I know 70% of the Chinese language. I can listen to it, speak it fairly well, and can sort of write it. However I cannot read Chinese the well. It's a bit weird.
Chinese is a quite interesting language, but I know only a few words (e.g. ni hao, in English hello). Also, if I remember correctly "ni hao ma?" means how are you doing?.
Aha! I am learning Chinese! Of course Parsat already knows this.... I would rather learn Japanese, but Chinese is the closest thing they teach to it. I'm glad I stopped at German 1, cause Chinese is about a million times easier. I can read characters better than I can actually write the Pinyin.... Speaking it was slightly difficult in the beginning but now it is pretty natural to pay attention to the tones and stuff.
Japanese and Chinese are actually very different languages...they aren't even in the same language family! If you can read Chinese, however, you do get an advantage in reading kanji, which is often a stumbling block for foreigners more used to the phonetic hiragana and katakana. These are Chinese words that were imported over in the Tang Dynasty some one and a half millenia ago.
If you live in Taiwan, where the Japanese occupied for about 50 years, you might actually find that Japanese words have been borrowed over in speech and in writing. For those of you who do understand Japanese, the possessive "no" is one of these words.
Overall, though, if you'd like to learn Japanese, Chinese won't give you that much of an advantage. Their spoken forms, much of their written forms, and grammatical structures are too different.
Way to crash my fun boat Parsat. But I do have feeling I have more of an advantage still, because given the fact I have studied 4 different languages, and I can speak/read 3 of them better than my fellow students at school, I can understand foreign grammatacal structures alot easier than others.
ni men chuan shi ben dan (lol dont ask what this means)
Not entirely grammatical but should I ban you before or after I tell everyone what it means? Wo kai wan xiao.
If you can read Chinese, however, you do get an advantage in reading kanji, which is often a stumbling block for foreigners more used to the phonetic hiragana and katakana.
It still doesn't help much. There isn't a 1:1 relationship between Chinese and kanji.
