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Comment by throwaway66554 | Hacker News Reader

>Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language.

>The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language.

I wouldn't go that far. It's more like learning Greek and hearing many of the same root words, sounds, etymology, etc. in English.

An Italian speaker can listen to Latin and grok maybe 25%. A Japanese speaker can listen to Chinese and get maybe 2%, max.

Words like "library" use the same Chinese letters, and have very similar pronunciations, but that's about the extent.

I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did).

Source: I speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

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You can definitely get a deeper appreciation of a language and get extra decoding tools for learning related languages when you learn about the history and etymology of words.

As a romance language speaker, knowing about greek and latin particles helped me greatly in learning english of all languages, just because of the sheer amount of appropriations english does.

Something that sticks with me from my early japanese learning after all these years is that, for example, "あ" (japanese "a") is a stylization of "安" (pronounced "an"). This helps make an association similar to how some kids books overlay hiragana over pictures of things that start with that letter, e.g. overlaying "い" (i) around a strawberry (ichigo). There are tons of similar examples in both japanese and chinese (pronunciation prefixes being a common tool used by chinese learners)

> I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did).

Why? I speak Chinese and used to be fluent in Japanese. I find my Chinese (and English + katakana) a huge help when visiting Japan in recent years.

What's your rationale for this ordering?

Because when you learn Japanese, you have to learn kanji, the more traditional strokes (non-simplified), both Japanese and Chinese sounds, and the grammar is closer to Korean (and closer pronunciation for a lot of words).

So, it's better to learn Japanese, quickly pick up Korean, then learn Chinese.

Chinese last since you have to learn simplified characters, the grammar is different, tonality is quite different, etc.

Doesn't the order matter only if it's harder to do this the other way around?

Anecdotally for me, learning Chinese first with simplified characters was totally fine, and without formal study, I can read traditional characters fine 90% of the time and guess a remaining ~8% of characters I don't immediately recognize for a total ~98% comprehension, kind of like figuring out how to read medieval gothic font.

Knowing Chinese, learning Japanese and its own simplified characters (shinjitai) was a breeze compared with my classmates who struggled especially with kanji, and also pronunciation. Until I compare hours with a native Japanese speaker learning Chinese, it's hard to tell if learning Japanese, then Chinese would have been easier or not.

> Anecdotally for me, learning Chinese first with simplified characters was totally fine, and without formal study, I can read traditional characters fine 90% of the time and guess a remaining ~8% of characters I don't immediately recognize for a total ~98% comprehension, kind of like figuring out how to read medieval gothic font.

AIUI that's not a recommended approach; my friend is learning Chinese and his teacher was insistent that he should learn the traditional characters first because it's much easier to pick up the simplified characters from the traditional ones than the other way around.

It's definitely true that it's easier for readers of traditional to learn simplified than visa-versa. After all, the simplified script was created by people who were already using traditional and were attempting to make logical and consistent simplifications!

On the other hand, your friend might find some very common traditional characters brutal to learn as a beginner. 醫生 (doctor) often comes up within the first few lessons and 鬱悶 (depressed) within the first couple of semesters. In contrast, someone starting with simplified won't be so daunted learning the simplified equivalents 医生 and 郁闷. Later, as an advanced student, the traditional forms aren't so daunting as they would have been to start with.

It's still more work for someone who knows 医 to learn the rest of 醫 than it is for someone who knows 醫 to learn that they just need to write the first 8 strokes that make up its upper left corner to make the simplified version, of course.

It's an interesting point--I underestimated the difficulty of learning to handwrite characters. Knowing simplified I can read traditional pretty effortlessly and even communicate with a relative in HK typing in traditional, but cannot write it by hand from memory. I liken it to being able to read but not draw the Gothic "T" in the New York Times.

Still, I'd claim that regardless of the direction, learning the simplification map (and some patternless exceptions) is a small incremental task compared with the thousands of hours learning the broader language. What's a few hundred mapping rules + exceptions, after learning 3000+ characters? If someone asked me which character set to start with, barring real issues with availability of education material, I'd say to learn whatever you want if you're committed to it! Just be ready to spend a few hundred more hours at least due to the increased amount of information to memorize in traditional.

> kanji, the traditional strokes (non-simplified)

Uh, both Japan and Chinese use different simplified glyphs. And they overlap a lot because they are different standardizations of handwritten glyphs in the bigger Sinosphere. I would be surprised if you indeed learned the traditional characters while learning Japanese.

>Uh, both Japan and Chinese use different simplified glyphs.

Wrong. Though there are divergences, Chinese in mainland China use simplified Chinese characters (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_character...).

Kanji is more closely related to the traditional Chinese characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Local_developments_and_d...) than the mainland simplification.

>I would be surprised if you indeed learned the traditional characters while learning Japanese.

Kanji is closer related, or exactly the same as traditional Chinese characters (used in HK, Taiwan, etc.) than simplified.

My understanding of Chinese (the language) is limited, but having learned Hanja (essentially traditional one) first then learned Japanese later the divergence was already significant. Or, more quantitatively, the Joyo Kanji has 364 simplified characters out of 2,136 (~17%) [1] while the mainland China simplified probably about 2,000 out of 7,000 common characters (~28%) [2]. This divergence is not the biggest deal, but still big enough to refute the claim that Japanese is easier to learn because it's "non-simplified" (there may be other valid reasons though).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai#Simplifications_in_J...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#...

>Or, more quantitatively, the Joyo Kanji has 364 simplified characters out of 2,136 (~17%) [1] while the mainland China simplified probably about 2,000 out of 7,000 common characters (~28%) [2].

It's 17% and 28%, but much, much higher for the most commonly used characters, which is where the divergence between simplified and traditional grows even more.

>This divergence is not the biggest deal, but still big enough to refute the claim that Japanese is easier to learn because it's "non-simplified" (there may be other valid reasons though).

I didn't make that claim. Maybe your talking about another thread?

It's not that it's easier to learn, it's that the path of going Japanese -> Korean -> Chinese is the easier, most logical path. The diverging simplified Chinese standard characters being a large reason behind that.

Speaking sure, because both Korean and Japanese were fully formed languages that borrowed a writing system. I've come to view Kanji/Hanja as an information layering on top of the language used to increase the information density/clarity of the written languages.

If you look at written Japanese/Korean (with Hanja) and you get a much higher transfer. Esp. Someone who knows Chinese trying to get by in Japan.

That sounds similar to English and German. There are a few words that are still somewhat connected, like water / wasser, but knowing one gives little insight into the other.

There's also "Gift" (Poison), "Pickel" (Pimple), "Wo" (where), "Wer" (who), "Fahrt" (travel), and so on...

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