TalnSG: I always confuse languages too >< Usually Japanese and Korean mush themselves together and I get a weird combination of the two that makes absolutely no sense. I agree that when learning them simultaneously it isn't that easy to keep them straight in your head. I also am learning German and French. One day I had a speaking exam in German, and I had just had French class the period before. Thankfully my German teacher understands French, so when I answered his "Wie geht es dir?" with "Bien, et vous?", he just laughed and told me to take a minute to flip the switch in my head to German.

I think Korean sounds more similar to Japanese than Chinese (it might also explain why I notice more Koreans being better at pronounciation). Some Koreans words seem to be shared with the Japanese, due to likeness of pronounciation, for example "washing machine" - 洗濯機（せんたくき）in Japanese and セータッキ in Korean.

Korean and Japanese are very similar. When I lived in Japan, some of my (native Japanese) friends told me tales of walking somewhere in Japan, hearing someone going off in Korean, and thinking it was Japanese until they realized they didn't understand anything the person was saying.

The grammar is very similar (sometimes I even hear things and recognize the patterns if not the meanings--the famous example is "nida" in Korean, which is like "desu" in Japanese, the copula). Additionally, the lilt (??) of the language is quite similar. Being a Japanese speaker who attends a university with a lot of exchange students and grad students from Korea, I've always thought that Korean sounds an awful lot like a Japanese person with a local anesthetic deadening their cheeks and tongue a bit to cause a shift in pronunciation.

In any case, the speech pattern of pitch rather than volume/stress as the primary I-don't-know-the-linguistic-term is native to both Korean and Japanese.

If someone says Chinese is more similar to Japanese than Korean is, they likely know only one of the three languages and have no familiarity with the other two. I've studied Japanese and Chinese, and, aside from a handful of kanji (recall that their writings systems have dramatically diverged since the simplified writing system of China and the post-WWII (I think this was when the change happened) writing reform in Japan), they are extremely dissimilar.

both korean and mandarin sound greek to me.

I bet you could Korean pretty quickly, though. It's probably the language closest to Japanese, grammatically speaking. I liken Japanese and Korean to English and Dutch/German, and Japanese and Chinese to English and Latin/Greek.

oh really? that's not good for me. i'd rather learn chinese than korean.

That's interesting, as I have taught dozens of Korean high school students Japanese and they pick it up pretty quickly, much to the chagrin of their Chinese classmates that think knowing kanji gives them a real advantage to learning Japanese, and then they are surprised by all the different pronunciations for the same character.

is that so? then Japanese and Korean must be more identical than I think they are. maybe our ancestors are like relatives huh?

As a Japanese native, you would know that better than I would.

You and me both, man.

大学生の頃、１学期中国語を勉強したんだけど、日本語 を専攻するためにやめちゃった。今は台湾人と結婚して いるので、中国語の勉強を続ければよかったっすね。

家内の家族との会話って...

幸いにも家内の祖母は日本の占領で日本語も話せる :)