Quote Originally Posted by unosarta View Post
As someone who is learning both, it helps me a huge amount. The Japanese pronunciations are fairly similar to the Chinese ones, and being able to compare characters and meanings to be similar is a very good way to learn the languages.
Yup, they're quite similar, and I can read a fair amount of Japanese because of my experience with Mandarin, but for some reason Mandarin is a lot easier for me than Japanese. I guess it just didn't work for me (which, again, I will probably put down to taking four languages at once, plus an altogether busy year).