A curious Korean-learner asks: are there any specific errors or not-exactly-wrong-but-still-peculiar turns of phrase that, when somebody uses them in Japanese, make you say “Ah, that guy speaks Korean!”. I’m thinking maybe things like using the topic and subject markers in a certain way, directly translating common Korean expressions like \[A/V\]ㄴ 것 같다 (“an \[A/V\]-ing thing is similar”, which means “I think…”, “kinda…” or, like, “like…”) if they aren’t common in Japanese, or maybe overusing honorific and deferential language with people only slightly above your status?
How does it come off in Japanese? Is it cringe? Cute? Funny? Barely noteworthy? Has anyone encountered a westerner who speaks that way? I imagine if I ever get fully proficient in Korean and decide to take up Japanese, I’ll probably commit plenty of Koreanisms in Japanese whether I mean to or not.
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I mean, sure, but as a westerner you will probably also be speaking Korean westernerly, so if you speak Japanese koreanishly it will really just be you speaking Japanese westernerly anyway. I don’t think there’d be much of a difference
That’s not anything specific to Korean speakers though and as you get more fluent in either language you stop literally translating stuff. I (a Westerner) currently work in Japan and have two people from our Korea office at work. They’re both fluent and they can use common Japanese idioms and they’re at the level where they don’t need to literally translate from Korean to Japanese in their heads.
Like you’d never try to literally translate 「日が浅い」 into Korean since that idiom doesn’t really make any sense when literally translated, in the context it’s used.
As for keigo I’ve only ever interacted with them at work and they’re pretty high up manager-level, so can’t say anything outside of the business setting.
Native Japanese speakers can immediately identify native Korean speakers from pronunciation alone. But as a western non-native Korean speaker, Japanese people are going to just think your Japanese is bad if you start throwing in random Koreanisms into your Japanese. But they’ll tell you your Japanese is awesome because they’re polite and don’t want to embarrass you.
As a Korean learner you won’t have problems whatsoever. If Korean was your native language maybe. At my language school I’ve seen teachers trying to get them to do better in intonation of words and questions.
Overuse of things like あにき because of feeling the need for a word like 형 (and in general using 丁寧語 with friends) , overusing あまりに rather than すぎる because it matches the Korean grammar word order of 너무 better, (hilarious) overuse of てあげる by analogy to 해줘 , for some reason the word むしろ …
Using dramatic reactions that’s common in Korean but not so much in Japanese is also another thing. Koreans in general are comparatively very emotive and like to jokingly complain about things.
Jokingly calling someone your age キモい by analogy to things like 징그럽다 or being self assertive in a way that’s not typical for Japanese culture like posting a picture of yourself and saying きれいでしょう？ Or instead of asking for a table to be wiped, being very direct like “this table is dirty” haha (These last cultural ones overlap with Western cultural differences too).
To be honest most Koreans who put in even the slightest effort get rid of these small problems pretty quickly and are just left with vocabulary problems, minor prosody problems, and maybe some gotchas on the very advanced nitpicking distinctions between は and が or その / この etc. Koreans have the easiest time becoming near native at speaking by far imo (not to say it isn’t still a difficult task!)
Edit: I didn’t realize you’re a Korean learner, not a native Korean speaker. Hope you find it interesting anyway
I have never encountered this situation before, but as a learner of both languages, I can see the following possibly happening: The word 되다 is used with the subject particle, but なる is used with the indirect object particle.
>학생이 돼요. 学生になる。become a student
So if you translated word for word, you get *学生がなる, which is not grammatically wrong but this means “student becomes (something)”.
On the other hand, I do have personal anecdotes where you could tell I learnt Japanese before Korean.
>Saying *학생에 돼요. (the reverse of above)
>Saying *학생이 되다. (not conjugating the verb because in Japanese, the dictionary form is already one of the grammatically correct forms)
>Saying 밥을 먹어요 instead of 밥을 먹을 것이에요. (not conjugating to future tense because Japanese does not explicit mark the difference between present and futute tense)
>Saying *펜에서 써요. (both location 에서 and method (으)로 particles are marked by the same Japanese particle で)
With respect to the ㄴ 것 같다 expression you mentioned, Japanese usesと思う. と is equivalent to 라고/다고/냐고/자고, and 思う is 생각나다. So a sentence like “I think he is handsome.” 彼がかっこいいと思う would literally be translated to *그가 잘생기다고 생각나요.