I was approaching 40 when I started learning languages and one I think I felt I wanted to learn many languages so starting with a very different one proves to me whether I can do it or not. Also seems a good strategy to leave the easier ones until later when my brain has deteriorated a little.

My impressions are different though, I don’t see Chinese grammar as easy at all, using separate particles for grammar functions etc. etc. can be damn hard, particularly in subtle language. What I see is European grammar (which is based on the Latin and Greek roots of our languages) wrongly used to try to explain how things work in another language.

I have seen many people who have mastered a few European languages stumped by Asian language (by their own admission) is it not more likely that learning other language that are closer to you own just re-enforces your preconceptions of how a language works. I have even heard people complain that not having the grammar patterns they are used to leaves them lost. In some languages you can tell the purpose of a word in a sentence and infer things about tense etc. without knowing what the word means.

Mandarin first meant I had no worries about staring Thai and yes yes YES German although still a challenge is looking much more accessible than either of those.

I would say be thankful that your language horizons were cranked wide open right from the start :)

I guess, it’s hard to tell. Mandarin grammar, like I said, stumped me
out of the ball park at first. But now it’s much more easier to
understand. Maybe I’m committing a hindsight bias. For instance, like
you say, people who have learned European languages before taking on
an Asian language, still struggled with it and similar language only
reinforce your previous. I didn’t think about that.

Essentially it will be tough to objectively test this. For instance I
see three scenarios here (assuming English is your 1st language):

1) If I learn Chinese first, then learning subsequent langues would be
easier, because of the vast differences between English and Chinese.
2) If I learn Chinese, after I have learned a similar language to
English (differences smaller than Eng & Chi) then Chinese would be
easier, because I understand the language process.
And now a third one.
3) Learning Chinese, even after you have learned a similar language to
English, it would still be more difficult to grasp, because of the big
difference. So, learning Chinese first would bridge a big gap, thus
other languages would be easier to handle. It’s all downhill after
Chinese.

However, I think another factor plays a role in number 3: the language
learning process. It’s got me thinking. An introductory
linguistics/language course on different languages and how they work,
would be actually very helpful before starting to learn a foreign
language. Basically, what it comes down to is that I wish I had this
knowledge of a language and the language learning process, before I
started Chinese, and sometimes the best way to get this knowledge is
to learn an “easier” similar language. However, and this up to debate,
would that knowledge have helped me in grasping Chinese grammar
quicker/easier?

I don’t remember a whole lot of Japanese. I took it for one semester in college, but the course material overlapped so much with what I studied in high school that I got really bored; plus, I ended up liking Chinese better anyway, so I went with that. I would say that my Korean is probably better than my Japanese now, but still nowhere near what it takes to carry on a conversation. I can carry on a decent full-speed conversation in Chinese, though. I’ve gotten a lot of speaking and listening practice this year.

For what it’s worth, I find Spanish very easy and have had a really big boost from knowing the quite simple conjugations of my knowledge of other languages, French and Italian. The grammar is really easy and it is possible to learn hundreds of words in one go.

For example, most words in English ending in -ation will end in -cion in Spanish. Decoration – Decoracion
Invitation- Invitacion
Preperation- Preperacion.

Then, to make the past tense you just take off the -acion and put on -ado. So:

He decorado- I’ve decorated
He invitado- I’ve invited
He preperado- I’ve prepared

I can’t comment on how easy you’ll find it after studying Mandarin as I don’t have any knowledge of any Asian language. There are other things in Spanish like what I’ve listed above and if you like I’ll e-mail some to you (there’s too many to list in 1 post). Sorry about the length. I thought this would be handy if you didn’t already know it.

Chinese is my 4th foreign language, and I must say that I’m incredibly grateful for the previous languages. I studied German as my first foreign language (It’s probably one of the closest languages to English out there, seeing as how they’re both Germanic languages), and I’ve studied less and less related languages after that.

For me, it was a lot easier to learn Chinese because I knew all about the science of learning languages (Linguistics). It was also a lot easier to come up with pneumonic devices for vocabulary or grammar (“Oh! This is just like _______ in Russian or _____ in French.”), and the other languages as well as the basic linguistic aspects formed something of an interweaving tapestry that helped me from drowning in confusion over a language that is so unlike my own.

On a different note, I believe you have an advantage over me: you’re truly bilingual. Bilingual language students who are attempting to learn a foreign language have a more innate ability to acquire more languages, because their brain has been trained from a young age to differentiate between languages and have better comprehension.

Thank you for sharing this article! I enjoyed it :)

You’ll probably also discover that the two languages have completely different curve severity. You can find Chinese to be quite difficult at first but gets easier as you can and find the Japanese to be easy at first and becomes more difficult when you do. Or you might find the opposite.

Hi Oreleona,

thanks for the comment. Yoruba sounds interesting!
Yeah, I agree on the Japanese Kanji thing. I think Japanese might just be my next language. :)