Anecdotally as a native English speaker, I find spanish much easier to guess the meaning versus french or german.
I believe the author means Japanese/Korean are easier to learn if you know the other, versus English which is comparatively difficult for native C/J/K speakers.
In my experience, studying Korean did make studying Japanese a lot easier. There are some shared concepts, but Japanese is still quite difficult and different from Korean. From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.
>>* From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.*
I think it also helps that Japanese and Korean sounds share similar sounds, where as English has sounds that are difficult to pronounce for native Korean/Japanese speakers. My mother still has a hard time pronouncing the English "V" and "Z" sounds.
yeah, that was pretty much my point. The article wasn't trying to show what language is easy to guess for K/J speakers, it was trying to show what language X sounds/reads like to speakers of languages A and B, where X was a major influence on A and B. In the article, A and B are K/J and X is Chinese. In my example, A/B is English, and X is French/German.
I study both Korean and Japanese and I agree, knowing some Korean helps with learning Japanese. My korean friends who speak both fluently say about as much as this article: it's almost a replace-in-place similarity, so that seems to line up with your account as well.
I believe the author means Japanese/Korean are easier to learn if you know the other, versus English which is comparatively difficult for native C/J/K speakers.
In my experience, studying Korean did make studying Japanese a lot easier. There are some shared concepts, but Japanese is still quite difficult and different from Korean. From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.