If you could learn either Japanese or Mandarin, which would you choose, for literary purposes...

As a clickbait article it was clearly well written or you wouldn't have posted it here.

I'm not the one who posted it.

I "lived" in China for 3 months. I have to say that one thing I learned unexpectedly is that it seems many Chinese people are not even completely fluent in Chinese.

>nearly impossible equals hard
If you are considering Chinese over other languages...why?

Yeah, this has nothing to do with the language. Lit studies majors are retards. I'm a mathematics grad student and it took me 2 and a half years of studying on the side simply out of pleasure to get fluent enough in the language to read Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber in the original with just occasionally looking up a character I didn't recognise.

I also speak better French than most of the idiots who read it in college.

I'd want to learn the chinese dialect that Chairman Mao wrote his poetry in.

This is true of most speakers of most languages, including English. The prestige dialect isn't "prestigious" for nothing.

I'm a Chinaboo.

Are you positive it has nothing to do with the autism?

Japanese no question. Mandarin is probably one of the ugliest sounding languages I've ever heard, it just sounds like gagging.

>Almost all chinese literature was burned in the cultural revolution
Utter bullshit/10. How would that even work? Even if you're imagining that they literally set fire to every single copy of most books in the PRC (which is ridiculous, but anyway...), Hong Kong and Taiwan existed.

The Chinese literary tradition is by far the greatest in the world. There's something like over a million poems from the Ming dynasty alone.

Mandarin, because To Live by Yu Hua is fantastic, and I liked the beginning of Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (had to return it to the library before I finished it).

>ten years of study
>takes hours to read two or three pages
Unless it's something specifically difficult like classical Buddhist texts, I'd say you'd have to be a pretty bad student for that.

It is genuinely hard, though- it's right that a four year course wouldn't be enough for most students. It's also really easy to forget stuff if you haven't done it for a while. Especially writing.

If you knew anything about languages, you would have picked Vietnamese or Tagalog.

I took japanese for awhile but realized I hate having to learn 3 entirely different alphabets and admitted to myself that I was only learning it to try and get japanese poon which will never happen because I'm fucking retarded.

Japanese is boring. Soulless. Not ugly, but lacklustre. Like Japan. Bad.

Chinese is song. It goes up and down like see-saw. Sounds cooler, too. Clearly has feeling. Good.

But Navajo is best language. Sounds like vomiting machinegun.

Are you one of these retards who think that "German is ugly because it sounds like you're getting shouted at" and "Arabic sucks because it's like the person talking is being strangled" ?

Are you one of these retards who think that "ancient knowledge was lost when the Library of Alexandria burned down" and "without the medieval dark ages we would have explored space hundreds of years ago" ?

He's one of those retards that curse the day Chairman Mao introduced simplified Chinese.

Fuck off, wumao.

China is the center of the far east. If Rome never fell you would have something approaching a western equivalent. Not only does it have a long, rich and interesting history but it also has strong philosophical and religious traditions and amazing works of literature.

The only non-retards in the humanities are philosophy majors, non-philosophy majors who can get into higher ranked law schools, and maybe people who go to one of the Great Books schools (like St John Annapolis).

>2 and a half years of studying on the side simply out of pleasure to get fluent enough in the language to read Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber

sure you did buddy

>2 and a half years of studying on the side simply out of pleasure to get fluent enough in the language to read Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber

>lying on an anonymouse mongolian totem pole carving imageboard

user reconsider your life choices.

>If you could learn either Japanese or Mandarin, which would you choose
Both.
>for literary purposes?
Both.

Basho and Du Fu alone merits the languages.
And of course both have their enjoyable genre lit like qidian novels and light novels.
Zhu Zhiqing's My Father’s Back is one of the few pieces of writing in any language that is wholly sincere yet universal.

I'm studying japanese for his lit and his movies.

I lived in Japan, I speak and read Japanese, and I'm learning Mandarin right now. I tried reading Matsuo Bashou, the greatest poet to come out of Japan and the king of haiku.
Haiku's make a little bit more sense in Japanese, it's like the Japanese version of iambic pentameter. The smallest unit of sound in Japanese is an entire syllable, that's reflected in their writing system, so syllable-based poetry isn't a stretch.
Even with a dictionary in hand it doesn't make any sense. It's a bunch of archaic characters and conjugations, and when you finally unravel the grammatical mystery the content still doesn't make any sense. "The frog jumped into the water." With a companion to the text, you learn it means something about wabi sabi. Or some bullshit. I don't recommend it.

learn chinese and read wuxia

It would take decades to be able to read literature in both Chinese and Japanese.

I can't speak for Japanese but when it comes to Chinese, achieving something resembling 'mastery' - the kind you'd need to read literature without having to pick up a dictionary every thirty seconds - could take you from 7 to 10+ years, depending on how motivated you are, including several years spent in China/Taiwan.

If you want to read Confucius or Zhuangzi in the original, you'll have to tackle Classical Chinese - the syntax and grammar of which differ substantially from vernacular Chinese.

I've been studying Chinese for 4/5 years now to the point where I can read the newspaper in Mandarin. But I'm nowhere close to reading 'literary novels' with any measure of fluency.

This.

My advice to OP would be to think of which culture you're more attracted to overall. It doesn't need to be rational. Don't choose based on literature. I doubt anyone has ever had the drive to learn either based on purely literary interests. Consider contemporary culture as well.

>Library of Alexandria
>Mao's Cultural Revolution of 1966

What the fuck are you talking about?

Whichever would help me more in getting a patrician east-asian gf

Yeah honestly that's one of the biggest reasons I'm learning Chinese. I chose Chinese because they're poor so they'll feel more grateful if they meet a middle class first worlder (for them that is rich, really) white male.

Japanese 100% every time.

I hate the Chinese so goddamn they're cultureless cunts

If they are so cultureless why did the Japanese copy so much of it?

Modern Chinese is kinda fucked. Classical literature is alright though. Also fuck Wuxia.

I can speak both, I much prefer the soft sounding of Japanese.

user's probably talking about modern Chinese.

Not only is it different syntax, it's like Joyce going balls deep into you, without lube.

I never once got the impression Joyce used lube. The slidey squelching sound would have made Nora's farts harder to distinguish

The 'patrician' part would be a huge challenge, though. Not impossible, but unlikely.

user was saying pretty much all Chinese literature was burned in the Cultural Revolution, which in a world full of stupid exaggerations of the Cultural Revolution is possibly the stupidest.

I assume the other user means that the loss of literature in the Library of Alexandria has also been exaggerated. Although it would be much more plausible.

I'm gay and guys have lower standards than women when it comes to looks, so I have that covered. Honestly the only thing I want is a cute, sexy, pleasant, submissive twink to marry and have kids with. That's my definition of patrician.

Japanese, if only because I have a fair working knowledge of it's modern history; plus Soseki Natsume and schoolgirls.

That's not really the case at all, it's analogous to saying "why learn English if latin is it's root?"; for one thing, Chinese lacks a standard phonetic script.

That could work out quite nicely. I've had gay Chinese guys proposition me in public because they have the general stereotype that westerners are open-minded and non-homophobic and generally cool dudes. Also they're generally likely to be with you on the whole kids thing, if only to get their parents off their back. Although gay guys in China generally have kids by marrying lesbians (ideally) or straight women (tragically).

You mean that happened while you were in China?

>He's too pleb for wu xia

Chinese. They have a more interesting history in my opinion. I would love to be able to read basic Chinese classics.

Also, it's harder to learn to read and write Japanese, even if the spoken language is more easily comprehensible.