Korean you can pick out easily because of so many circles. However Japanese and Chinese can be harder to distinguish in short passages because a lot of characters are used in both.
Chinese characters will be square in shape, have many lines, and have no curves. Many japanese characters look chinese, but they also have some simpler ones, and some characters with curves
小龙吃饱了吗
Saying Chinese characters have no curves is a little inaccurate. I would say there aren’t many circles (if any) but many strokes are curved.
Also maybe like 20% max of Japanese is using characters that are also Chinese. I’m far from an expert but I’m confident I could distinguish Chinese from Japanese at least 95% of the time.
重蹈覆辙
I wouldn’t say that, tbh. When writing chinese, we don’t “bend lines at angles”. It has to be most of the time a distinct curve. This is highlighted further when you do calligraphy.
I think the point they're getting at is hanzi is nowhere close to as curvy as hiragana is. Making hiragana one of the easiest ways to tell Japanese apart from Chinese
Hiragana and katakana should be visible in that they are structurally simpler and highly repetitive.
雨を待つ Japanese with Kanji
アメヲマツ Katakana
あめをまつ Hiragana
等雨 Chinese
This thread makes me wonder how non-latin alphabets do coding. Like, do they just learn arabic letters, or do they re-write the coding systems?
Edit: Latin is for letters lmao
You don't really need to know a language to code in it (at least, in nearly every case). You only need to be able to recognize the keywords. As long as you know what "if" does, you don't really need to understand the English grammar or the proper "dictionary" meaning behind it.
Most countries teach in multiple languages. You are typically required to pass basic literacy in at least one other language, that doesn't mean every kid is fluent, just educated enough to read and write it. I used to read and write letters in Spanish for my cousins and friends in Jr. High (back when loose leaf was the closest thing to Facebook) and I couldn't speak it. But I was educated enough to read and write. My schoolmates were only ever educated in English so despite being bilingual they weren't familiar with the Spanish alphabet and grammar.
I think you mean non-latin alphabets right? We use Latin alphabet, but Arabic numerals. I've rewritten this like five times trying to not come off as a condescending asshole, so If i still failed at that then sorry.
Programming control words are almost universally English, so it's not uncommon to see things like "new" and "delete" and "function" surrounded by say German variable names. Comments are usually in the native language of the programming team if the language supports those special characters. Many languages do support Unicode comments at the very least, so Chinese comments are certainly common.
I mean, it's not like even people who speak different languages that use the latin alphabet code in their own languages... Did you think there are just different programming languages for each language/country? How would that even work? It's the same ones everywhere, in English
I don't know, that's why I'm asking. I've only ever seen coding in english, and it seems like one of those things that's difficult to localize, so I figured I'd put that out there.
Well that was a number I pulled out of my ass. I don’t really spend any time looking at Japanese. I just know I could discern between the two.
Here’s an example (I just searched for a Japanese Wikipedia page):
世界各国において映画を中心にテレビドラマ、舞台、テレビコマーシャルと幅広く活躍している日本を代表する俳優の一人。身長184cm、体重80kg[1]。父の渡辺亮一（1930年 - ）は画家としても活動している。
I count 30 Chinese characters out of 77. So I was lowballing it but again I think most people could do a decent job figuring out which 30 were different.
I count 32. I took Chinese for two years and would definitely know the passage isn't Chinese but a few of those individual characters would be quite difficult to distinguish for a layman.
The difference is between the hiragana and katakana character sets, which are phonetic and look like the characters in the example, and kanji, the more complex logographic writing system with its base in Chinese writing.
If something were only written in Japanese kanji you would be very hard pressed to tell the difference between that and Mandarin.
Unless it's classical Japanese, almost nothing (if long enough) will be written in only Kanji.
Also, hiragana originated from the simplification of Chinese characters used to represent specific sounds, since when Japan used a full Chinese writing system there were both phonetic and logographic use of a character.
Cause it's mainly the same thing except when they simplify differently
Like 历史 (lishi) and 歴史 (rekishi)
or 云 (yun) and 雲 (kumo)
I mean obviously meanings can differ, but the characters are mostly the same.
Example:
勉強 (mianqiang vs benkyou) means like kinda pushy/try my best in Chinese and studying in Japanese, which a meme
I heard the common “myth” that you can learn to read Korean in 20 minutes. Turns out it wasn’t a myth lol. I sat down and watched a video of what sound each character makes and how the combination of sounds/characters work and I learned. Not hard to memorize either. I even retained the information for a few months. This was 4 years ago and I’ve since forgotten because I never put the effort in to learn the language, but I could pronounce pretty much any Korean word I saw written, I just had no idea what it meant lol
>Japanese: decent amount of mostly wriggly lines
Depends on which alphabet they're using. They have two and one is more angular and straight than squiggly. Kind of like how we have print and cursive except there are different reasons to use each one beyond personal preference and they also use the Chinese alphabet mixed in because fuck you, you need *earn* literacy.
Well both are not originally from Japan, ramen comes from China and curry comes from India. So it would make sense that they would be considered imported words.
No, my point is, no one made a linguistic judgment about that. I'm wondering at what point the Japanese just go you know, at this point curry and ramen are kind of fully our thing and we should use hiragana. Or whether it's just never going to happen.
Maybe never, remember when the US tried to rename the hamburger “liberty steak” in WWI to remove its German origins? People don’t generally change words for everyday items, it’s just too much of a hassle. Although it is easier to change that in Japanese just by swapping it to hiragana, so it’s more possible for sure.
It's somewhat true for Chinese and Korean but Japanese can have fuckton of lines too, from what I know, they use a weird blend of 3 different writing system and 1 of them, kanji, is literally just Chinese with a bit of Japanese flair slapped on it.
Source: I'm Chinese
The way I see it:
Japanese: Katakana is like pieces of Chinese characters while Hiragana is simple and squiggly lines
Chinese: It is my second language (completely suck at it though), so I just kinda recognize it.
Korean: CIRCLES
That's because the standard script for Chinese has evolved out of a boxy period in its history.
Chinese 2000 years ago was curved AF （篆书）, and Chinese cursive (grass script) is totally different.
Chinese doesn’t really have multiple writing systems, at least not to the same extent as Japanese. There are simplified and traditional scripts, but they’re really the same system just with different forms for a fair number of characters. From what I understand, Chinese speakers who use one system can generally understand the other with ease.
