Korean and Japanese language?

What do you know about Korean and Japanese language?
Japanese is the 9th most widely spoken language in the world and Korean ranked 15th.
So they might not be international working languages but probably are sort of major languages.

They are sometimes classified as Altaic language family but mostly considered as language isolate.
However, the two languages have a lot in common with grammar, sentence structure and word orders which means they are closely related.

Anyway, what do you guys know about these two East Asian languages?
Are they Altaic language or language isolate?
And how Korean and Japanese are related to each other?

They seem very different to me.

1, They have similarities in grammer, most linguists believe that they belong to the same language class - Altaic.

2, Both language have lots of Chinese vacabulary, because in history both countries were influnced by Chinese culture. It is said thay 40% of japanese words are from chinese, and for korean, the number is 70%.

3, Because Japanese is the first county in east asia, which have succeed in adopting western culture and technology, therefore many terms on modern technology and science in korean language are from japanese.

Konichiua! Japanese is very similar to Chinese...at least that's what this Chinese lady told me. And if people are going to learn an Asian language I think it should be Japanese, because Japanese culture is very popular everywhere, especially in America with Anime and their technology and stuff like that.

Japanese and Chinese are not related, even in hypothetical proposals. Korean and Japanese, as mentioned above, are sometimes grouped together in the Altaic family, but they are more often listed as isolates (ie. not related to any other language). From Wikipedia:
"[The] Korean language was influenced by the Chinese language in the form of Sino-Korean words. Native Korean words account for about 35% of the Korean vocabulary, while about 60% of the Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words. The remaining 5% comes from loan words from other languages, 90% of which are from English."
"According to some estimates, Chinese-based words comprise as much as 70% of the total vocabulary of the modern Japanese language and form as much as 30%-40% of words used in speech."
This page is about the classification of Japanese:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language_classification

Yes they are related, Chinese people can understand Japanese and vice versa. I don't know, maybe you know more about Chinese than actual Chinese speakers who say they can understand Japanese????

Chinese and Japanese are NOT mutually intelligible!!
Since they share some characters, some of the words are understandable but the language itself is totally different.

Chinese and Japanese are maybe like English and French!
Some of the words look similar but Chinese people cannot understand Japanese unless they learn it and vice versa.

If you focus on grammar, sentence structure, word orders and phonology, you would find that Korean and Japanese are closer.

I obviously don't claim to know more about Chinese than a native Chinese speaker, but there are a few problems here. You may have misheard or misinterpreted what she said; you may be misremembering what she said; she may have mispoken.
As Native Korean said, many of the characters used to write Japanese are from Chinese. Parts of texts in Japanese could be read as if they were Chinese, and probably at least partly understood. However, the grammar of the text would definitely be very different. Japanese phonotactics are very restrictive, so borrowed words are often very different from their sources. English 'girlfriend' for example is 'garufurendu' in Japanese, if I remember correctly. I find it extremely unlikely that many of the Chinese loanwords into Japanese would be recognized by a Chinese speaker, not to mention the differences in meaning with borrowed words, the grammatical differences in meaning, etc. (Grammatical particles in Japanese are written with non-Chinese characters, so knowing Chinese would not help.)
If you check the Wikipedia pages, you'll see that Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language, while Japanese is of unknown classification, possibly Altaic or Austronesian, but no one has suggested that it is related to Chinese.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language_classification
The poster above compared Chinese and Japanese to English and French; while the analogy is useful in terms of shared vocabulary, I think Chinese and Japanese are further from each other than English and French, since they aren't related at all, while English and French are both Indo-European. In short, while I don't claim to know more about Chinese than Chinese speakers do, I do trust linguists who have studied these languages more than the observations of a random Chinese woman reported to me over the Internet by someone I don't know (no offense).

Okay I should correct my comment:

The similarities between Chinese and Japanese are like English and Latin or English and Greek!

The similarities between Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch or English and French.

Chinese language is totally different from Korean and Japanese!

The difference between Chinese and Japanese is still greater than that between English and Latin or Greek because English, Latin, and Greek are all Indo-European languages, but that is a better example because there is a similar situation in that English borrowed many words from Latin and Greek, and Japanese borrowed many words from Chinese.

<< The similarities between Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch or English and French. >>

In regard to the spoken forms, I find the difference between Japanese and Korean to be significantly greater than the difference between English and French. I have studied Japanese on and off for a number of years.

Whoa, this is so totally my subject!!

I have spoken Japanese and Korean from birth. My father is Japanese and my mother is Korean. I attended Korean Saturday school every week for six years in the first eight years that I spent in Japan. So, I don't mean to brag, but I am fully competent in both of these languages.

«Yes they are related, Chinese people can understand Japanese and vice versa. I don't know, maybe you know more about Chinese than actual Chinese speakers who say they can understand Japanese???? »

Um, Alba, I don't know what kind of Chinese you think you are talking about. You have clearly demonstrated your ignorance in this reply. You also seem to lack in English skills...

Yeah, pretty much, this subject is a tad controversial. From the perspective of a native speaker in both languages, I would say that they are unrelated. They both share a similar grammer system and have lexical similarities, but I think they are still unrelated.

If they are in fact related, they're not related in a way like the Latin languages or the Scandinavian languages. In these groups, they are clearly based on their seperate predecessors. This is not as evident in Japanese and Korean. They seem like they started out as different languages that were influenced similarly by Chinese.

In a grammatical sense, they are closer to each other than they are to Chinese. Chinese grammar is freaking easy. Japanese and Korean have a crazy system with all of these nasty sentence particals and verb endings.

Lexically, the words derived from Chinese in both languages are often near identicle. These include most medical terms and other "higher" vocabulary (e.g. Korean, "nim-sin", compared to Japanese, "nin-sin", both mean pregnant). Otherwise, Korean words of Korean etymology pretty much never coincide with Japanese words of Japanese etymology.

what's the difference between North Korean and South Korean? Are they interintelligible?

<<They are sometimes classified as Altaic language family but mostly considered as language isolate.
However, the two languages have a lot in common with grammar, sentence structure and word orders which means they are closely related.>>

Having a lot in common with grammar, sentence structure and word order doesn't mean that two languages are closely related at all. You refer to language typology rather than to genealogic language relationship, which has something to do with the proto language the words of a language are derived form.

In this sense, all the indo-european languages are related. But they can differ in typology, with Englisch as most known example, classified as isolating -- although not in that degree as Chinese --, whereas other indo-europiean languages like Latin or Greek or German are flectional.

Dear Franco:
<<what's the difference between North Korean and South Korean? Are they interintelligible? >>

Yes! North Korean and South Korean are mutually intelligible.
Basically we speak the same language with just different accent.
Of course, some of the expressions are not understandable but they are minor and do not hinder communication.

I would say North Korean and South Korean are like British English and American English.

Korean peninsula use the same language - Korean and we do have many dialects and accents. But they are all intelligible to me!