Is Chinese easier to learn after learning Japanese or vice versa?

It's hard to say for sure whether J then C is easier than C then J, as nobody can try both routes... but I have done J then C, so can make a few comments.

Having learned Japanese (fluently) many years ago, and married a Japanese lady, we both started learning Mandarin just over a year ago. We both found that we had a great advantage over other people in the class because we could read many of the characters (and identify the ones different from Japanese more easily). Some parts of the grammar are similar, but Chinese word order is in general closer to English than Japanese (so in that sense, learning Japanese first could help as Chinese is *comparatively* easy). The pronunciations of most characters are fairly similar to Japanese on-yomi (again, as Japanese as multiple readings for most characters but Chinese seldom more than one, this means Chinese is *comparatively* easy). However, Chinese tones are difficult (you really need to make sure you learn them properly with each word, right from the start), and several of the sh/ch/zh or e/i/u sounds are almost indistinguishable to either English or Japanese ears -- whereas most Japanese sounds are quite simple.

It's quite likely that rather than which you learn first, the important thing will be how good your teacher is. Trying to teach yourself will only produce very limited results, so if you have e.g. a good Mandarin teacher nearby and only a mediocre Japanese teacher, I would say do Chinese first (and vice versa).

Trying to learn both at once would be too confusing: get to the level where you can *at least* have a daily conversation and read a child's book (without using a dictionary) in one of the languages before you even start the other.

It might also be worth considering "what if I don't actually manage both" -- which one is a greater priority? If you're doing it out of interest in manga, obviously Japanese is more important, whereas if you want to trade with China, Mandarin is the way to go...

So the bottom line is: (a) Only do one at a time; (b) Choose which one based on which language is more important to you if you could only do one; (c) If both are equally important, choose the better teacher; (d) If all else is equal, I'd suggest Japanese first, as some aspects of Chinese will be easier after doing Japanese.

Hope this helps!

Learning Japanese might help a little, as many characters in Chinese writing share similarities with Japanese Kanji. Chinese, whether it be Mandarin or Cantonese or another dialect, is a very challenging language, perhaps one of the most difficult in the world. If you begin with another asian language such as Japanese, it might help to introduce you to some of the charactistics of asian languages, and ease the learning curve of studying Chinese. However, they are still very different languages in most respects.

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I am chinese learning japanese now. Learning kanji is easy sometimes i do not know the pronunciation but i do know the meaning and can understand the sentence. However, the sentence structure are totally different, sometimes i have to sort of translate what that japanese is saying into chinese. It is easy to learn kanji but for the sentence structure and particle wise will be difficult.

Good question. Chinese and Japanese include so many of the same characters so maybe about the same. I think Japanese is a little easier though because of hiragana and katakana. but combing all that and kanji can be difficult...

To my knowledge, learning Japanese first will be a better idea, especially if you're learning to write too. Chinese is much harder to grasp. But then again, that's just my own opinion.

learn chinese first. japanese has like three different alphabets. the chinese language is only one component of japanese, so it is best to learn it in steps.

I think they'd both be pretty much the same: difficult. (well, at least for me!) However, if you have already learned a language before hand than learning a second is supposed to be easier.