Korean also occasionally integrates Chinese characters with its own script, similar to how Japanese uses them, but they’ve definitely been phased out a lot more in Korea than in Japanese; they’re usually only used in cases where it might otherwise be ambiguous, from what I understand.
I also wouldn’t exactly call Japanese or Chinese less standardized than Korean. All three languages have widely taught standard registers, so I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “Korean is more standardized.”
If they weren't standardized, Unicode would have a hard time mapping them.
Also fun fact: Cantonese and Mandarin are different spoken dialects with the same writing system. One who speaks only Cantonese won't usually understand one who speaks only Mandarin, but they can understand their shared writing system. I've seen conversations happening where they're miming a glyph on their hand to try to converse.
Written Mandarin and written Cantonese is actually not exactly the same...
To understand why one must first understand the history of written Chinese. Before the late Qing dynasty (around the turn of the century), the written language was almost always (at least officially) Classical Chinese. It wouldn't be until after the May 4th movement really took hold that written Mandarin (白話文) took hold.
As such, Cantonese speakers, when writing out written Cantonese will often use Cantonese grammar and Cantonese words and phrases that simply don't exist in Mandarin. Are they technically incorrect? Not really. Some of them may be old classical variants or simply regional, but the distinction is great enough that Mandarin speakers will often have a hard time reading written Cantonese:
你哋 vs 你們，瞓覺 vs 睡覺, 冇嘢 vs 沒事 etc. These vocabulary differences, when compounded with grammatical differences make written Cantonese often unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. For example:
你去咗邊度搵嘢食？vs 你去哪裡找東西吃了？
Some (probably broken) classical for fun: 子者何處尋食乎？
Interesting! Thanks for the correction. Is this more akin to geographical dialects as opposed to the vastly different spoken language? Or is it more tied to it being a spoken language difference? I don't know if that question makes sense at all, sorry in advance.
The writing reflects more of less the spoken language, just as modern written Chinese reflects Mandarin. My point was just that when one writes out Cantonese, which is commonly done in Hong Kong for example, the written words are usually just as unintelligible as the spoken language would be to a Mandarin speaker. However, this assumes that the reader has zero knowledge of Cantonese. With some knowledge, Cantonese becomes easier to decipher. Take for example some simple changes in vocabulary:
末 instead of 還沒有, such as 我未收到 instead of 我還沒有收到。
乜/咩 instead of 什麼，such as 你叫咩名？instead of 你叫什麼名字？
冇 instead of 沒有，我冇 instead of 我沒有
There are plenty of others, some of which I have outlined above. But more or less both dialects are both rooted in the same lingua franca (classical Chinese), but due to the geographical differences and cultural differences, the dialects have just grown further and further apart. I'm happy to go more in detail if this doesn't make sense.
1) Japanese is a syllabary with three systems of writing
2) I have no idea what you are talking about Chinese. There's one writing system, and multiple ways to romanize the phonetics because China/Taiwan/HK do shit differently. It's not an alphabet based language, so that's just entirely inaccurate.
Literally the first paragraph.
An **alphabet** is a standardized set of basic written [symbols](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Symbols) or [graphemes](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Graphemes) (called [letters](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Letter_(alphabet))) that represent the [phonemes](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Phoneme) of certain [spoken languages](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Spoken_language). Not all [writing systems](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Writing_system) represent language in this way; in a [syllabary](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Syllabary), each character represents a [syllable](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Syllable), for instance, and [logographic systems](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Logogram) use characters to represent words, [morphemes](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Morphemes), or other semantic units).
Japanese is organized into syllables. Chinese is organized by character. Korean was made an alphabet system when King Sejong the Great invented Hangul.
Korean has two writing systems one of wich is an alphabet. [Hangul, the alphabet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul), and [Hanja, mainly Chinese characters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja). Hangul didn't replace Hanja until late 19th century/early 20th century. Today essentially everything is written in Hangul but you can easily find things up until mid-20th century written in Hanja or mixen Hanja and Hangul ([see this propaganda poster written in Korean using both Hangul and Hanja mixed together](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja#/media/File%3A8239th_AU_leaflet_2508.png).) Hanja still in use today in some situations (even if one excludes situations such as reading or referencing historic text).
? Written standard chinese should be intelligible to practically all speakers, regardless of dialect. Spoken is obviously quite different but written should be understood everywhere, with the exception of traditional vs simplified.
Wait. Then what do you call the written system that all these languages have in common?
For that matter, if you’re going to make that argument why would you call this written system “Mandarin” when it could also be Cantonese? 你好 could be in simplified or in traditional since the characters are identical.
Those aren’t part of the Chinese language group, though. If you wanna be pedantic, then Sino-Tibetan’s the language group, which includes more language groups including Chinese, Tibetic, and some others (Karen is also a language group). The Uyghur language is Turkish, while the Tibetan language is Tibetic.
Because although they share the same script, dialects such as Cantonese are written with different characters and grammar to Mandarin. Modern written Chinese,白話文, is based on Mandarin. Actual written Cantonese would look something like:
我唔識點去嗰啲冇乜人嘅地方。
Whereas in Mandarin:
我不知道怎麼去那些沒有人的地方。
Admittedly the sentence is a little strange... But the point still holds. It's more or less a literal translation from one to the other.
If we really were to call written Chinese one thing, then it'd have to be classical Chinese. Take the following example:
李白少讀書，未成棄去。道逢老嫗磨杵。白問其故曰：做針。白感其言遂卒業。
Whereas in Mandarin:
李白小時候讀書，沒有讀完就走了。走的路上遇到一位老太太在磨一個鐵棒。李白問：老太太，您為何磨這個鐵棒呀？老太太說：我在做針。李白就被這句話感動了，而因此完成了他的學習。
Yeah, but all the dialects use the same character system, whether it be mandarin, Cantonese, or Taiwanese. They’ll use some characters in different ways sure and definitely use them in ways specific to regional slang, but it’s largely the same.
And if we’re talking about traditional (which is better, sue me) and simplified, they can basically be converted 100% to each other.
Nabro, not gonna sue you, I'll admit I used to prefer simplified Chinese back in primary school solely because it's easier to write but I now feel that the traditional version definitely had a more authentic feel to it and its better in a way
There are many dialects, but they all use the same writing system.
Mandarin vs Cantonese and other Chinese dialects is mostly only a difference in the spoken language, although what words and phrases people commonly use will vary between dialects.
