I currently have to use Subtitles, kinda annoying. And I despise dubs since the voice acting is so bad, I mean like the emotions in the voice, its so emotionless in English.
I am a English speaker with some fluency in Cantonese and Mandarin.
How difficult is Japanese? Am I gonna waste a lot of time?
Also what’s the best resource to learn?
I tried this during my weeb phase some 20 years ago.
I stumbled across a video lecture series om some torrent site, and despite being very old (from the 70s or 80s) it was actually pretty good for teaching everyday conversational japanese.
I never progressed beyond the very basics due to life happening, but it got me far enough that I could at least grasp the general topic at hand. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a decent understanding of the language if I had kept at it.
Japanese is a fairly simple language with easy grammar. From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart that knowing one probably won’t help you much with the other, although I may be mistaken.
There are probably some loanwords, and I’d guess being able to read Chinese might help reading kanji, but beyond that, yeah, the two languages are completely unrelated linguistically. Japanese is effectively a language isolate, not related to any other languages in the world. (There are technically some minority languages on Japan’s outlying islands with their own separate but related languages, so it’s not quite a language isolate, but close.) That includes being unrelated to Chinese and Korean languages. (Incidentally, Korean is like Japanese, almost-but-not-quite a language isolate.)
As someone who has tried studying all three languages, Korean and Japanese are actually quite similar. Many grammar patterns like particles and conjugations can be directly translated and many loanwords from Chinese sound very similar in both languages. So knowing either one certainly does make learning the other one easier.