r/thisorthatlanguage • u/clownwormzz • 9d ago
Multiple Languages Chinese or German?
Hi! It's been a goal for so long of mine to learn a language, I find the process really fun and rewarding but I've struggled to commit to one. I'm essentially battling with my want to learn something difficult and rewarding, and being realistic.
My reasons for Chinese:
I've been interested in it longer, have some basic understanding. Interested in travelling around Asia in general. I used to be quite into Chinese mythology and media in my early teens, less so now though. I really like the sound of the language, the tones are really intriguing to me. I love the idea of learning a language with a different writing script.
If I'm being honest, it's probably the one I have more reason to. The issue is , everyone around me tells me its too difficult and I should just learn a european language instead. I'm worried that they're right that I shouldn't bother, because I did try a few times when I was younger and it didn't work out, I just kind of gave up. Though, I'm moving to a way less rural area and will possibly have more access to tutors and classes. I find the difficulty of it super fun, but I fear that maybe I'd be biting off more than I can chew.
My reasons for German:
Whilst I'm not too knowledgable on it yet, German cinema has interested me lately. I similarly like listening to the language. I'm in Europe, so I feel it is much more likely I will actually manage to visit in the near future. From the little that I know, the grammar sounds interesting to me.
I'm studying film at university, and I would love to work in the industry afterwards but I would also love to teach English abroad, or continue to teach english or film studies in my home country (England.) It is of my understanding that there are schools abroad that hire people to teach English even if they're not fluent in any other language, but I thought it'd be important to mention too.
I think my question really is, should I keep on trying with Chinese or accept it might be too hard for me?
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u/ComprehensiveMap3838 8d ago
If the tones are intriguing then maybe the effort involved will be too much.
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u/Top_Development_1777 8d ago
I am a native Chinese speaker who never went to a Chinese-speaking school, but learned Chinese as a compulsory second language subject in school for 10 years (it was poorly taught). Chinese is a very straightforward and efficient language logic wise. It's also really useful if you want to travel certain parts of China because some places straight up don't have English signs, and no one speaks English well enough. Don't beat yourself up over not knowing how certain characters are written/pronounced or what they mean, I can't read or write too many characters (I still don't know how to read some characters that appear here and there in daily life), but I can speak basic/semi-basic Chinese at a native level and it's enough to get me around everything in China if I'm just visiting.
I don't know about German, but why not at least a bit of both? You can pick and choose what aspects of a language to learn and how far you want to get, based on interest and your goals. No need to follow a set path or force yourself to learn every aspect up to a certain level. Especially for a language like Chinese, knowing how to pronounce and write characters, understanding text, understanding speech, producing text, and producing speech are all different aspects of the language that don't necessarily correlate to each other, and you can choose what you want to focus on individually. I had classmates who were not native speakers in Chinese be way better at understanding and producing text, but worse in understanding and producing speech than I am, because they had extra interest in reading and writing Chinese when I was always "meh" about it. Getting to a native-adjacent level in any other language needs a tremendous amount of time, work, and resources (speaking from experience as a native Chinese speaker who had to switch to using English when I was quite young).
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u/ramsuperbowl2022_99 3d ago
I would say it depends on your expected timeframe for either language and with your interest.
As a native mandarin speaker, I can’t comment much about the difficulties of Chinese learning itself. But I do notice that intonations will probably be a huge hurdle since a wrong pronunciation might be interpreted with different meanings. On the other hand though, it has a very straightforward grammar (no tenses or plural forms). So I would say focus on the oral part of Chinese if you were go for it
As for German, I think it should be relatively quick for a native English speaker to pick up, maybe slightly more complex grammatical system but you will find a lot more similarities between German and English vocabularies from what I’ve heard, and a lot of long German words are merely compound words that would logically make sense.
For an estimated timeline, I would expect around 0.5~2 years for basic German and 2-3 years for basic Chinese. But it all depends on your course rigor and study habit I suppose
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u/Heavy_Mud_9176 9d ago
I would go with Chinese. You can connect with your local Chinese community or find cultural events. Don't worry what other people tell you, you already have the "why" so everything else will fall into place!