[tel]

The story I hear (again from the Chinese) is that Korean is a dialect/divergence from Chinese that lost much of the tonality. I've not studied it personally, but from my knowledge it wouldn't be surprising for a Chinese speaker to believe Korean (and Japanese) lack tonal structure.

Japanese on the other hand is considered more likely to be separate but high influenced due to word sharing from the many wars between China and Japan. this seems pretty plausible considering the sharing of the written language which is widely considered to be Chinese in origin.

It's all interesting because I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the ancient history is obscured by the three proud nations.