That, and would you consider Wanikani still worth it if you already have a good grasp of Chinese?
Because I notice Wanikani is primarily vocab and pronunciation-based, and I think a Chinese-speaking learner of Japanese would benefit most from grammar, like something more deeply involving sentences, particles, or grammatical inflections.
For context, my background is that I’m a heritage Chinese speaker with a good grasp of Mandarin (originally Simplified characters, then I taught myself Traditional). And I recognize a lot of the vocab, but also have fallen for a few pronunciation or meaning errors (false friends).
E.g. once I put down 自殺 as じしゃ instead of the correct じさつ. The term exists in Mandarin too, with the same meaning, and is pronounced “zìshā”.
And while not for this one, じん vs にん for the on’yomi of 人 is still something I struggle with when learning new vocab. The character’s Chinese pronunciation is “rén”, and r- in Mandarin can correspond to either n- or z-/j- in Japanese (熱 rè comes out to n-, 弱 ruò comes out to j-, and 日 rì — like 人 — can come out to either).
A meaning example: 作業 is “work”, “task”, or “operation” in Japanese, but 作业 (the Simplified form) is “homework” in Mandarin. 宿題 (or 宿题) does not exist as a standard term in Mandarin.
I am a native speaker of neither Japanese nor Chinese, but I did start to learn Japanese around 10 years before I started learning Chinese.
Wanikani is obviously catering to English speakers. Hence all the mnemonics are English-language based. I believe that most native Chinese speakers would not use Wanikani to learn kanji because they would have to use a third language (English) to access a totally new language, which makes things complicated.
I believe that there are lots of videos on Bilibili for Japanese learners. They cover topics such as kana, false friends, and grammar, among others; all delivered in Chinese so they are more accessible.
Your position is a bit unique because (I’m guessing) you’re more fluent in English than Chinese. So Wanikani may still be useful to you, but not as much as for English speakers who don’t know Chinese.
I’m not fluent in Chinese but I am a heritage speaker. Before starting WK I already knew ~1000 Chinese characters. If I were fluent in Chinese with a high reading comprehension ability, I would have preferred to use Chinese resources to learn Japanese. There just feels like less friction even after accounting for false friends and differences in grammar. There should be plenty of Chinese resources for studying Japanese as plantron has suggested. I’ve stumbled across a few just casually websurfing in the past. English honestly feels like an unwelcome middleman between the two, only useful for sounding out katakana loanwords.