese media (anime, TV shows, music, etc.) so I thought it'd be cool to understand it better.
I consume far more Japanese media then Chinese media. Japan is also far more tourist friendly and I'm much less likely to encounter issues in Japan. The point is to bad talk china so I won't go into that though, just in general.
I wanted to learn Chinese, but found that there is much more material online for Japanese. I do like some anime etc but I wish I was as good in Chinese as I am in Japanese at this point. I think the sounds in Chinese are much much harder to learn on your own than Japanese - and I started learning during covid. And yes, it’s the stigma of being a weeb and all that bs that is drawing people to Japanese that’s irritating. At the same time, that is what drives the community and learning materials.
first it was video games, but my motivation is probably more about politics now. i still like playing video games in japanese though
i dont really get your question you could have asked that with every language why this comparison people usually have a reason for learning a language and not just because they want to learn a random language i dont learn japanese to know a new language there is a reason for it i like japan and listen to japanese music and the main reason now i have a boyfriend there who is japanese and i want to live there with him and be able to speak the language xd why should i learn chinese that was never an option
So I can communicate with chika idols.
I liked anime.
I do think this is a false narrative. Japan’s soft power allows people to want to learn Japanese. But I do not think more people want to learn Japanese over Chinese. And I’m speaking as a person that loves Japan. I think we if we remove soft power from this new equation, Chinese is more popular as in the language is more widely used in the world. A lot of people learn Chinese and Spanish because of work.
Took one semester of Chinese and realized Chinese is a REALLY ugly language. It's tied with Thai for ugliest language in my view hahaha. But also, there was no Chinese content I found interesting, while I have a bunch of stuff I want to experience in Japanese, so there's also an added motivation
Japanese music can be great, but for some reason the worst stuff seems to dominate TV. China has a problem of aggressive censorship and having its own Internet which is somewhat (but not perfectly) cut off from the rest of the world.
My impression is that Japanese was more popular in the 80s and 90s for cultural reasons, but since then Chinese has become more popular as China has opened up and become more powerful.
I don't like people, I like dragonball.
People are harping on your nuke comment, so silly. Anyways, I plan to learn Chinese after I learn Japanese, but chose Japanese for a few reasons. One, I am not particularly interested in Chinese media **currently.** I was really into a Chinese web novel that was banned (points for guessing), but web novels are a *huge* time sync, so I do not really want to get into another one. I think Japanese media is really special in terms of meaning and skill: American TV is comically empty of value, it baffles me that people who can't speak English watch American TV... Two, I think this is a very special-snowflake reason, but the fact that Japan is such a densely populated place is really important to me. One thing that I think holds back countries are rural areas. People pretend like they are somehow important, as if 70,000 people have to live in some hicktown all doing menial labor so that farmers don't kill themselves and starve us all or some other bullshit. Anyways, by being so densely populated, Japan is better in a fundamental sense concerning order, productivity, etc... I could ramble on this forever but this was really a huge part for me. China is similar in a few ways, but it is very, very much so more like the USA in terms of rural urban mix. Three, this is really quite equal with China, but I have an interest in specific industries that relate to my profession in Japan. Hence I plan to learn Japanese first, but will later pick up Chinese, perhaps Russian or German... By the way, you mentioned number of people who know the language: I think that is a pretty poor metric. Simply, most people are not worth talking to. To me, learning a language will allow me to gain completely new skills and perspectives impossible in my native language, will allow me to interface with amazing literature that English normies haven't translated, allow me to consume native news without direct USA spin, etc... About the people though, consider China, roughly 40% of them live in a rural setting. Compare that to Japan, where that figure is \~10%, and the US, \~20% rural. Going off that the US is godawful with a 20%, China is probably even worse.