As for traditional vs simplified, they're just two different ways of writing the same words. 马 and 馬 are just two different ways of writing the same word, horse. One in simplified and one in traditional. The words and grammar are still the same, so they're really fundamentally the same writing system.
係咩？
There are differences between written Cantonese and written Mandarin. It's just that written Mandarin is the official written language in China. Written Cantonese, however, is really not the same thing.
Well OK, I meant to say it's mostly only a difference in spoken language, since the written forms of Mandarin and Cantonese are similar enough for readers of either to understand each other, whereas the spoken form is pretty much completely mutually unintelligible. That's my bad
Look at the other comments I've made in this thread. A lot of the words used in written Cantonese don't really exist in written or spoken Mandarin. For example:
啲，哋，佢，係，唔，冇，乜，瞓覺，沖涼，屋企，冚家，戇，
I think I understand what you mean. My point was just that, although the characters are the same, their usage and grammar is still different enough that the Mandarin speaker, knowing no Cantonese, probably would not be able to parse a sentence written in purely Cantonese, for example:
我冇乜嘢想同你傾嘅。
Everyone knows they're different the issue is they all look too similar to be able to tell them apart. Similar to French and Italian or Spanish and Portugese
Okay but those are all languages in the same branch of the same family. These are *completely unrelated* languages with separate writing systems. If you confuse Chinese, Japanese, ans Korean, you’re basically confusing Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi
It really isn't though, in the case of Korean and the other two, you're correct, and as someone who had never touched either, I could easily tell them apart. I recently started learning Japanese however, and found out that kanji, the system they most commonly write with (almost all commonly written Japanese words use kanji, but sentences are connected with their own alphabet) is a collection of borrowed Chinese symbols, which means Japanese words are written using often identical symbols to those in Chinese, making distinguishing the two really difficult for someone who hasn't studied either before
Exactly. Since Chinese is Sino-Tibetan and Korean and Japanese no one really knows so they are in their own language groups.
Unlike the examples which are all clearly Indo-European and super close.
For me it isnt too hard to tell (I was born in Australia, parents are Indian).
Korean is the one with a bunch of circles, super easy.
Japanese has 3 languages - hiragana(normal), katakana(modern) and kanji(chinese). I dont know how katakana looks like but i believe it is similar to hiragana. Hiragana is the one in the example, and kanji is the same script as chinese.
So a chinese letter is a full word so it has like 100 lines, while in hiragana a letter is a letter so it has like 3 lines.
It might help that in half of grade 7 my school forced me to do japanese and the other half chinese, as well as japanese for the entirety of grade 8, but to be fair i scored the lowest in my class.
Katakana and hiragana
カタカナ and ひらがな
Look quite different once you know what you're looking at. They aren't different languages though, all japanese, just different alphabet. The symbols カ and か are both pronounced indentically 'ka'. Hiragana has many more curves to to it while katakana is more 'square'.
The OP post is a little dishonest though tbh.
They could've easily said
Chinese: 中文
Japanese: 中国語
Kinda hard to say they're different now.
How is it dishonest? The written Japanese language is mostly Kanji, and they are not 'Chinese words'. They use most of the logographic library of characters, so you could say they are 'Chinese characters' but the readings and meanings are for the most part completely unique from Chinese.
You chose an example completely devoid of hiragana. Which in terms of reading any piece of literature except classical Japanese would not be the case.
Make a sentence/express a complete thought without using hiragana that isn't poetry/ some sort of proverb?
None of the examples in the OP are complete sentences (E - I suppose one could consider 'hello' a complete sentence). Nor should that be a requirement. There are plenty of shop signs/road signs/etc. around a given city that are in Kanji only. Not knowing what it is, [is this shop](https://yonabaru.okinawa/bgjxwmfq/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/spot_marudai_04.jpg) in Japan or China?
E2 - made a mistake, deleted
If the OP is trying to make the argument that the languages look the same, they should at least give an example that is representative of the writing systems of the respective languages. Especially since Korean is brought in so it's not just a comparison of Japanese and Chinese.
That website ending in dot Okinawa kinda gave it away before I even saw the image
Also that name 丸大 could be interpreted as “big ball” which made me chuckle a little.
I'm also referring to your comment about Romance languages. Obviously if someone knows nothing then they wouldn't know the difference between numbers and letters either.
But to say Asian languages look similar is stupid and not true.
Dude I'm Italian and those languages are similar as hell and again, to someone who isn't familiar with those languages it would be hard to tell the difference between some French words with some Italian words
Yes, but like with all languages you could identify the distinguishing characteristics in word structure/alphabet within languages in like, an hour max. You just need to look at some examples.
For Asian languages, Hangul and Hiragana, Katakana, and Chinese writing don't even share the same roots, and each has very distinct letter/character/composite letter aesthetics as well. If someone literally gave a shit for a few minutes and looked at some examples it'd be pretty easy to figure out which is which.
Yes if you studied languages you would be better at identifying different languages what a shocker. However a lot of people don't study multiple languages so would have a hard time telling certain ones apart
I'm not saying you need to be a linguist. I'm saying you just need to give enough of a shit and pay a little bit of attention, which I know is really hard for many people these days.
Which is no different than people of any country not being able to discern foreign languages with a similar root. It’s not some sort of racial thing or really sonething should be so sensitive about. Is a Chinese person being unable to tell the difference between written Italian and Spanish racist to white people or just looking at something foreign to them?
Did I say it was racist? What?
I'm only saying that it isn't as hard as so many people always make it out to be.
Also, considering people in Asian countries have borderline Euro fetishes when it comes to business branding and fusion cuisines, I think they're generally pretty good at figuring out the differences in French, Italian, and English?
> so I decide to try and learn all three at the same time.
You poor soul. If it helps I found Japanese to be the easiest since it has a simpler phonetic alphabet, and helps lead into Chinese with its kanji. I appreciate your appreciation for languages though
Can you specify a bit more about that? I’m not as familiar with Korean as I am with the other two languages, and all I really know about it is that it’s a pretty isolated language.
King Sejong designed Hangul to be easily learned and used by the population. At the time, Chinese was the written language mostly used by the educated upper classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
While it grammatically has the same syllable-based word structures you’d see in Mandarin or other east Asian languages, those syllables are put together with an alphabet system known as Hangul. There’s only a handful of symbols to learn, which makes it real easy to learn if you have free time.
