Many people have this misconception that having been educated in Mandarin somehow gives you an advantage at Japanese basics because you already know a lot of Chinese chars/kanji. But kanji is an advanced subject in Japanese and has nothing to do with basic grammar and vocabulary.
In Mandarin, with some exceptions, 1 Chinese character usually has only 1 reading. Not so in Japanese, in which a kanji has at least 2 readings (kunyomi and onyomi) and can have up to 10 readings. In terms of syntax, Mandarin is actually closer to Modern English than to Japanese.
The Chinese have a fundamentally different relationship to Chinese chars than the Japanese have to kanji. Oftentimes a kanji has nothing to do w the native word it was borrowed to represent, a good example being inaka (田舎), and the Japanese always have kana to fall back upon.
No so for the Chinese, bc both pinyin & zhuyin are regarded only as pronunciation auxiliaries, not real writing systems like kana. It's actually possible to write Chinese w a pinyin-based system & pinyin was designed w this goal, but the project was halted by rising nationalism.
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