I currently have to use Subtitles, kinda annoying. And I despise dubs since the voice acting is so bad, I mean like the emotions in the voice, its so emotionless in English.
I am a English speaker with some fluency in Cantonese and Mandarin.
How difficult is Japanese? Am I gonna waste a lot of time?
From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart
There are probably some loanwords, and I'd guess being able to read Chinese might help reading kanji, but beyond that, yeah, the two languages are completely unrelated linguistically. Japanese is effectively a language isolate, not related to any other languages in the world. (There are technically some minority languages on Japan's outlying islands with their own separate but related languages, so it's not quite a language isolate, but close.) That includes being unrelated to Chinese and Korean languages. (Incidentally, Korean is like Japanese, almost-but-not-quite a language isolate.)