Hmm, they're similar grammatically, but not close enough for me to parse a written sentence in Japanese reliably (despite, re: parsing specifically, my having been elbow-deep in various dead European languages).

The less conversational, the better, for things like this: several Japanese commonplaces come to mind from jdramas which are written with kanji but which have no idiomatic equivalent in Korean or Mandarin. 仲間 (nakama) is one. My mother can't do it with conversational Japanese, either--it was specifically the medical terminology.