Native Chinese speaker here, and this is how I view Japanese before/after learning Japanese: Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words

Native Chinese speaker here, and this is how I view Japanese before/after learning Japanese: Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words in tons of unknown characters. To try to grasp a meaning from a Japanese sentence, just remove all the hiragana and katakana and try to make sense from the remaining words. I found that it is similar to reading Classical Chinese. After learning kana: Could understand more things about a sentence by です ない か... Also, can read some katakana words if it is originated from English. Actually learning Japanese and start memorizing Japanese words: Grammar is quite different, but still can find some sentence structures that are similar. Such as …も…ない and …也…沒… It is easy to find that 訓読み words have similar pronunciation with some Chinese variants. It is usually more similar to Minnan(Hokkien), Cantonese... compared to Mandarin. IMO, knowing Chinese do make me easier to learn and read Japanese. I am still trying to get JLPT N3 this year, so other people knows more about Japanese may have different experience.