Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
In my experience the only advantage you will have as a Chinese speaker is writing characters.
I have taught Japanese to many native Chinese speakers and all were surprised at how hard it was for them to learn (meaning they assumed it was easy).
I also taught Japanese to many native Korean speakers, and many were surprised how similar it is to Korean, and picked it up much quicker than they expected.
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I think at a certain upper-intermediate point, the biggest roadblock to progressing is kanji. I have trouble upping my vocab because I'm at a point where a greater knowledge of kanji would explode my vocab like knowing Greek and Latin roots does for English.
Before that, yes, Koreans would definitely have an advantage, as the languages are grammatically similar.
I still think a Chinese student will have a better time going than an American, for example.
FWIW, at my Japanese university, I probably would have tested into the highest level of Japanese had I known more kanji. Instead, I tested into upper-intermediate or lower-advanced. This is why I always bemoan how underemphasized kanji are in language instruction. Learning a lot of kanji early on in the process doesn't pay off immediately, but it's a very long-term investment.
It's like putting 20K in the bank. It's 20K, but 20–30 years later, it's approaching a million.
Learning more kanji than usually emphasized in a first–second year class will not pay off in the short term: you'll carry around a lot of kanji that you won't use.
However, after two–three years, you'll hit a point where your vocab will explode because you'll be able to pick up a newspaper and read more easily than someone who knows less, and you'll start learning the way you learn vocab in your native language: contextualization.