I found this post where someone else asked a similar question:
[「みたく」の使用方法](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/5ud0ct/%E3%81%BF%E3%81%9F%E3%81%8F%E3%81%AE%E4%BD%BF%E7%94%A8%E6%96%B9%E6%B3%95/)
I will probably never use みたく but for curiosity’s sake and to share this amazing song, **”Is there a difference between the two”?**
In the song [“Dry Flower” by Yuuri](https://youtu.be/yXZd7xVdpJ0?t=192), in the second chorus he changes “ドライフラワーみたい” to “ドライフラワーみたく”.
Is there some artistic meaning to it? Is it just a dialect thing?
From the post I linked at the top, a native speaker says it’s part of a Tohoku dialect, but Yuuri is from Chiba.
Anyways, just thought I’d ask. I can’t be the only one wondering! lol
2 comments
Well, it does serve a concrete grammatical purpose: it turns みたい into an adverb.
The strictly correct way to do this is by adding a に (みたいに). みたい behaves like a な-adjective, not an い- one, and thus doesn’t conjugate into a “く-form”. I always assumed みたく is just a colloquial “mistake”, in the same vein as 違くない (rather than 違わない), for instance. No clue if dialects come into play here.
**Edit 2:** Oh wait, now that I look at the title again, you already knew about みたいに. Welp.
^([**edit:** typo, minor rewording])
Yeah, like Dragon says, it’s grammatically incorrect. That’s because みたい comes from みたよう, i.e. it’s not an i-adjective. To become an adverb, it uses に like よう does. However, it’s not uncommon for things that are X part of speech to be treated as Y part of speech in colloquial language due to the appearance/sound of the word. In fact, the ない form of verbs is an example of something that wasn’t originally an i-adjective but became one as the spoken language evolved. So in the future, say a century or two from now, if みたく gained broad use, it could become standard JP.