Korean uses many Chinese loan words (in the same way that English uses Greek loan words) but the sentence structure, pronunciation and grammar are totally different. You would not say English is a dialect or branch of Greek for the same reason.
I speak both Korean, Japanese and am currently studying Chinese. Korean does not sound like Mandarin at all because it is not a tonal language. It does sound similar to Mongolian and Manchurian. That is not surprising because the roots of Koreans (and probably their current language) come from the area north of Korea near Manchuria.