I'm flirting with the idea of learning Japanese (in fact, I have a dictionary beside me right now) and I can think of a few. Japanese has 130 million speakers, making it the 9th most spoken language in the world. As well, Japan is a prosperous, developed nation, a liberal democracy with the second-largest economy in the world and high rankings on political, economic and press freedoms. Finally there's the diffusion of Japanese media and the significant overseas communities.

Having said that, more or less the same arguments apply to why you should learn German, which is in the same language family as English and uses the same writing system, so it's up to you if you want to try your hand at a harder language.

Do it! Do it!


Not by total speakers. Either Portuguese or Bengali would be 9th. By native sepakers it is about 9th, though.


As far as I know, there isn't much of a Japanese diaspora. Significant communities exist in Brazil, the United States & in the Philippines but beyond that...


You're right. But for me, German is the harder language.

I'm scared, honestly.
Yes, that's correct. Still a lot of speakers either way though.
I was thinking of the United States as well (and Canada).
I don't think it's easy, exactly but Japanese is a tough nut to crack. There's the agglutination, the complex writing system and all the unfamiliar vocabulary. I'd say it's on par with Arabic and Russian in terms of difficulty.

Mandarin, but not Cantonese.


No, it's the Guandong people who are really writing in Mandarin. Cantonese when written is different, ask our HongKong resident.


Me not. Cantonese speakers may have enough knowledge of Mandarin, or may not.


WTF? o.O


Exactly. That's not Cantonese AT ALL.


I'd love to, but there are no resources on written Cantonese IN ENGLISH where I live (Vancouver). A guy I know from another forum who is learning only written Cantonese from London told me he had to order the books from Amazon. He kind of inspires me, but I can't really take on one more language for now.


No more crazy Arabic-like diglossia please. Some normal, healthy, English-like diglossia is enough. (Well, maybe not so healthy, but I hope I got my point across.)

@Talib: I can only wish you good luck.

For the average resident of Guangdong, isn't it diglossia that they speak Cantonese but read and write Mandarin? I'm not sure exactly how much difference there is between those two lects but I suspect it compares favourably to the gulf between MSA and Egyptian Arabic.
If I do try to learn Japanese, which I probably won't unless they start writing everything in hirigana.

I know that HongKongers are taught Written Cantonese, and I am only assuming Guandongers write in Mandarin, because, well, it's the People's Republic of China. One of these days I'll ask a Cantonese immigrant about it, but at the school I've been going since February there are none, so it'll take some time. Kaenif? Are you there? 'Ya know anything about it?

Haha, it's exactly all those X-yomi readings what really scares me off that language. Gosh, what a hell of a writing system those Japs came up with!

That, and I don't really like all the Japanese I've got to meet so far. Materialist brats. Well, it's Vancouver, so as for Japanese immigrants...

Second-generation Japanese would be thoroughly Westernized (I mean even more than Japan itself) and probably wouldn't have a ton in common with Japanese from Japan.

Dude, you've been learning Arabic! Arabic!


That seems to be where most people rank it. I'm a hell of a lot more scared of Russian, though and Arabic is impossible as far as I'm concerned.


It is. It's practically the same situation for average residents of Egypt who use Masri & MSA.


There's only 2: on & kun. The former are the Sino-Japanese readings while the latter are native Japanese readings. There are also special readings used in names.

We have Cantonese as our first language, and Putonghua became compulsory in schools these days.
However, we are always taught to write in Baihua(i.e. written Mandarin, we call it 書面語 [written language?]) for Chinese, and we start to learn reading some simple Wenyan(Classical) in secondary school.

Maybe reading Baihua in Cantonese is a bit weird, but we are used to it.
A small amount of Cantonese-styled words can be written in compositions as long as they have a special meaning (or inconvenient to write in Baihua), but they are usually enclosed in 「」s.
We are not taught written Cantonese, but we use it in informal writings and on the internet. Writing the wrong character (in written Canto) is not an issue as long as the pronounciation is similar.
For example, /jì ká/ or /jí ká/IPA (now) can be written in the following ways:
/jì ká/:
宜家 (=Ikea )
而家
兒家
/jí ká/:
依家
衣家

One can replace 家 with 加(or other homophones of course), some even write E+ on the internet.
(And I'm going to talk about 火星文 again if I continue )

@Talib: Nah, I consider Canadian-born heritage speakers more Canadian than anything else. Many of such Japanese I've met are year-long International Students, hence well probably coming from middle-upper and upper classes, increasing the chances of heavy westernization.

@Kaenif: Thank you for the info! Wow, and that's Hong Kong. I thought you were taught some kind of Standard Written Cantonese. So all those articles in the Cantonese Wikipedia and Uncyclopedia are written just using de facto characters (not following any standard)!?

Is Putonghua your language of instruction, or you just take it as a second language?

Wow. I remember reading somewhere in the Internet (Wikipedia?) that reading Baihua with Cantonese pronunciations was really odd and not recommendable, and now you're telling me you're even used to that!

Ok, too much shock for a day.