text: which language is better/easier to learn: japanese or chinese?   chinese is more difficult, but it's more helpful.  many asian languages including japanese and korean are derived from chinese.  so if you can write chinese, even educated japanese and koreans can understand you.  don't learn simplified chinese for 2 reasons.  1) only people in china can read it and 2) it's incredibly ugly, and disrupts the traditional calligraphy of the characters.