🇮🇳 → 🇯🇵

How easy is Japanese for Malayalam speakers?

Going from Malayalam to Japanese (日本語) has a composite linguistic distance of 77% (heuristic estimate). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

77% distance FSI Cat IV (Hardest) — ~2,200 hours

Lexical similarity

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance

79%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity

25%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match

Malayalam → Japanese

Genealogical kinship

Dravidian ↔ Japonic

Open the interactive comparison →

Other easy languages for Malayalam speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Malayalam:

🇮🇳

Tamil

21% distance
🇮🇳

Kannada

34% distance
🇮🇳

Telugu

50% distance
🇮🇳

Marathi

72% distance
🇱🇰

Sinhala

77% distance

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Malayalam and Japanese. No signup.