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They are two different languages, and because everyone has different learning styles/strengths/weaknesses it will depends on yourself which you find more challenging.

I speak Japanese, but I know a lot of people who have tried learning Chinese. Overall, they are both complex languages that require dedication to learn (especially because they are SO different to English or other languages from the same language tree). Learning French or German etc is A LOT easier in my opinion, because as an English speaker you don't need to learn how to write (both are essentially romanised - no character sets like Japanese and Chinese) and many of the words are similar to what they are in English. The fact you need to learn characters in Japanese/Chinese means you spend less time learning the other things because you need to put time into both, making it a longer process in my opinion.

With Japanese you need to learn three character sets (hiragana, katakana, kanji). The hiragana and katakana are small in number (approx 50 main characters in each). The kanji on the other hand is endless, I think it is really impossible even for natives to learn every single kanji. There are simply too many. But there are 2000 kanji that you generally need on an everyday basis which you are basically expected to learn. These 2000 are what Japanese natives learn through primary school and highschool and they are expected to know them all by the end of highschool.

To pronoune Japanese is relatively simple, each sound always sounds the same, it doesn't change like it does in english, for example in English adding a vowel to a word can completely change its sound, like cam and then came, the bossy 'e' on the end changes the vowel sound of the 'a.' In Japanese this does not happen, ka will always sound like 'ka' and if you add something else to it you pronounce them as you would if they were by thremselves i.e. 'ka-me.' There are some exceptions, for example "mata ashita" (see you tomorrow) is pronounced "mata ashta" but in general the sounds always sound the same.

Like I said I have never learnt Chinese but from what I know about it it is much harder to learn to speak because of the tones in the language. Changing tone can change meaning and mean completely different words.

Oh well, I hope I helped you somewhat. Good luck learning either!

It's good to see someone interested in learning an oriental language. I know many people who speak Chinese, and so far the only people I know who speak Japanese are my family. They are both very different from European languages, and thus will be more difficult. Both Japanese and Chinese use a "character" writing system. Japanese uses syllables and characters, while Chinese uses only characters. While leaning Japanese, you have to learn two "alphabets" and characters. To be able to understand Chinese, however, you have to learn many many more characters than in Japanese. Jobs that require you to speak Japanese pay more than Chinese, but you can probably find plenty of jobs on the West Coast. As far as learning for fun, you may want to learn both. In Rosetta Stone, I could understand a good amount of Chinese based on my understanding of characters from learning Japanese. I don't know which will be easier for you to understand. For basic communication with writing, I think Japanese will be far easier than Chinese. I hope you enjoy your studies!

I'v learned Japanese but the grammer is too complicated. In compare, Chinese is much easier to pick up, but of course there are too much characters. Here is some suggestions for you to learn Chinese.

1. Making friends with local Chinese people is always one of the best ways, most of them are eager to improve English by chatting with foreigners. so..win-win. You may find language partner at some forums.

2. Attend some courses at a University or private training center.

3. Or you may study online at you leisure-time with some internet tools. A website introduced in the facebook http://www.chinesetime.cn/ It's good . they can teach you Mandarine with a series of systematic courses through Skype.

4. Use the social network like Facebook.com, there are a lot of groups for Chinese learning. Such as Learn Chinese: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2372234064 You can get some Tutorial Video there. and Learn to Speak Chinese in 5 minutes group!!! http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2213647922

i've studied both, and in my opinion, i think japanese is easier to learn. chinese is hard to pronounce because it has many tones. japanese has an alphabet sorta...so its easy to write and spell. with chinese there is no alphabet so you have to like...memorise the words to be able to write a sentence.

japanese does use chinese characters, which means, chinese would be more useful, since chinese is a part of nearly every asian country's culture.

but, like i said before, i think you should go for japanese, purely on the basis of it being easier.

From learning both, I would say that both are very fun. I eventually picked Chinese for its more practical use. Chinese is made of simple sentence structure and monosyllabic or compound words, but every sound has a meaning. It also has different tones, so depending on your inflection, you can change mother to horse to a verbal question mark. Japanese has longer words, but inflection doesn't matter and there is only one way to pronounce each sound. Reading is also easier.

I prefer to learn Mandarin Chinese, because it is the language which sounds nice, it is the language which is spoken by most people. It is the language, which has potential to influence the future. I learn Mandarin from http://www.hellomandarin.com/ Anyone who is interested in Chinese can join me.

If you want to learn Mandarin but you have no clue where to start then a course for Mandarin is the ideal on-line program for the novices due to the fact it really starts with the basis.