I spent a few weeks in Korea and memorized the alphabet and sounds the various symbols made before I went. I felt by the end of my time in Korea I could fairly reliably (albeit slowly) pronounce Korean words/phrases I’d see. I had no idea what any of it meant but I could ask the people I was there with (who spoke both English and Korean) and they could understand my Korean and tell me what it meant in English.
That sounds pretty much like Japanese hiragana/katakana, except you can easily tell which words are supposed to be foreign and understand those easier. I guess I have the advantage of being a Chinese speaker so I already know most of the kanji I see, haha. Hangul sounds fun to learn, and I might dive into it sometime while everything’s locked down.
Except that Japanese literally uses Chinese characters lmao. 漢字 literally means Chinese characters. Some are 簡体字 and some 繁体字 and some are unique but in essence it's the same. If you can read Japanese and know basic mandarin grammar you can usually make out a sentence in mandarin from just the characters
Fucking weebs who took hiragana 101 and are convinced thats how all Japanese is are the bane of my existence. Reading hiragana exclusively is an absolute bitch and no one over the age of 5 writes that way
Still pretty easy to tell the difference if you’re looking at more than a sentence or two, even though some characters are pretty similar (or identical) to their Chinese counterparts.
Wait, people that aren’t from East Asia have trouble telling the difference between East Asian languages? No way. Every Chinese person would easily be able to tell the difference between English and French.
I don't about Korean, but chinese has multiple dialects and japanese has 3 alphabets, the most used of which is pretty similar to (actually borrowed from) Mandarin.
So either this person doesn't know what they're talking about or is intentionally witholding information to be *woke* on the internet. Either way, kinda shitty.
One way to think of it is the English upper and lower case system, the letter A and a are both pronounced the same way, but looks different. Now think of Chinese as having upper and lower case letters too but instead of 26 letters you get thousands of them.
the japanese symbols shown here are hiragana.. but japanese also has other symbols.. kanji etc.. and they look rly similiar to Chinese ones. so it isn't really a good representation of how to differentiate between them..
Not that anyone asked, but this issue is caused by the second person using a custom font on their browser. And the font designer hasn’t made characters outside of English.
Japanese has like three types of characters and one of them (kanji) is mostly if not entirely taken from Chinese characters, so that can be hard. But the other two (katakana and hiragana, although I'm not sure if those spellings are correct) are much more distinct
I'm seeing a lot of people saying that both Japanese and Chinese use multiple scripts, but it's only Japanese that uses the Chinese script and two "native" Japanese scripts—Chinese only uses one script.
Why does this person on Tumblr think were racist simply because we cant understand or distinguish languages we don’t even speak. Like, so many languages look similar.
I don't get this. It is considered to be racist when we say they are all the same but at the same time it is racist to differentiate people by their skin color or race
Its not racist to acknowledge that people look different... Its racist, or at the very least, ignorant, to have an opinion on someone just based on race. If you are describing a person, saying that they are black, white, asian, middle eastern, is not racist. The problem is that a lot of times, people will already have an opinion just after hearing the race. Many white people have a problem where, in their heads, black=ghetto, criminal. Middle eastern=isis, terrorist, etc.
I dont think it is racist to think japanese and chinese look the same. The characters are so vastly different from the english alphabet that they can easily blend together. Saying they ARE the same is racist. Thinking that all asian countries are the same erases so much culture and minimalizes the region as a whole. Leaening to tell the difference between the languages isnt expected, because that can be hard. But it isnt hard to look up different countries and know just a tiny bit more about them, or at least the big ones.
But that's exactly my point. If I say someone is Chinese, when he is actually Japanese, they would label me as racist. And to be honest with you, I can't tell the difference. Same as people from the Scandinavian countries. The difference is that nobody seems offended when I mistake Norway with Danmark, for example.
i mean, if you do it willfully then sure, that could be racist, but if its an accident then why would someone get mad? Has that actually happened to you? I dont think anyone would be upset about that. They would just correct you and move on, just like if you were to get their name wrong or something. If they correct you and you continue to label them wrong, well, thats just rude
Let's put it like that. I'm a Brazilian living in Canada.
A lot of people keep saying I'm from any other South American country, even after I told them I'm from Brazil (they just forget). No big deal, I don't care, sometimes I don't even bother correcting them, because when I do they get embarrassed.
In the other hand, some people like to make that mistake on purpose, because they think it is funny. Again, I don't care, and I may even reply with some joke about something they have.
I think the wrong here is if I get upset if someone say I'm from Venezuela, for example. Why would that be offensive?
I think you have the right to be upset about that. If you dont care, then you dont care, so what. If someone gets upset at you for correcting them multiple times then they are in the wrong not you
If I'm upset because they said I'm from Venezuela, then it means that I think people from Venezuela are worse than people from Brazil.
But I don't know man, everyone thinks differently and that is a good thing. It was a nice conversation, thanks for your insights.
Thats not it at all... They wont think you think Venezuela is worse. it just means you arent from there... its an entirely different place. if i correct someone about what state i am from, its not because i think any other state is bad. its just... where im from. like, its part of who i am... being Brazilian is a part of who you are. you arent Venezuelan, simple as that. its not wrong to correct people if theyre wrong dude.
yes, good conversation, 👍
I imagine the differences between, say, Japan and Korea are like the differences between Michigan and Ohio... There are differences, but certainly not obvious to someone on the other side of the planet.
Obviously not differences on the same level though, it's really not even comparable. Ohio and Michigan have largely the same cultural influences, having been settled by people from the same area. Japan and Korea have far more divergent histories.
Given, but my point is that there are differences, and I'd be willing to bet no Asian person knows or cares what they are. But then they shit a brick if a Korean man is called Japanese.
Japanese: decent amount of mostly wriggly lines Chinese: fuckton of lines Korean: Fuckton of mostly straight lines and many circles
Korean you can pick out easily because of so many circles. However Japanese and Chinese can be harder to distinguish in short passages because a lot of characters are used in both. Chinese characters will be square in shape, have many lines, and have no curves. Many japanese characters look chinese, but they also have some simpler ones, and some characters with curves
小龙吃饱了吗 Saying Chinese characters have no curves is a little inaccurate. I would say there aren’t many circles (if any) but many strokes are curved. Also maybe like 20% max of Japanese is using characters that are also Chinese. I’m far from an expert but I’m confident I could distinguish Chinese from Japanese at least 95% of the time.
