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