Is it because Japanese pronunciation is easier to pick up than Mandarin? Also, is there a such thing as “Chinese” anime (as in made in China / Taiwan being originally in Mandarin), they do have an equvalent of Manga known as Manhua (漫畫) but is it even popular to the same extent as the Japanese counterparts? Why do those types of foreigners favor Japanese (language) over Mandarin regarding pronunciation?
Are sentences in Japanese easier to pronounce in comparison to Mandarin? JP does not have tones (rather pitch accent) with an “alphabet” of some sort (known as ひらがな & カタカナ) even though they have 漢字 (Furigana is used for placing kana above Kanji for native speakers to understand) while Mandarin places a big emphasis on tones and its entirelty written in 漢字 (for transliteration, either Pinyin or Bopomofo is used).
I started being interested in japan because of anime, vns, and japanese music, so that naturally lead to an interest in the language. Personally I also just like the way japanese sounds, but don’t really like the sound of chinese. And because of those interests, it’s also more immediately useful.
Japanese also seems easier to me (both the pronunciation and overall structure) but that might just be a result of consuming japanese media for a long time.
And yes, there are chinese anime too, but they’re overall less well known even though there are some pretty good ones.