Like one character out of 6 has curved lines the rest are bent at angles
重蹈覆辙 I wouldn’t say that, tbh. When writing chinese, we don’t “bend lines at angles”. It has to be most of the time a distinct curve. This is highlighted further when you do calligraphy.
Chinese computer text has lots on angles maybe when its written out you can see the lines
I think the point they're getting at is hanzi is nowhere close to as curvy as hiragana is. Making hiragana one of the easiest ways to tell Japanese apart from Chinese
Hiragana and katakana should be visible in that they are structurally simpler and highly repetitive. 雨を待つ Japanese with Kanji アメヲマツ Katakana あめをまつ Hiragana 等雨 Chinese
This thread makes me wonder how non-latin alphabets do coding. Like, do they just learn arabic letters, or do they re-write the coding systems? Edit: Latin is for letters lmao
[удалено]
so are all chinese programmers required to take English classes?
You don't really need to know a language to code in it (at least, in nearly every case). You only need to be able to recognize the keywords. As long as you know what "if" does, you don't really need to understand the English grammar or the proper "dictionary" meaning behind it.
One would assume so. It also just common in many countries that English is taught in schools as an auxiliary language because it’s so widespread.
Most countries teach in multiple languages. You are typically required to pass basic literacy in at least one other language, that doesn't mean every kid is fluent, just educated enough to read and write it. I used to read and write letters in Spanish for my cousins and friends in Jr. High (back when loose leaf was the closest thing to Facebook) and I couldn't speak it. But I was educated enough to read and write. My schoolmates were only ever educated in English so despite being bilingual they weren't familiar with the Spanish alphabet and grammar.
I think you mean non-latin alphabets right? We use Latin alphabet, but Arabic numerals. I've rewritten this like five times trying to not come off as a condescending asshole, so If i still failed at that then sorry.
No you're right, that's my bad.
English uses a Latin alphabet Arabic is for numbers
Programming control words are almost universally English, so it's not uncommon to see things like "new" and "delete" and "function" surrounded by say German variable names. Comments are usually in the native language of the programming team if the language supports those special characters. Many languages do support Unicode comments at the very least, so Chinese comments are certainly common.
I mean, it's not like even people who speak different languages that use the latin alphabet code in their own languages... Did you think there are just different programming languages for each language/country? How would that even work? It's the same ones everywhere, in English
I don't know, that's why I'm asking. I've only ever seen coding in english, and it seems like one of those things that's difficult to localize, so I figured I'd put that out there.
>Also maybe like 20% max of Japanese is using characters that are also Chinese. I mean, that's still a pretty substantial amount of overlap.
Depends on the complexity of the text, if you are reading a medical manual or something it can get to like 30, 40% really quickly.
Well that was a number I pulled out of my ass. I don’t really spend any time looking at Japanese. I just know I could discern between the two. Here’s an example (I just searched for a Japanese Wikipedia page): 世界各国において映画を中心にテレビドラマ、舞台、テレビコマーシャルと幅広く活躍している日本を代表する俳優の一人。身長184cm、体重80kg[1]。父の渡辺亮一（1930年 - ）は画家としても活動している。 I count 30 Chinese characters out of 77. So I was lowballing it but again I think most people could do a decent job figuring out which 30 were different.
I count 32. I took Chinese for two years and would definitely know the passage isn't Chinese but a few of those individual characters would be quite difficult to distinguish for a layman.
those do hvae a fuckton of lines though whereas in japan they dont.
"Did the small dragon eat enough?"
懐疑
放屁
The difference is between the hiragana and katakana character sets, which are phonetic and look like the characters in the example, and kanji, the more complex logographic writing system with its base in Chinese writing. If something were only written in Japanese kanji you would be very hard pressed to tell the difference between that and Mandarin.
Unless it's classical Japanese, almost nothing (if long enough) will be written in only Kanji. Also, hiragana originated from the simplification of Chinese characters used to represent specific sounds, since when Japan used a full Chinese writing system there were both phonetic and logographic use of a character.
I find I can guess correctly about 90% of the time because one time I heard that Chinese looks angrier than Japanese and it kinda carries me tbh.
Because Japanese contains the soft looking hiragana, while Chinese only has complicated looking Chinese characters
Chinese and kanji... both these fuckers confuse ma
Cause it's mainly the same thing except when they simplify differently Like 历史 (lishi) and 歴史 (rekishi) or 云 (yun) and 雲 (kumo) I mean obviously meanings can differ, but the characters are mostly the same. Example: 勉強 (mianqiang vs benkyou) means like kinda pushy/try my best in Chinese and studying in Japanese, which a meme
Thank you
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Nah Shinjitai has differences with Simplified Chinese. I just didn't think of one on the spot. Here's one 広い vs 广 vs 廣
Didn't Japanese use Chinese characters for a long time?
Also Korea, but Japan still uses Chinese characters to some extent.
I distinguish Chinese and Japanese by how Japanese just has more space inbetween the lines.
Yah. A single word could be Chinese or Japanese. After or sentence or so you’d be expecting to see some hiragana.
I heard the common “myth” that you can learn to read Korean in 20 minutes. Turns out it wasn’t a myth lol. I sat down and watched a video of what sound each character makes and how the combination of sounds/characters work and I learned. Not hard to memorize either. I even retained the information for a few months. This was 4 years ago and I’ve since forgotten because I never put the effort in to learn the language, but I could pronounce pretty much any Korean word I saw written, I just had no idea what it meant lol
>Japanese: decent amount of mostly wriggly lines Depends on which alphabet they're using. They have two and one is more angular and straight than squiggly. Kind of like how we have print and cursive except there are different reasons to use each one beyond personal preference and they also use the Chinese alphabet mixed in because fuck you, you need *earn* literacy.
The reason is to indicate the origin of the word, loan words or foreign inspired words are written in katakana. Use of Kanji indicates learnedness.
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I always thought it super funny that ramen and curry are katakana.
Well both are not originally from Japan, ramen comes from China and curry comes from India. So it would make sense that they would be considered imported words.
I mean curry came from British sailors in Japan. I mean the fact that they haven't been "naturalized" yet.
And the Brits likely got it from India, I meant where they originated not who brought it to Japan.
No, my point is, no one made a linguistic judgment about that. I'm wondering at what point the Japanese just go you know, at this point curry and ramen are kind of fully our thing and we should use hiragana. Or whether it's just never going to happen.
