…Well I guess there is one meaningful qualitative difference between Chinese and Japanese animation, which is that Japan has made 423 animated half-hour TV shows about cute girls doing cute things and China has only made one.
Really, I think this difference in volume is true in general as well. Whether it’s because the studios are focusing on the domestic Chinese market, lack of government support, or something else, I could only name maybe a handful of donghua that blew up (relatively speaking), whereas there’s a never-ending flood of anime and many of them are absolutely massive by comparison. No matter how much I like Link Click and dislike Demon Slayer, the latter is objectively way more well-known.
The games side of things is an even more obvious split. There are a decent number of Chinese gacha games that do well, but the only big “gamer’s game” I’m aware of is Black Myth: Wukong.
Japan has like a 60 year lead in pop culture exports and the government is aware of that and has been actively pushing further growth in the sector for some time. China is playing catch-up and it’d take quite some time for them to be on parity (barring something like a collapse of the anime industry, which certainly seems possible).
All this to say that yeah it makes sense that people would learn Japanese over Chinese explicitly because there’s more content in that language and that content is also more talked about.
All this to say that yeah it makes sense that people would learn Japanese over Chinese explicitly because there’s more content in that language and that content is also more talked about.
This is also why I’m big on subbing and dubbing anime into a wide variety of languages: if utilized effectively, anime can be genuinely great language learning material not just for its original language but for any language you can think of.
Really, I think this difference in volume is true in general as well. Whether it’s because the studios are focusing on the domestic Chinese market, lack of government support, or something else, I could only name maybe a handful of donghua that blew up (relatively speaking), whereas there’s a never-ending flood of anime and many of them are absolutely massive by comparison. No matter how much I like Link Click and dislike Demon Slayer, the latter is objectively way more well-known.
The games side of things is an even more obvious split. There are a decent number of Chinese gacha games that do well, but the only big “gamer’s game” I’m aware of is Black Myth: Wukong.
Japan has like a 60 year lead in pop culture exports and the government is aware of that and has been actively pushing further growth in the sector for some time. China is playing catch-up and it’d take quite some time for them to be on parity (barring something like a collapse of the anime industry, which certainly seems possible).
All this to say that yeah it makes sense that people would learn Japanese over Chinese explicitly because there’s more content in that language and that content is also more talked about.
This is also why I’m big on subbing and dubbing anime into a wide variety of languages: if utilized effectively, anime can be genuinely great language learning material not just for its original language but for any language you can think of.
Edit: Obligatory mention of my /c/worldbuilding post about the Open Sign Language Animation Project