Yes...actually te most spread teories about Japanese linguistic filiation are two:

-Altaic: mostly foreign scholars
-Austronesian: mostly Japanese scholars

The last is also suported by cultural and mythological similarities, and also by a very basic vocabulary (i remember a few words very general and fish names.

Also, Japanese and Korean have a characteristic: words endings and particules change depending on the communicative
situation; don't confuse with courtesy words, which are almost present in all languages.

For example, in Japanese there are six forms to say "I", depending on linguistic situation, speaker and listener, one must use one or other.

Also counting coefficients....but in this i won't enter now...

These things also occur on austronesian languages, but in Altaic (as in indoeuropean and Semitic) are completely unknown. But also, word order in Japanese is completely different than that of Austronesian languages but very similar Altaic languages....

I find this matter fascinating, deil mi?

That's what I call cool knowledge! Heyt beah!!

I read this yesterday and want to share with you. It was interesting for me, I didn't know about this.
Modern Armenian is typologically close to Turkish.Among the features that illustrate this similarity are the agglutiative system of diclension( i.e. the compounding of several linguistic elements of independent meaning into a single word), the use of suffixes to indicate possession, the emploing of passive and causative forms for all verbs,and the use of postpositions (grammatical elements placed after the word) instead of prepositions.
The Armenian language forms a separate branch of the western group of Indo-European languages.

I've read recently that only Korean can be cosider to be classified either to both Altaic and Austronasian group of languages or just to Altaic or Austronasian but Japanese is classified separately as the mixed type of language.

Turkish is the first language of this kind that I have learned and it really is very diffferent, BUT strangly interesting to me, I love to learn new languages.
Lizx

I will begin to learn some other Uraloaltaic languges soon...

Well, I think that there is definitely a relation between j japaness and Turkish language because one of my students has proved it in 6 months. I give Turkish lessons to adults in Europe and this year I had a Japaness woman in my class and she learnt Turkish in 6 months while other people were busy with the basic structure of the language. I had to send her to the last class of the 6 year

I studied Japanese at a 'very basic' level and it was gramatically very similar to Turkish. Sentence structure and suffixes are similar, and Japanese doesn't have the harmony rules (vowel harmony and cosonant harmony). The bigest problem is the alphabet