Hi guys I’m Kenyan and I have a pretty casual question, is Swahili related to Japanese in some way because I have seen similarities in how words are said, and does that give a speaking advantage over a monolingual English speaker? 
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Hard to give a conclusive answer as the origins of Japanese aren’t all that well understood, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any relation between Japanese and Swahili, so any similarities are going to be coincidental. Actually the only thing we know for sure is Japanese is related to several other Japanese languages like Ryukyuan, other hypotheses have (AFAIK) been sketchy at best, aside from a plausible (but still unproven) relationship with Korean.
If the similarities are purely phonetic, it’s probably going to be minimal - however, the fact that you’re bilingual is going to help in and of itself, because you’ve already internalised the idea that the way languages map real-world concepts to words differs between languages - so the concept expressed in one language using a single word might have multiple words in another language depending on context, and vice versa.
That said, you might have an easier time earlier on hearing and pronouncing similar sounds that others might struggle with. Hard to say.
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I don’t know, man (?). You can really tell when someone’s native language is English when they talk Japanese sometimes.
My German friend also can’t pronounce the ら row.
What I mean is, not necessarily just earlier on. 
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I think that’s largely a matter of their learning process, tbh. If you don’t bother improving your pronunciation it’s gonna suffer, big surprise. You see the same with literally any other language - you can immediately tell which Dutchies haven’t bothered with their English pronunciation because their TH is gonna sound like either a D or a Z 
But really getting the pronunciation is gonna take a bit of work either way, it may just require less work if you’re already used to the sounds Japanese has
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Also found this Quora answer that I found funny.
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My favourite answer to that question has to be this one
In Swahili cake is Keki
In Japanese cake is Keki
In Swahili jam is Jamu
In Japanese jam is jamu
In Swahili soup is supu
In Japanese soup is supu
In Swahili ice cream is ayskrimu
In Japanese ice is aisukurimu
Sound almost the same in Swahili
In Swahili menu is menyu
In Japanese menu is menyu
In Swahili cream is krimu
In Japanese cream is kurimu
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