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Oh do you have any previous experience with mandarin? When did u start learning?

A little. I've loved Mandarin and Japanese since I was a kid, and, since I know some kanji and a lot of roots for kanji, and since Japanese and Chinese share a writing system (minus Japanese's kana), I can often get a gist of what's being said just by looking. Also, I'm a lifelong fan of Kung Fu Panda. Aaaaaand that's about where my experience ends. I keep clearing out my local Books-A-Million's books on both Japanese and Mandarin, though, so I am trying to learn it! It's just significantly more intimidating than Japanese, so it's a slow process.

It's obviously very hard to learn to write in chinese but what do you think about lerning to just speak chinese? Is that as hard?

I don't think the spoken part is as hard. It's a very tonal language, so that's my biggest challenge in that regard, but just looking at pinyin, I can usually manage.

Cool! Thanks for the info! I always have a big respect for people who try to lern new languages

Why is learning Chinese more intimidating than Japanese? Just curious--I don't speak either language, though from what I know Japanese intimidates me plenty! :)

Peaches will be able to fill you in more than me but it's most likely because of the writting system. Like yes...japanese also has kanji but you can still somehow lean on the kana, it's more approachable writting sytem for a beginner.

Japanese has two systems of writing (not counting romaji): kana and kanji. Kana has under 100 characters that are syllabic and are easily recognizable once you learn them, and then there's around 2,000 kanji to learn beyond that. Mandarin's writing system contains twice that, with no system like kana to fall back on (not counting pinyin, which is Chinese's equivalent to romaji). On top of that, like I mentioned, it's a tonal language, meaning the same sound can have vastly different meanings and writings depending on how you say it (which is where the "mother, horse" line from Yi Er Fanclub comes from).

On top of that, I've been listening to Japanese music since I was in the single-digits, and my exposure to Mandarin is significantly less, so I'm much more familiar with Japanese. Still, it's the most spoken language in the world, so who's to say I can't learn it just the same?

Ah, I see. That's a really good explanation. Thanks!

Is one of the two Japanese writing systems preferred/more main than the other? The way I though I understood it, kanji was like the primary system, and kana sometimes appears to help out when the kanji might be hard to read/pronounce (because there are so many kanji symbols that some people might not know all of them, I assume).

I wouldn't say one is more preffered than the other, just one might be preferably used in certain cases than the other but I don't know enought o go in detail. Also if you were to just write in kana the text would get super long and hard to read so people mix in kanji to make the text shorter and easier on the eyes.