Does Japanese sound a bit like Korean?
 

I watch quite a few Japanese and Korean films and at times, to be honest, I can't tell the two languages apart; yet when I see Roman transliterations of names or text they look nothing alike. Do other people [who aren't students of the language] have a similar problem?

Yes, similar but different.

To me, the languages sound completely different... But from a grammatical standpoint, they are somewhat similar. You can find the same sort of patterns in sentences, which can lead to the same sort of tone to the speech itself.
The base sound pool though is quite different.

Well, it's all relative. I think that Japanese sounds a lot more like Korean than it sounds like English, Spanish, Chinese, German, and so on. I would say that Korean is probably the closest language to Japanese, both in sound and grammar. But of course if you know or study either Korean or Japanese they sound nothing alike anymore.

If you study either language, you should be able to hear the complete distinction between one or the other. If you don't, then I'd like to still think you should be able to hear the difference. Maybe if you listened to both languages back to back.

I have had both native Japanese and native Korean friends who have admitted that at least once in their lives they have mistaken one language for the other when hearing it in a large crowd of people.

It's sort of how I think Dutch sounds like the speech of a really drunk American.

It may not be too relevent here, but I think Korean sounds a LOT like Chinese. When I was abroad in a country where they showed both Korean and Chinese TV programmes, I thought I was watching a Chinese show until I saw the writing.

I don't know if Korean is a tonal language or not, but it certainly sounded tonal!

The only place I have a hard time telling it apart immediately is in some music,
here's an example on youtube, this took me a good minute the first time I heard it... hell it even sounds French sometimes haha

05 . The Movement - YouTube

Nice find. I could only tell the difference around 27 secs in. For the first few secs though, it sounds like English! lol

well like most hiphop in any language English creeps in a little some times haha :)