Hi Becoh -- I'm a native English speaker and have begun serious study of my "first" second language: Japanese. I did a bit of study on this awhile back, and I have learned a couple of things. Since so much of Japan's writing is based on Chinese symbols, learning Japanese would be much easier if you were to learn Mandarin first. However, since the Japanese system of symbols is a simplified version, it's easier to learn Japanese initially than it is to learn Mandarin. From a conversational dialogue standpoint, I believe that it is also easier to learn Japanese. Why? The main reason is dialects. In Japan, you speak Japanese, and you are spoken to in Japanese. In China it isn't so simple. Depending on where you are and who you are speaking with, it will vary and can not only be very confusing, but frustrating as well. Additionally, just from my own personal study of Japanese, I find that the sounds are very, very easy and simple, and flow more easily. Just listen to the Japanese alphabet on youtube if you don't believe me! ;) Lastly, conversational Japanese really isn't that large: less than 20,000 words versus almost 300,000 in English! From what I have read, Japanese is about equal in difficulty to learn for English speakers as English is for Japanese speakers. However, Chinese is considered about one and a half times more difficult. Final note: learn the main one that you have a desire to learn. By doing so, you will work harder, do better, and enjoy it more! Ganbatte!

Oral Chinese is difficult because of you coming from a non-tonal language background. Oral Japanese is easy because all sounds end in a vowel and no tones. Chinese has no grammar, verb conjugation, Japanese does.

ah,Chinese is difcult but once u get the point of the studying, u would find it interesting.

It's said that by the time you master the tones, you 'll be talking in Chinese. If you get the tones wrong, meaning will be totally lost! This is so frustrating. In this respect, Japanese is much easier. You can speak like a robot and still communicate. ;)

It depends on how you look at it, there are a few advantages and disadvantages of each one. More people speak Mandarin, therefore it's more useful. You'll be more desirable when it comes to work and such because China has a large hand in many industries. The sentence structure of Mandarin Chinese is really simple whereas Japanese sentence structure is basically nonexistant. My friend is a native Japanese speaker and even he can't explain how they organize their sentences. Japanese contains a lot of alphabets and characters as well. Chinese does too but it's actually not very difficult to memorize them, you'll have to memorize characters either way but Japanese also has the Hiragana and Katakana alphabet, so you'll need to memorize those two on top of all the characters. So I'd say Mandarin is a better choice, but in the end it's up to you.