Yeah, just like Chinese, Japanese and Korean!

Well I know Korean is not as close as Japanese and Chinese are.

Close in what way? Both have a ton of Chinese loanwords and until recently Korean made use of a great deal of Chinese characters, the same way Japanese does.

This is sarcasm, I hope.


Japanese and Korean are a hell of a lot more similar to each other than either is to Chinese. They both have similar grammar, while Chinese grammar is way different, borderline nonexistent, in my opinion. The phonologies of Japanese & Korean are also similar: no tones, polysyllabic morphemes (which don't exist in Chinese).
Some scholars actually classify the Japonic & Korean languages under Altaic, but this is not widely accepted. Korean classification is still ongoing, though, & it may end up in the Altaic group after all.

I wouldn't call it nonexistent just because it's analytic. I always thought of such languages as having simpler morphology (or in the case of Chinese, none) and more complex syntax. A language like Latin has complicated inflectional paradigms but virtually free word order.
I'm skeptical. The Uralic and Altaic families were once thought to be related due to similar structural features (SOV word order, agglutination, vowel harmony) and it was found those resemblances were areal, not genetic. I suspect it's the same for Japanese and Korean which have been spoken in the same area long enough for a sprachbund to develop.

Wait, Uralic languages are SOV? I thought they were SVO...

My mistake -they are. SOV word order is an argument for a relation between Japanese and Altaic, though.

A pretty weak one, in my opinion, since lots of languages are SOV like Indo-Iranian, Caucasian (all 3 I think), Dravidian, Eskimo-Aleut, & many others.

I was being sarcastic. I know that Arabic is Semitic, Iranian is Indo-European, and Turkish is well Turkic. I know Chinese is Sino-Tibetan and that Japanese is Japonic and an isolate. I knew Japanese was thought of possibly being Altaic. I've never really read about Korean though. I think I remeber reading about a Altaic-Uralic connection and thinking how strange that Finnish and Japanese could be related. I haven't been able to find any information on this in a long time though.

The current consensus is that the Uralic and Altaic families are not related and any similarities between them are due to geographic proximity, not genetic relation; and Japanese and Korean may be Altaic (or at least related to each other somehow) but this is extremely controversial when the unity of the Altaic family itself has been called into question.