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Japanese language is highly contextual. Quite often they omit the Subject in sentences because it is "obvious" from the context... although the context could come from a conversation that happened before. Sometimes they even omit the Object or the Verb. Not sure if it works the same for Mandarin. Anyway, in some cases the context could help you understand even if you don't know the words, so it could be similar to Mandarin.
Japanese people are always trying to be friendly, so if you start speaking (even broken) Japanese, their eyes will start to glow and will start saying how your Japanese is perfect (even if it may not true). So, if you speak a broken Japanese, they will try to understand you and sometimes even correct you if you say something wrong. So this is probably similar to Chinese people.
That tracks with my experience. I visited Japan but knew minimal Japanese (pretty much just 有り難う御座います) and everyone was very friendly and helpful, and seemed pleased the limit of my Japanese was at least something polite.
I feel like one difference is a friendly Mandarin speaker would be less likely to try to correct me if I made a mistake and more likely to try to just interpret what I'm trying to say. I wonder if some of that comes from the possibility of misunderstandings from a tonal language.