LogFAQs > #912926225

Also, I've started learning Mandarin for shits and chuckles, I view it as the better language and so far most/all of the Kanji learning stuff I picked up with Japanese transfers right on over.

I'm only about 300 Hanzi deep (a week or so worth of study) but this isn't particularly hard. The grammar is so straightforward that it's actually hard to deal with, after coming from Japanese and its often roundabout ways to say stuff.

Q -
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A -
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The neat thing is that if you have a good handle on Japanese and English grammar, Chinese is awesome because SO FAR it appears to be the best of both worlds with very few of the drawbacks. Verbs aren't really conjugated, you just set up the "when" in advance or use a certain marker to say "it happened." Word order is largely English with certain elements of Japanese (mostly the TOPIC handling). The only huge negative (barely) is that counters are out to own your soul, but those are things you get through context anyhow.

I'm not sinking too much time into it (about an hour a day) but it appears that learning to deal with Kanji is a huge time-saver. Tones are (so far) not terrible like everyone would think. Also only having ONE way to read any given character is AWESOME.

...still, there's around 5000 Hanzi one must know before you're truly worth a damn, so many things are yet to be seen.

The goal is to be reading in 4 or so months after heavy grinding (I'll probably have around 3-5000 words under my belt at that time) and let input carry me from there, but again, not working too hard on it since most of my watching/reading is Japanese. I'm employing much harsher learning strats and imposing time restrictions to this just to see how it goes.