3 ms·

Japanese and Korean are actually fairly similar as far as Asian languages go and may even be related, although that's controversial. Try eg. Japanese<->Chinese

• Figs 9y ago
  Eh. I'm not sure if Japanese<->Chinese is that good of an example either; Chinese is sort of the Latin of Japanese. Even though it's grammar is different, China had a huge cultural influence on Japan, and both its writing system and its vocabulary (as spoken over a thousand years ago though!) were imported and incorporated into Japanese. Something like 60% of the Japanese dictionary is Chinese-derived either as old imported words, or more modern "wasei kango" (lit. Japanese-made Chinese words) -- think "television" for an English word equivalent (modern idea but coined with Greek and Latin word roots). There's a lot of really interesting details about this on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary