Hiragana and katakana won’t really help. Knowing Kanji would. Kanji had a lot of similarities with traditional Chinese which has a lot of similarities with simplified Chinese. Some Kanji sounds are similar to mandarin.

For example someone mentioned 図書館 vs 图书馆 which you can see is similar.

In simplified Chinese instead of writing out 書 with all the straight lines+top and bottom, you just turn twice with 书.

Left part of 館 also simplified into the hook-like 饣instead of totally writing out the boxes, and this simplification applies to any character that has this 饣part (which often relates to food, livelihood related characters)

And for pronunciation it is to-sho-kan VS tu-shu-guan also similar. Or in most accurate English pronunciation with pronounced parts inside brackets: lit[tle]-[show]-[con] VS [too]-[shoe]-[gwon]e

Oh but of course catch with mandarin Chinese is it having four tones. English and Japanese is just flat. The flat tone is only one of the four possible tones in Chinese.