Hey, @eggstraordinair. My wife and youngest son have both been to the Tokyo area and loved it, and my oldest son's wife is of Chinese descent (parents are both from China). So those are places that are high on various family members lists, too. I think I'd probably like Japan. I'd need to study up more on China. It's huge, of course, and since no one has been yet, there's the matter of getting around and so forth.
Just how long would you like to stay, or how long do you think it would take to learn the language? I was going to guess you want to learn Mandarin, but I suppose Cantonese is a possibility, too.
I'd love to learn Mandarin, actually I'm even more interested in learning to read and write which is even more difficult lol
I could see the writing part being especially difficult. I would think reading would be the easiest.
When I learned Spanish, reading comprehension came first, speaking it second, and I'm still lacking in the writing part of it. Writing is typically more formal than speaking is, and so it would depend on what I was writing I suppose. Sometimes, you just need a more formal, matter-of-fact, grammatically correct tone.
Anyway, that's not to say it can't be done. People do it all the time. My youngest son took four years of Mandarin in college. I think he's still working on it, but it's a complex language with many moving parts. He's fluent in Japanese, though, and Spanish.
I've read that a guy learned 3 thousand characters and still is not able to read a newspaper properly, it's a little overwhelming
hey @eggstraordinair—it sounds like it is overwhelming. I think I told you my youngest son studied Mandarin—after four years, I don't think he's comfortable enough with it. Of course, study isn't all that needs to happen. You really need to get immersed in it, which it sounds like you would be doing if you went. I think the main thing is, there are so many ways to pronounce a single word that changes its meaning based on where the accent is, and if you're off even a little in your pronunciation of each syllable, it can cause issues, too. In English anyway, you can do both and you might get some strange looks, but the word itself isn't appreciably changed.