Which language is easier and best to learn - Chinese or Japanese? And where?

Chinese might be a little harder to learn because it is tonal. Words have different tones that change the meaning entirely. Learning Chinese might be harder but it is well worth it. Mandarin is spoken by more people in the world than any other language and is the national language of China. China is increasingly emerging as a world economic and military power. China has been buying up literal pallet-loads of US currency for many years. They use the money to buy gold on the world market since the dollar yields more gold than the yuan at this time. The yuan is the Chinese dollar. Since USA has been off the gold standard for many years, the value of the dollar is largely determined by world opinion as is the euro. The USA even sells its gold to China. The Chinese yuan will eventually be backed by gold and will be stronger than the dollar or euro. China's goal is to be the major world economic power. English has always been the language of international commerce but that can change. Westerners who speak Chinese will be in great demand. Imagine how helpful it will be at the 2008 Olympics? I speak both Japanese and Chinese and use the later more frequently. I rarely get to speak Japanese unless I'm in Japan. Every major U.S. city has a China town. Ni huì jiang ying yu ma? 和平 Peace Out Ya'll .

Obviously Chinese since it is the most spoken language in the world....... and anyway Japanese derives from Chinese so it will be easy to other languages once you learn Chinese. However, it will be more difficult to learn Chinese.

Both are equally difficult but for different reasons, Chinese grammar is very easy but it's difficult for being a tonal language with no alphabet, you gotta learn a lot of characters, more than in Japanese. Japanese has a very difficult grammar but is not tonal and has a rather limited number of Kanji (characters that were taken from Chinese) but also has 2 alphabets (Hiragana and Katagana) and even the spoken language for men and women is different. And just for the record, Japanese does not derive from Chinese, I admit that some Chinese characters are used in the Japanese language but as languages they belong to totally different language families. Where can you learn the languages? Best is always to go to the country where they're spoken, get involved with the local population (boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn't speak English helps a lot) or try several universities in England, like University of Oriental Studies and others.

i have studied both. chinese is easy

I suppose Chinese would be more useful since you will be able to communicate to LOTS of Chinese once you learn the language.

The best way to learn a language is to mix with people who speak the language.That way you learn fast.Listen ,and converse,and make sure the people you learn the language from have good command of it themselves.Learning new languages are never easy that's why a lot of people can only speak their mother tongue.China is very strong in this world and learning it's language will get you farther.Of course Japan is also a powerful country.I'll learn the latter if I have a chance because I already know Chinese.

I had to learn (to speak) a little of both. I really enjoyed Mandarin, but found Japanese easier to pronounce as Mandarin is full of different tones.

I think which interest you most is the easiest way to start with these languages..if you are fond with Japan culture and people you will learn faster or the other way around..try listening to music or chat with the native speakers.

All languages are equally difficult. They just have different hard parts and different easy parts. Chinese is tonal, so if you're tone deaf study Japanese. Also the syntax of Japanese is subject, object, verb, which is hard for English speakers. Chinese is more like English in that way. But Japanese is easier to pronounce, although it has more levels of politeness. The best way to learn either language is by going there for an intensive immersion program, maybe as an exchange student.