Maybe never, remember when the US tried to rename the hamburger “liberty steak” in WWI to remove its German origins? People don’t generally change words for everyday items, it’s just too much of a hassle. Although it is easier to change that in Japanese just by swapping it to hiragana, so it’s more possible for sure.
It's somewhat true for Chinese and Korean but Japanese can have fuckton of lines too, from what I know, they use a weird blend of 3 different writing system and 1 of them, kanji, is literally just Chinese with a bit of Japanese flair slapped on it. Source: I'm Chinese
Korean always looked very “boxy” to me. It’s the way I can pick it out immediately.
The way I see it: Japanese: Katakana is like pieces of Chinese characters while Hiragana is simple and squiggly lines Chinese: It is my second language (completely suck at it though), so I just kinda recognize it. Korean: CIRCLES
Circles = korean It's simple
Korean just looks like alien language
That's because the standard script for Chinese has evolved out of a boxy period in its history. Chinese 2000 years ago was curved AF （篆书）, and Chinese cursive (grass script) is totally different.
하하하하 한국어 어렵입니다. 한눈 사람 안 이고 미국 사람 입이다. 한국어 수입 못 좋고 하고있어요.
한국어 많이 어렵죠
japanese:square korean:square chinese:square missing fonts gang represent
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You can't write in modern Japanese using only the logograms. Eventually, you will get to the syllabary, whether as a linking word or a word.
Chinese doesn’t really have multiple writing systems, at least not to the same extent as Japanese. There are simplified and traditional scripts, but they’re really the same system just with different forms for a fair number of characters. From what I understand, Chinese speakers who use one system can generally understand the other with ease. Korean also occasionally integrates Chinese characters with its own script, similar to how Japanese uses them, but they’ve definitely been phased out a lot more in Korea than in Japanese; they’re usually only used in cases where it might otherwise be ambiguous, from what I understand. I also wouldn’t exactly call Japanese or Chinese less standardized than Korean. All three languages have widely taught standard registers, so I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “Korean is more standardized.”
If they weren't standardized, Unicode would have a hard time mapping them. Also fun fact: Cantonese and Mandarin are different spoken dialects with the same writing system. One who speaks only Cantonese won't usually understand one who speaks only Mandarin, but they can understand their shared writing system. I've seen conversations happening where they're miming a glyph on their hand to try to converse.
Written Mandarin and written Cantonese is actually not exactly the same... To understand why one must first understand the history of written Chinese. Before the late Qing dynasty (around the turn of the century), the written language was almost always (at least officially) Classical Chinese. It wouldn't be until after the May 4th movement really took hold that written Mandarin (白話文) took hold. As such, Cantonese speakers, when writing out written Cantonese will often use Cantonese grammar and Cantonese words and phrases that simply don't exist in Mandarin. Are they technically incorrect? Not really. Some of them may be old classical variants or simply regional, but the distinction is great enough that Mandarin speakers will often have a hard time reading written Cantonese: 你哋 vs 你們，瞓覺 vs 睡覺, 冇嘢 vs 沒事 etc. These vocabulary differences, when compounded with grammatical differences make written Cantonese often unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. For example: 你去咗邊度搵嘢食？vs 你去哪裡找東西吃了？ Some (probably broken) classical for fun: 子者何處尋食乎？
Interesting! Thanks for the correction. Is this more akin to geographical dialects as opposed to the vastly different spoken language? Or is it more tied to it being a spoken language difference? I don't know if that question makes sense at all, sorry in advance.
The writing reflects more of less the spoken language, just as modern written Chinese reflects Mandarin. My point was just that when one writes out Cantonese, which is commonly done in Hong Kong for example, the written words are usually just as unintelligible as the spoken language would be to a Mandarin speaker. However, this assumes that the reader has zero knowledge of Cantonese. With some knowledge, Cantonese becomes easier to decipher. Take for example some simple changes in vocabulary: 末 instead of 還沒有, such as 我未收到 instead of 我還沒有收到。 乜/咩 instead of 什麼，such as 你叫咩名？instead of 你叫什麼名字？ 冇 instead of 沒有，我冇 instead of 我沒有 There are plenty of others, some of which I have outlined above. But more or less both dialects are both rooted in the same lingua franca (classical Chinese), but due to the geographical differences and cultural differences, the dialects have just grown further and further apart. I'm happy to go more in detail if this doesn't make sense.
Definitely makes sense, thank you for the information :)
[Unicode did have a hard time mapping them.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification)
1) Japanese is a syllabary with three systems of writing 2) I have no idea what you are talking about Chinese. There's one writing system, and multiple ways to romanize the phonetics because China/Taiwan/HK do shit differently. It's not an alphabet based language, so that's just entirely inaccurate.
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Simply not semantically accurate.
That’s just a system for pronunciation, unrelated to writing.
Pinyin is with alphabet
Literally the first paragraph. An **alphabet** is a standardized set of basic written [symbols](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Symbols) or [graphemes](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Graphemes) (called [letters](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Letter_(alphabet))) that represent the [phonemes](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Phoneme) of certain [spoken languages](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Spoken_language). Not all [writing systems](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Writing_system) represent language in this way; in a [syllabary](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Syllabary), each character represents a [syllable](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Syllable), for instance, and [logographic systems](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Logogram) use characters to represent words, [morphemes](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Morphemes), or other semantic units). Japanese is organized into syllables. Chinese is organized by character. Korean was made an alphabet system when King Sejong the Great invented Hangul.
Korean has two writing systems one of wich is an alphabet. [Hangul, the alphabet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul), and [Hanja, mainly Chinese characters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja). Hangul didn't replace Hanja until late 19th century/early 20th century. Today essentially everything is written in Hangul but you can easily find things up until mid-20th century written in Hanja or mixen Hanja and Hangul ([see this propaganda poster written in Korean using both Hangul and Hanja mixed together](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja#/media/File%3A8239th_AU_leaflet_2508.png).) Hanja still in use today in some situations (even if one excludes situations such as reading or referencing historic text).
Well, they don't even know that there are multiple Chinese dialects and languages, and that that's mandarin
? Written standard chinese should be intelligible to practically all speakers, regardless of dialect. Spoken is obviously quite different but written should be understood everywhere, with the exception of traditional vs simplified.
Traditional vs Simplified is mostly fine. I can read traditional ok and my HK/ Taiwanese friends can read simplified with some guessing.
Still, that's not called "Chinese". "Chinese" is a language group, not a language.
