which is easier: to learn to speak (not write) Japanese or Chinese?

Chinese is a tonal language, so to Indo-European non-native speakers, it is quite difficult to master. On the other hand, Japanese has only 5 main vowels and a dozen consonants whose pronunciations share with Spanish/English, so I am quite sure you will find Japanese easier to speak.

You can check out the pronunciations of Chinese and Japanese alphabets here, it's a good site:

http://www.sayjack.com/

It really depends on your native language, I believe. For native English speakers, I have heard that Chinese is easier to learn to speak because the sentence structures are similar for both languages. However, the sentence structure is rather different in Japanese, so it is more difficult for English speakers to learn. The Japanese and Korean sentence structures are rather similar and I have studied Korean for some time and I found it very difficult to learn. I have not studied Chinese or Japanese though.

While speaking i think both japanese and chinese is complicated. Japanese got 50 sound but the chinese got over 300+ sound. However, chinese is more complicated while in writing, you can use 50 hiragana and 50 katakana while wrting in japanese but in chinese you need knowing 8000+ of Han Character. But in my opinion, you should learn chinese then japanese as kanji and han character is similar. (i recommend to use Traditional Chinese as Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja is same as it.) Moreover, for learning chinese, please go to Taiwan's school but not China's School because Taiwanese is spoken is in Southern Chinese Slang as it is used at Southern China, Hong Kong Province, Malaysia and Singapore. (That is about 110M people who use it). While China's School speaking is in Northern China Slang, that only has using in Beijing, Tianjin, and more (that is about 65M people who use it).After you mastered in Chinese, you can start learning japanese as with knowing the han character, it is more easy to master the japanese. Then, you maybe can start learnig Korean XD...

For an English speaker, I'd say about equal. To be honest with you, I would go for Chinese. Japanese is pretty much useless and it's a total joke on resumes.

Depends. I think Japanese is harder because everything sounds the same when u speak... But Chinese has 4 tones, which makes it difficult to adjust to speaking.. Chinese can be harder if u have difficulties with toning ur voice. But, I dunno. It's all opinions. I am currently taking a Chinese class. xD And it's ten times easier than Japanese. But that's just me! I think you should try Chinses because Chinese is one of the world's most spoken languages!

Chinese.

Japanese because in Chinese you need to perfect your intonation (that's like making your voice go higher or lower or longer or shorted for a certain sylable). Japanese does not use intonation.

i would take japanese. it's very easy to pronounce it intelligibly, and what's more, it is easy to HEAR it. and i think it is much easier to remember japanese vocabulary. as for grammar, i think the supposed ease of chinese is entirely deceptive.

I would say Chinese.

Chinese...

coz there's no masculine/ feminine speech and a range of degrees of politeness...