Heya, I know this might be an obvious question but I am a native english/chinese speaker wanting to learn japanese. Common sense tells me that it will be easier to learn japanese with chinese but would there be any benefit/easier to learning with english? May thanks!
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I’d say it depends on which language you feel you have stronger command over. Chinese and Japanese don’t really share all that much in common gramatically and kanji have transformed in manifold/difficult-to-predict ways over the course of the past 1400 years, so knowledge of hanzi alone won’t necessarily make the process all that much easier. There are hundreds of thousands of fully lexicalized Chinese loanwords in Japanese, though, which could make Chinese a more convenient place to start in some ways–I guess it’s sort of like how knowing Spanish will make learning Latin vocabulary slightly less of a chore. At the same time, there are also countless English loanwords in Japanese, so it kinda goes in both directions. I can’t vouch for the quality of Chinese-language resources for learning Japanese, but I’m sure there are tons of solid ones out there.
Native Cantonese speaker here. There are far better learning materials in Chinese for learning Japanese than in English. I wrote this post awhile ago on Chinese resources: [Chinese resources for learning Japanese](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/13gy3ym/chinese_resources_for_learning_japanese/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)
I highly recommend the books on my recommendation list to learn Japanese. The first 4 books should take about 20 hours in total to read and you should be able to read novels after that (I started reading novels before reading the 4th one) and willing to look up every unknown words, which can be made easier if you read digitally.
As someone who has learned Japanese from both English and Chinese resources, Chinese is better in my opinion.
It’s true that Chinese and Japanese are very different, but just getting a sense for how to use vocabulary and even some grammar structures is closer to Chinese.
But honestly at the end of the day I don’t think it matters that much. Even when learning in English, I will think “oh hey this is similar/same as Chinese” and I get just as much benefit. But out of the resources that I’ve at least looked at, Chinese learning material often explains things better and more accurately because the nature of the two languages often allow for better comparisons.