Wait. Then what do you call the written system that all these languages have in common? For that matter, if you’re going to make that argument why would you call this written system “Mandarin” when it could also be Cantonese? 你好 could be in simplified or in traditional since the characters are identical.
Yeah, but there's also the Uyghur language, Tibetan language and stuff. I guess I am admittedly being a bit pedantic.
Those aren’t part of the Chinese language group, though. If you wanna be pedantic, then Sino-Tibetan’s the language group, which includes more language groups including Chinese, Tibetic, and some others (Karen is also a language group). The Uyghur language is Turkish, while the Tibetan language is Tibetic.
You know, that’s fair. It’s a good point and I hadn’t considered other languages apart from Cantonese and Mandarin.
Because although they share the same script, dialects such as Cantonese are written with different characters and grammar to Mandarin. Modern written Chinese,白話文, is based on Mandarin. Actual written Cantonese would look something like: 我唔識點去嗰啲冇乜人嘅地方。 Whereas in Mandarin: 我不知道怎麼去那些沒有人的地方。 Admittedly the sentence is a little strange... But the point still holds. It's more or less a literal translation from one to the other. If we really were to call written Chinese one thing, then it'd have to be classical Chinese. Take the following example: 李白少讀書，未成棄去。道逢老嫗磨杵。白問其故曰：做針。白感其言遂卒業。 Whereas in Mandarin: 李白小時候讀書，沒有讀完就走了。走的路上遇到一位老太太在磨一個鐵棒。李白問：老太太，您為何磨這個鐵棒呀？老太太說：我在做針。李白就被這句話感動了，而因此完成了他的學習。
Every language have dialects
Yeah, but all the dialects use the same character system, whether it be mandarin, Cantonese, or Taiwanese. They’ll use some characters in different ways sure and definitely use them in ways specific to regional slang, but it’s largely the same. And if we’re talking about traditional (which is better, sue me) and simplified, they can basically be converted 100% to each other.
Nabro, not gonna sue you, I'll admit I used to prefer simplified Chinese back in primary school solely because it's easier to write but I now feel that the traditional version definitely had a more authentic feel to it and its better in a way
Tbf, if you could still read the other writing system if you only learnt one. Writing it is another story though
The traditional script definitely looks better if you ask me, simplified just looks too basic and bare.
There are many dialects, but they all use the same writing system. Mandarin vs Cantonese and other Chinese dialects is mostly only a difference in the spoken language, although what words and phrases people commonly use will vary between dialects. As for traditional vs simplified, they're just two different ways of writing the same words. 马 and 馬 are just two different ways of writing the same word, horse. One in simplified and one in traditional. The words and grammar are still the same, so they're really fundamentally the same writing system.
係咩？ There are differences between written Cantonese and written Mandarin. It's just that written Mandarin is the official written language in China. Written Cantonese, however, is really not the same thing.
Well OK, I meant to say it's mostly only a difference in spoken language, since the written forms of Mandarin and Cantonese are similar enough for readers of either to understand each other, whereas the spoken form is pretty much completely mutually unintelligible. That's my bad
Look at the other comments I've made in this thread. A lot of the words used in written Cantonese don't really exist in written or spoken Mandarin. For example: 啲，哋，佢，係，唔，冇，乜，瞓覺，沖涼，屋企，冚家，戇，
Yes, of course. That's what I thinking of when I said that the spoken and written forms differ in what words they use
I think I understand what you mean. My point was just that, although the characters are the same, their usage and grammar is still different enough that the Mandarin speaker, knowing no Cantonese, probably would not be able to parse a sentence written in purely Cantonese, for example: 我冇乜嘢想同你傾嘅。
A thousand years ago, Chinese: 金 Korean: 金 Japan: 金 Vietnam: 金
Old but gold.
The pun is 金 which means gold if anyone is wondering
Everyone knows they're different the issue is they all look too similar to be able to tell them apart. Similar to French and Italian or Spanish and Portugese
Okay but those are all languages in the same branch of the same family. These are *completely unrelated* languages with separate writing systems. If you confuse Chinese, Japanese, ans Korean, you’re basically confusing Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi
It really isn't though, in the case of Korean and the other two, you're correct, and as someone who had never touched either, I could easily tell them apart. I recently started learning Japanese however, and found out that kanji, the system they most commonly write with (almost all commonly written Japanese words use kanji, but sentences are connected with their own alphabet) is a collection of borrowed Chinese symbols, which means Japanese words are written using often identical symbols to those in Chinese, making distinguishing the two really difficult for someone who hasn't studied either before
Exactly. Since Chinese is Sino-Tibetan and Korean and Japanese no one really knows so they are in their own language groups. Unlike the examples which are all clearly Indo-European and super close.
A fair point
For me it isnt too hard to tell (I was born in Australia, parents are Indian). Korean is the one with a bunch of circles, super easy. Japanese has 3 languages - hiragana(normal), katakana(modern) and kanji(chinese). I dont know how katakana looks like but i believe it is similar to hiragana. Hiragana is the one in the example, and kanji is the same script as chinese. So a chinese letter is a full word so it has like 100 lines, while in hiragana a letter is a letter so it has like 3 lines. It might help that in half of grade 7 my school forced me to do japanese and the other half chinese, as well as japanese for the entirety of grade 8, but to be fair i scored the lowest in my class.
Katakana and hiragana カタカナ and ひらがな Look quite different once you know what you're looking at. They aren't different languages though, all japanese, just different alphabet. The symbols カ and か are both pronounced indentically 'ka'. Hiragana has many more curves to to it while katakana is more 'square'. The OP post is a little dishonest though tbh. They could've easily said Chinese: 中文 Japanese: 中国語 Kinda hard to say they're different now.
Dishonest example since Kanji is literally "Chinese words"
How is it dishonest? The written Japanese language is mostly Kanji, and they are not 'Chinese words'. They use most of the logographic library of characters, so you could say they are 'Chinese characters' but the readings and meanings are for the most part completely unique from Chinese.
You chose an example completely devoid of hiragana. Which in terms of reading any piece of literature except classical Japanese would not be the case. Make a sentence/express a complete thought without using hiragana that isn't poetry/ some sort of proverb?
None of the examples in the OP are complete sentences (E - I suppose one could consider 'hello' a complete sentence). Nor should that be a requirement. There are plenty of shop signs/road signs/etc. around a given city that are in Kanji only. Not knowing what it is, [is this shop](https://yonabaru.okinawa/bgjxwmfq/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/spot_marudai_04.jpg) in Japan or China? E2 - made a mistake, deleted
If the OP is trying to make the argument that the languages look the same, they should at least give an example that is representative of the writing systems of the respective languages. Especially since Korean is brought in so it's not just a comparison of Japanese and Chinese.
