Two Asian Languages at Once?

[amaimono]

School hasn't even started yet but after a super relaxing summer, I'm a little freaked out. I signed up for Preadvanced Japanese and Beginning Mandarin. I think both are going to be really heavy. It seemed like a good idea at the time because I'm thinking of going to grad school for Japanese history and I've heard that languages are really

Comments

[amaimono]

That's what I'm afraid of. Can you tell me about how much time you were spending on each language at a time?

[vinceypoo]

Its definitely doable, I think as long as you have a strong foundation in one of the languages your fine. If you're learning both of the languages on an equal playing field, I can see getting a lot of them confused.

You should be fine. But yea - Its gonna be a lot of work as the guy above me said.

[amaimono]

I remember kanji pretty easily. Japanese grammar forms are where I stumble. I thought I could keep putting more work into Japanese since it's supposed to be my main language and all. My friends tell me that Chinese grammar forms are easier so I hope they're right.

[esckey]

Indeed it is. Chinese doesn't even reference things like tense aspect and plurality explicitly (it uses extra words if it needs to). Nor does it use honorific structures like Japanese does. Also, Chinese can create grammatical sentences without a subject which makes it very easy to form meaningful sentences without worrying about all the grammatical points European languages stress.

[accountingwitch]

Never took Japanese classes (but knew people who did), but that sounds hard. Doable, but it's real work. I suspect that you're going to have to 'unlearn' some kanji to learn the hanzi as well.

On my resume I just say "some knowledge/experience of blahlanguage" or "A2 level in blahlanguage". At the very least, I know more than someone who doesn't.

[ninthwind]

I'd imagine it'd be worthwhile. I'm primarily going to be studying Japanese, but really wish I could also make room for Chinese, too.

And aside from language, if you're interested in contemporary politics and society, Sino-Japanese relations are at a pretty important yet fragile point now, so more scholars who are familiar with Japanese and Chinese are all the more welcome these days.

Best of luck.

[hkmercredi]

I haven't done 2 languages at once myself (although I did study 4 within a relatively short period of time, and that's not easy even if it's not concurrent). I do plan to study Japanese and Chinese at the same time, but I already have a fairly strong background with Japanese, so I'm not too worried about adding Chinese on