Japanese is usually more difficult than Cantonese? Really?
As an English native speaker who has learnt some rudimentary Cantonese I find this hard to believe.
I started learning Cantonese recently, and the thing that struck me is how insane it is just to get started. Half of my books use Yale romanization, but others use jyutping, so I had to pick up both.
Add to that that written Cantonese is Mandarin, but most speakers use traditional characters, and it's a hot stew of pain.
I ended up making my own notation early on, for exactly the same reason.
Adding to the difficulty is that some native speakers will enthusiastically correct your tone by over emphasiszing and embellishing their words (with trailing tones, ah's and lah's, etc). There are some people that I simply can't learn words from because I can never pick the tone. Luckily after a while you can pick those people fairly quickly!
Cantonese is unusual. It's seldom written down. Standard Chinese (i.e. the written form of Mandarin) is used instead. So there are two comparisons.
Spoken Cantonese + Yale vs. spoken Japanese + Romaji.
Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers (correction: honorifics), so it would be easier to learn to speak.
Spoken Cantonese + Written Chinese vs. spoken Japanese + Kanji + Kana.
Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. There's no such hard limit on the number of Hanzi you need. (But there's the complication of On-yomi and kun-yomi pronunciations of the same kanji.)
The other issue is the quality and quantity of learning material. Japanese wins by a country mile.
>Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji.
Students are taught around 2136 kanji in school, and there are a couple hundred more that aren't taught in school yet pretty much every adult knows and uses regularly. e.g., ๅ, the character for "a lie".
The fact kanji average over 2 readings each vs Chinese's average 1 reading each also makes Japanese quite difficult. When factoring in usage in names and extremely common kanji like ็, you can have well over a dozen possible readings which you can only learn through long exposure and living in the country. There are so many times where I think, "Oh, I've never seen that word but I can guess the pronunciation since I know the kanji", only to be shut down and told it's some weird exception.
> Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers, so it would be easier to learn to speak.
Registers being different levels of formality (informal, formal, slang, etc)? If so, Cantonese has that in spades.
Your answer also ignores the tonal nature of Cantonese/Mandarin. Most guides can't event agree to how many tones there are. I get by with 7, but it can range from 6 to 10 depending on who you speak to (in contrast to 4 in Mandarin).
What I meant by registers was different relationships/pronouns/verb endings to indicate different levels of politeness. I should have written honorifics. Japanese and Korean have these. Chinese languages don't.
I thought of mentioning tones, but they're not as much of a problem for learners as they're made out to be. Cantonese has seven tones. However, there are no word pairs where the only difference is that one has a high level tone where the other has a high falling tone.
As an English speaker, the entire concept of tones is more than a little daunting.
On a lesser scale, the hardest thing about learning German, as, again, an English speaker, but one who had poor grammar instruction and no grounding in Latin, the idea of cases for verbs and pronouns was... weird.
Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word (though it's maddeningly easy to think of it as separate, with your English-brain saying that they can be safely ignored).
I've had a bunch of German, and just passing contact with Latin, but a lot of German grammar started making a lot more sense when I started thinking of those languages as similar in a sense, because of declension.
> Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word
True that. Also, it's just a different use of tone - English uses tone to differentiate questions from statements, and to otherwise add meaning to words/sentences. There are other mechanisms for that in Chinese dialects.
Yes about the intonation of the word. The difference is that that "really" would mean "mom", "stupid", "really", "nothing" according to the tone. Some embarrassing mistakes.
Japanese has fewer phonemes than Canto or Mando, which always gave me the impression that it was easier to learn.
Maybe the added difficulty comes from needing to understand the grammar (particles) and the different forms of speech for different levels of politeness (after a few years, it now weirds me out when a white dude calls himself 'watashi').
Edit: Actually, if the methodology is "average time spent to learn" another possibility is that the average is slower because the barrier to learning the language is just low enough to attract a bunch of slow learners that wouldn't be interested in Chinese or Korean. (Reminds me of a study where decreasing page weight in KBs increased average page load time because users on the slowest connections were now able to load the page and skewed the average upward.)
Many, many learners wish Japanese had more available phonemes. One of the biggest problems with Japanese is it imported batches of tens of thousands of Chinese words and forced them into a language with only a fraction of the sound complexity. The result is loads of words with the same pronunciation but completely different meaning. "Shoushin" can mean a work promotion or cowardice. "Shinkou" can mean attack, (military) invasion, progress, encouragement, pickles, or religious faith. None of these usages are rare.
If English had half the available consonants and vowels it had now, it'd be far more difficult to learn rather than easy. Japanese has the same problem.
Chinese grammar is simple, and the grammatical structure is similar to English. What's more, each character tends to have one pronunciation, whereas with kanji there are many surprises.
I can't comment on Cantonese, but I've heard that most people never truly learn Japanese unless they went to school in Japan. Apparently you can learn the basic in a year or two if you immerse, but learning the more complex stuff can take a decade or more.
This is the kind of mythical chauvinism that some Japanese people like to espouse, but itโs by no means true. Fluency is entirely possible as people like Seidensticker, Keene, and many others have proved.
"Truly" learning any language probably can take a decade or more. I'd wager that many native speakers reach the level of "truly" understanding their native language. The Oxford English dictionary for example lists more than 150000 words in current use. If you want to learn them from scratch in just ten years you need to learn forty new words a day. That's not a sustainable rate. If you want to be able to read old texts (Shakespeare?) you probably need at least the 50k obsolete words that the dictionary also lists.
Add to that that written Cantonese is Mandarin, but most speakers use traditional characters, and it's a hot stew of pain.
(the grammar is a lot of fun though)