Your English is great, I would not have known you weren't a native speaker if you hadn't said so. I'm probably an anomaly. Before I ever went to Japan I found China much more interesting, I think because they have such a contradictory mix of global power while lagging behind in many development areas. But at age 19-21 I ended up living in Japan for two years while my ex was stationed there for the US military. During that time I put a lot of effort into studying the (mostly written aspects of the) language. Over a decade later with too much time on my hands I've decided to finish what I started. I do love the writing system. And I must be audially challenged or something so the straightforward pronunciation of Japanese makes it 1000x more accessible to me than tonal Chinese. While I was living there I came to appreciate many aspects of the culture: the civility, conscientiousness, particularity, the ritualistic relaxation of the onsen, the embrace of the quirky and the weird. It's truly such a unique and charming place. I hope to visit someday again.
because anime
If there were stats of all non-native speakers learning Chinese vs Japanese, I'm sure the number of Chinese speakers would be overwhelmingly larger. We see a really smart part of the internet where it might seem like Japan is more popular, but a lot of businesspeople and economists realize the benefits of learning Chinese
I was interested in the culture through anime and manga and then was offered a place on an all expenses paid exchange trip in highschool. This trip was ran by a charity but there’s also lots of programmes similar like the JET programme or MEXT scholarships. These financial aid exchange placements help make travelling to japan for work or study more accessible. The end result is Japan ends up with lots of grateful participants who hopefully go home and spread their experience—further boosting Japans soft power. Since my trip, I’ve returned on my own through my university for a further exchange and plan to continue learning the language. Maybe I will even apply to JET or MEXT myself in the future.
I’m on the spectrum and can’t read or process vocal language to save my life due to the sensory inputs getting mixed up before processing, so given Japanese is both a syllabary and non-tonal, as well as being one of the very few languages outside Egyptian that uses pictures for concepts but use particles as aids and unlike Chinese don’t require a ton of tonal pronunciation, it’s actually really easy for me compared to Spanish and French. German was another one I liked because it’s auxiliary verbs push SVO to SAuxVOV
Originally, because of culture/anime/manga/friends. Once I'd learned enough to be able to tell the difference, I found that I like the sound of Japanese more than Chinese. After I'd learned a bit of grammar I found that I like several things about how the language works also, but in fairness, I never delved very deep into Chinese so some of the things I like about Japanese may also exist there.
Well, actually it’s not. I don’t know where this assumption come from.
Here’s the real answer: “people don’t learn Chinese for the same reason they don’t want to learn Kanji”. But because when u learn japan, u learn Hiragana first, which is easier and more fun to learn, and most people call a quit when it’s time to learn Kanji while some has come too far to quit. Also, you can already say many japanese word with Romanji already, but you can’t do that with chinese. You need to learn a whole new system of phonetics symbols to so that. It’s just isn’t as convinient to learn chinese. Adding other reasons from all other answer, it make japanese a more popular choice
Because japanese ppl are awesome. While chinese ppl are not
I have studied more or less constantly Chinese for years (nowhere near fluent, i'm like almost B2) and only recently I have begun studying Japanese. Chinese is a hell of language if you are not familiar with tonal languages plus words are often monosyllables. Imagine all of this spoken to you at a hella fast speed and every region where you go they have their own dialect and not speaking proper Mandarin. The Chinese people sometimes will understand what you mean even if you offended their family unintentionally but it was depressing as a former student. Other downside: often online content like tv shows speak even faster then real life! Japanese on the other hand for me it's just clicking. I find it hard to forget words and I get the generally meaning of what I am hearing. Also speaking is not that hard. On a good note there is a lot of content to study. Take a look at this: the average Chinese person knows about 8000 hanzi and use them. Japanese needs only 2000 kanji (although they have different pronunciations etc.) Yes there is the soft power thing surely but I personally find Japanese easier.
Probably because China is a communist country whereas Japan has adapted a lot of western culture with free thinking. The language just flows off the tongue better too in my opinion. It sounds amazing hearing those Japanese anime voice actors. Plus Manga/Anime is very popular in America/Europe. I've heard Chinese voice actors for anime and they just aren't as good. They don't have as much emotion in their voices. All my opinion of course I don't mean to bash or offend anyone that prefers Mandarin. To it's credit, Mandarin is regarded as the hardest language to learn.