<p>are u serious^2 month old thread that nobody cares about?</p>
<p>Dude... I'm Korean and I can tell you Japanese has nothing to do with Korean. The only simmilarity is that the etymology of most words are similar, since most of the words from both languages have Chinese roots, but Korean doesn't even use Chinese characters so it wont really matter, unless your studying it as a linguist. Just wait for another chance.</p>
<p>Study the Vietnamese language instead. That's the future, son.</p>
<p>gameandwatch,</p>
<p>Again, that may or may not be true. Some linguists posit that Japanese and Korean may have some root similarities.</p>
<p>the only reason why japanese and korean words have some root similarities is that Japanese annexed Korea in 1904/1905 and actually ruled the country until 1945. Of course through cultural interchange japan gained some of their words with roots from Korea and vice versa. </p>
<p>If you want to learn korean, I'd suggest korean dramas. Seriously.
I actually know some white/other asian people who watch korean dramas and they actually learned to understand korean somewhat. One of my chinese/white friend can speak conversational korean with me lol. </p>
<p>And wth @ Vietnamese language? I'm Korean and if anything, Chinese would be the future international language.</p>
<p>GPAx213,</p>
<p>That's... not true at all. The reason that much of the vocabulary is similar is because of the Sinification of both of the languages.</p>
<p>As a Korean learning Japanese in high school, I can say going the other way around really help. The sentence structure and use of particles, I think, would be the greatest asset. I can get all the pronunciations, while a Japanese-speaker wouldn't be able to get all the Korean ones at first. There are a lot of cognates between the two because of the influence from Chinese, so that would help. It's not like hanjas (kanji, Chinese characters) are completely gone. From what I know, they're still taught in Korean schools, used sporadically in newspapers, and helpful to know to figure out vocab. They're not ubiquitous, but they're still certainly there.</p>
<p>I guess learning Japanese would be more helpful than learning Arabic or something, but it's certainly not like learning Spanish in hopes of learning Italian.</p>
<p>There are several words that are sound very similar like....a "library." If you convert the words into alphabets (Japanese-Toshokan; Korean-I don't remember), they wouldnt seem like they would sound similar, but if you hear them, you would know. It's pretty cool. I knew some other words that sound similar..but I can't remember. "Is Japanese the closest thing?" like other people on this thread said, they are not the same and the only similar thing would be the SOV grammar. But, they are not completely different or the opposite like English and Korean or English and Japanese. I heard that it is actually easy for Koreans or Japanese people to learn the language of the other. My friend, fluent in Japanese, learned Korean rather quickly, although I'm not saying he mastered it immediately (naturally, they are two different languages) ;) Haha. OKay, just thought Id say something bout it since I saw this thread. Hope it helped a little.</p>
<p>I took Japanese at UChicago this summer and one of the kids that sat next to me was an international student from South Korea.</p>
<p>First language was Korean, second was english.</p>
<p>He was then taking Japanese and Spanish at the same time and said that Japanese was easier to him because of the grammar and pronunciation, than was spanish cause he said it was easier to learn and understand the grammar usage of Japanese and not be puzzled by it, whereas spanish was still more difficult because the grammar is more similar to english, which is way different than japanese.</p>
<p>A little more on the relationship between Japanese and Korean.</p>
<p>Classification</a> of the Japanese language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
<p>I personally am on the isolate side of the debate (though I can see the influences). I don't buy the Altaic hypothesis.</p>
<p>if you really want to learn Korean, i suggest you find a school that teaches it and not take something thats "related" to it.</p>
<p>thats like saying you want to learn English, but your going to take Spanish instead because its so similar. They are different languages.</p>
<p>Kyledavid80.
It can easily be agreed that it is an isolate. I agree that it is an isolate. But similarities still exist, mostly in basic grammar structure (SOV) other than that, i dont think there are much of any either.</p>
<p>Well, that Japanese is an isolate isn't so easily agreed on, which is why it's so contentious.</p>
<p>There's also quite a bit more grammatical similarity than just purely SOV, and there are even lexical similarities, as the Wiki article discusses. Other traits common to both are verb endings (honorifics), topical markers, particles, few to no plural indicators, no relative clauses, verbing adjectives, pronoun usage, etc. Here's a great article on it:</p>