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According to Wikipedia,

> Historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. [A
> language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no
> demonstrable genealogical ... relationship with other languages]

Yet whenever I hear Korean spoken, my ear is tricked for a short time into
turning on "Japanese mode"; there are resemblances to Japanese in vocal
cadence, pitch variation, syllable enunciation, morae timing, etc. Then I
start wondering why I'm not understanding a single word, until I realize I'm
not hearing Japanese at all.

The first time this happened to me I was at a hotel in Los Angeles and was
flipping through channels on the TV. I was much newer to Japanese at that
point and thought I simply didn't have enough practice to understand any rapid
speech at all. I watched for about a minute, puzzled, until the screen showed
an American speaking English together with some subtitles in Hangul, and I
realized this was a Korean show.

Are the two languages actually related in some unrecognized way? Or am I
perhaps the only one whose brain initially tries to run Korean through a
Japanese filter?
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spoken-language
Are the Japanese and Korean spoken languages somehow related?
Genetic relation between languages is usually measured by finding regular
correspondences between the two - for example, Fs in native English words like
'father' usually have P in their Latin counterparts like 'pater'. As far as I
know, no such regular correspondences between Japanese and Korean have been
found. This does not necessarily mean they're unrelated, but if they are
related, they split so long ago that it is now impossible to determine.

Genetic relation is also not the only cause of similarity between languages.
Geographic proximity often results in languages exerting influence on one
another - this sort of thing is called a Sprachbund, I believe - and both
languages have a history of borrowing from Chinese, explaining why they might
have a lot of similar words.
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I'm a native Japanese speaker, and I have experienced this, too. Depending on
the weather condition, it's possible to listen to Korean AM radio in Japan.
When the noise is _very_ strong, I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish
whether it's in Japanese or in Korean.

I guess this is mainly because of the intonation rather than actual
vocabulary. I feel the two languages have similar rhythms when spoken, and
they are both relatively "flat" in terms of intonation. (This is my personal
experience, and I have no idea if it's academically correct or if it's a
coincidence.) On the other hand, the 'four tones' in Chinese sound very
distinct to my ears.

In addition, the two languages do share many words of the same Chinese or
English roots, and the pronunciations of such words are similar. For example,
compare the pronunciation of
[大学生](https://ja.forvo.com/word/%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%A6%E7%94%9F/) and
[대학생](https://ja.forvo.com/word/%EB%8C%80%ED%95%99%EC%83%9D/) ("university
student"). On the other hand, native vocabularies are completely different (eg
[猫](https://ja.forvo.com/word/%E7%8C%AB/#ja) vs
[고양이](https://ja.forvo.com/word/%EA%B3%A0%EC%96%91%EC%9D%B4/#ko) for "cat"),
and I think this is why they are unrelated in the linguistic sense.

**EDIT:** Both languages are surprisingly similar in terms of grammar, too.
Machine translation works much better between Japanese and Korean than between
Japanese and Chinese/English/etc. I don't know why, and apparently linguists
don't know much about the reason, either. I found this Wikipedia article:
[Comparison of Japanese and
Korean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Japanese_and_Korean#Grammar)
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I am going to attempt an answer from a linguistic angle. It is true that the
Korean language and the Japanese language are regarded as two language
isolates by many scholars. But efforts to bring them together have not
stopped.

You may have heard the term [Altaic
languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages). As one of the
early and most hopeful attempts to bring Japanese and Korean together under
the rubric of a large overarching language family called the Altaic family.
The existence of this umbrella language family is not universally accepted,
but since you apparently want something that shows the opposite side of the
proclamation that "Japanese and Korean are language isolates", I am going to
do just that with arguments that connect these two languages.

Such works as [Roy Miller](http://Roy%20Andrew%20Miller)'s seminal 1971 book
_Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages_ Chicago: University of Chicago Press
and Nicholas Poppe's 1965 book Introduction to Altaic Linguistics argue that
Japanese-Ryukyuan and Korean are the fourth and fifth branches of Altaic.

One paper I have found that presents a highly cogent argument for viewing
Korean and Japanese in the same light is IGARASHI Yuko, 2003, [Japanese as an
Altaic language: An investigation of Japanese genetic affiliation through
biological
findings](https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/WPLC/article/view/5163) . Some
passages from that paper:

> In order to determine whether two or more languages are genetically related,
> the following aspects are generally examined: 1) whether languages have in
> common a large number of basic vocabulary items and morphological components
> through regular phonetic correspondences, and 2) whether there are many
> examples of identical semantics in lexical comparisons.

She argues Korean and Japanese share similar agglutination patterns. She gives
three examples: Korean, modern Japanese, old Japanese, all romanized, so I
won't attempt a reconstruction of the examples in my answer.

> According to Poppe (1965), the agglutination of Altaic word inflection is
> characterized by adding suffixes mechanically to the stem, and each suffix
> has a single function. Both Korean and Japanese show this pattern.

She also argues Korean and Japanese have similar postpositions that are
characteristic of Altaic languages. She then goes on to claim:

> Martin (1991) describes the syntactic similarity between the two languages
> as follows:
>

>> The syntax is a model example of the object-verb language, with modifier
preceding modified, with the predicate at the end, and with the relationship
between the adjuncts (the noun phrases) and the predicate shown by
postpositional particles, by ellipted postpositions, or (as with adverbs) left
unmarked (p. 281).

>
> ...
>
> The examples above demonstrate that it is possible to translate **word-to-
> word** and **morpheme-to-morpheme** between Japanese and Korean. Therefore,
> Japanese syntax is remarkably similar to that of Korean.
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