No Stupid Questions

A perspective from an European here with nativeness and alike in several latin-related languages and long lasting interest in Japanese language and related culture since the 2000s.

Certainly for written Japanese it will help you your Chinese knowledge (after a learning curve of false-friend associations), I heard that many technical/modern words have been imported in Chinese also from Japanese adaptations (only the characters implied, not the sounds, as is common in indoeuropean language imports), as a return kind voyage, since Japanese writing was first imported from old Chinese and then evolved in today's system (kanjis and two silabaries). Also many English words have been imported into Japanese, but highly phonetically distorted in the adaptation. Foreign words are easy to spot in written text, and I often chuckle when I understand the word by realising about the original one after backtracing the intended pronunciation.

As a consequence of Chinese influence in the writing system, most of the kanjis have two pronunciations, one(or-more-alike) of Japanese origin and another(or-more-alike) of Chinese origin, which in many cases will resemble to current Chinese ones, but I have heard that phonetic changes will throw away potential direct understanding (also rules about which pronunciation is used when in Japanese are not rock solid or straightforward always) specially since grammar is notably different also. I found that proficiency in two similar related languages (e.g. between roman-latin languages, between germanic languages, etc) develop certain ability in spontaneous word recognition across phonetic variations, but I found this in indoerupean languages with "long" words with "long" roots (not one "syllable" per "word"), not sure how much would work between Mandarin and Cantones and a phonetic adaptation from old Chinese into Japanese, which would be just a part of it.

I am far from fluent in Japanese, but the most basic interactions, grammar recognition, etc and the learned nuances add a wonderful experience to OVS watching (love for those sub volunteers that explain the cultural context of many situations), and since most of my consume is Japanese culturaly rooted (e.g. not sci-fi, western fantasy, etc) I am not interested in dubbed material at all. I think fluency requires a serious investment, even for Chinese background, user abilities and environment may vary this a lot also, so the gain must be worth it: for careless plain consumption of works not rooted in Japanese culture I doubt is worth it, for the rest I find worth the effort to read subs most of the time and appreciate recognise the nuances hard/impossible to translate.

I had zero regrets of all what I invested in Japanese understanding up today, even if is not enough for general understanding, but I also find such cultural travel worthy on each step. I am attempting something alike with Chinese nowadays, let's see how far I arrive...

Good luck!

It depends on your age and determination. The younger you are the less effort it will take

https://youtu.be/7fvCb5_Nzq4

TL;DW: keep listening to Japanese media for a couple of hours a day. Watch anime in Japanese with no subs, listen to Japanese podcasts or audiobooks in Japanese while you're working or doing something else, etc. Try to find something you know a bit about because it will help keep you engaged and help with context.

There's a chapter about tolerating ambiguity which means they in the beginning you won't understand anything and it will be very frustrating but you need to accept it and keep feeding your brain Japanese inputs. You'll learn the sentence structure and vocabulary as well as learning pronunciation, this is basically how babies learn. You're brain is really good at pattern recognition so just give it enough inputs and eventually it will start to click

Start doing Anki cards which will supplement all the inputs. Don't go overboard, just learn the alphabets and then some common vocab and keep listening to other media. After about a year, start reading and writing a lot. Read manga, read books, and start writing notes and stuff in Japanese.

That's basically it. You can use study materials if you want but feeding your brain more inputs is key. In addition to being really effective it has the benefit of being way more fun than studying grammar and whatnot

I don’t know shit about Cantonese and the only mandarin I know is the most basic of phrases and stuff to refer to food (so essentially nothing) so I can’t speak to that

Japanese is hard, but so is any language. You get out what you put in. I wasted about a year with “studying” half assed for like 10-15 minutes a day with duolingo. It was good that I had a consistent routine but at the end of 1 year I had very little to show for my effort. Learn from my mistake.

After that I switched things up. I didn’t put in a ton more time but I changed approach. Pretty standard but boring stuff: Anki, Assimil, and some other more targeted apps later on (renshuu, Benkyō, and most recently kanji dojo have been helpful). Setting up language exchange calls via apps like hello talk and discord have been far more helpful as things have progressed. This is more of a significant time investment and requires me to teach English a bit but I am happy to do it for free Japanese instruction. Joining group chats on line, watching YouTubers and vtubers, anime and dramas, etc also is helpful but the hard part was determining when to make the jump to not use subtitles and finding content that was digestible at my level. I’m not the kind of weeb that watches precure and little kid shows but for a minute I did just to watch stuff without subs. It sucked.

After about 5 years I got decent enough to have solid conversations via phone and text. Then DeepL came out and made it all pointless haha

Japanese is considered to be the most alien of languages to native English speakers, and vice versa. That said, it has been done, and it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to learn Japanese as a native English speaker. What it takes is time and dedication.

I actually know a few dozen words in Japanese, but I don't know Japanese.

As for dubs, I prefer some anime dubbed in Japanese and some anime dubbed in English. Generally English is more accessible in that I don't have to read as well as listen, but there are some animes I don't want to be distracted by subtitles.

Anyway, it's a common misconception in anime that "the language I don't understand has better voice acting." It's because you don't understand it. If you understood it, you'd likely come to the conclusion that some actors are just better than others, in either dub. The difference is, English dubs pay more and they have a wider pool of talent. But as you learn Japanese, you'll find the same is true in Japanese dubbing, some of the actors are actually good, and others are just phoning it in, same as anywhere.

I do feel like if you're familiar with Chinese languages, you probably know that Japanese evolved from Chinese (I'm not sure on the specifics here), like how they have the same numbers. So it's a good starting point. You can probably read the symbols, or at least know what they sound like. I can read romaji passably enough. But the symbols? Haha nope.