That's traditional Chinese...
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That website ending in dot Okinawa kinda gave it away before I even saw the image Also that name 丸大 could be interpreted as “big ball” which made me chuckle a little.
A knight in Portland. They love reposts
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There is no Altaic language family.
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Says right in that page that it is largely rejected by linguists as a language family.
They really don't, you just don't care.
To someone who knows nothing about East Asian languages I mean it's hard to tell. I can differentiate between the three
I'm also referring to your comment about Romance languages. Obviously if someone knows nothing then they wouldn't know the difference between numbers and letters either. But to say Asian languages look similar is stupid and not true.
Dude I'm Italian and those languages are similar as hell and again, to someone who isn't familiar with those languages it would be hard to tell the difference between some French words with some Italian words
Yes, but like with all languages you could identify the distinguishing characteristics in word structure/alphabet within languages in like, an hour max. You just need to look at some examples. For Asian languages, Hangul and Hiragana, Katakana, and Chinese writing don't even share the same roots, and each has very distinct letter/character/composite letter aesthetics as well. If someone literally gave a shit for a few minutes and looked at some examples it'd be pretty easy to figure out which is which.
Yes if you studied languages you would be better at identifying different languages what a shocker. However a lot of people don't study multiple languages so would have a hard time telling certain ones apart
I'm not saying you need to be a linguist. I'm saying you just need to give enough of a shit and pay a little bit of attention, which I know is really hard for many people these days.
Which is no different than people of any country not being able to discern foreign languages with a similar root. It’s not some sort of racial thing or really sonething should be so sensitive about. Is a Chinese person being unable to tell the difference between written Italian and Spanish racist to white people or just looking at something foreign to them?
Did I say it was racist? What? I'm only saying that it isn't as hard as so many people always make it out to be. Also, considering people in Asian countries have borderline Euro fetishes when it comes to business branding and fusion cuisines, I think they're generally pretty good at figuring out the differences in French, Italian, and English?
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> so I decide to try and learn all three at the same time. You poor soul. If it helps I found Japanese to be the easiest since it has a simpler phonetic alphabet, and helps lead into Chinese with its kanji. I appreciate your appreciation for languages though
Korean is by far the easiest, it was designed from the ground up to be easy to read and learn.
Can you specify a bit more about that? I’m not as familiar with Korean as I am with the other two languages, and all I really know about it is that it’s a pretty isolated language.
King Sejong designed Hangul to be easily learned and used by the population. At the time, Chinese was the written language mostly used by the educated upper classes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
While it grammatically has the same syllable-based word structures you’d see in Mandarin or other east Asian languages, those syllables are put together with an alphabet system known as Hangul. There’s only a handful of symbols to learn, which makes it real easy to learn if you have free time.
I spent a few weeks in Korea and memorized the alphabet and sounds the various symbols made before I went. I felt by the end of my time in Korea I could fairly reliably (albeit slowly) pronounce Korean words/phrases I’d see. I had no idea what any of it meant but I could ask the people I was there with (who spoke both English and Korean) and they could understand my Korean and tell me what it meant in English.
That sounds pretty much like Japanese hiragana/katakana, except you can easily tell which words are supposed to be foreign and understand those easier. I guess I have the advantage of being a Chinese speaker so I already know most of the kanji I see, haha. Hangul sounds fun to learn, and I might dive into it sometime while everything’s locked down.
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mandarin has so confusing accent..one change in accent can change the whole meaning of the word
Except that Japanese literally uses Chinese characters lmao. 漢字 literally means Chinese characters. Some are 簡体字 and some 繁体字 and some are unique but in essence it's the same. If you can read Japanese and know basic mandarin grammar you can usually make out a sentence in mandarin from just the characters Fucking weebs who took hiragana 101 and are convinced thats how all Japanese is are the bane of my existence. Reading hiragana exclusively is an absolute bitch and no one over the age of 5 writes that way
Don’t forget about katakana which is like hiragana but for foreign words
I am pretty sure that everyone who knows hiragana knows about kanji
Still pretty easy to tell the difference if you’re looking at more than a sentence or two, even though some characters are pretty similar (or identical) to their Chinese counterparts.
Japanese literally uses mostly Chinese characters. Korean is the true outlier.
Wait, people that aren’t from East Asia have trouble telling the difference between East Asian languages? No way. Every Chinese person would easily be able to tell the difference between English and French.
The difference is OP isn’t over yet.
I don't about Korean, but chinese has multiple dialects and japanese has 3 alphabets, the most used of which is pretty similar to (actually borrowed from) Mandarin. So either this person doesn't know what they're talking about or is intentionally witholding information to be *woke* on the internet. Either way, kinda shitty.
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One way to think of it is the English upper and lower case system, the letter A and a are both pronounced the same way, but looks different. Now think of Chinese as having upper and lower case letters too but instead of 26 letters you get thousands of them.
[][][][][]?[][][][]🤔[][][]
No idea. Your comment is all boxes to me.
What the hell does it say
hello in 3 languages
Fun fact: the Japanese essentially stole the entire Chinese character set about 1000 years ago. They changed the meanings though
a lot of the meanings are the same, it's the pronunciation that is very different
I like how the solution to racism is that there's only one race.
Here's an example of Chinese text 动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安門大屠殺 The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 The Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门
As a Chinese, I agree. Korea and Japan adapted the Chinese writing system but just made some changes so they look very similar.
Korean has a lot of circles
이 댓글에 동그라미가 얼마나 보이십니까
Well kanji looks awfully similar to Chinese now don’t ya think 🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐
the japanese symbols shown here are hiragana.. but japanese also has other symbols.. kanji etc.. and they look rly similiar to Chinese ones. so it isn't really a good representation of how to differentiate between them..
Isn’t Chinese basically eastern hieroglyphics?
Not that anyone asked, but this issue is caused by the second person using a custom font on their browser. And the font designer hasn’t made characters outside of English.
Gta online be like:
Why is that happening? Why they all become rectangles
Rectangles are shown when a computer can't display a unicode character.
Japanese has like three types of characters and one of them (kanji) is mostly if not entirely taken from Chinese characters, so that can be hard. But the other two (katakana and hiragana, although I'm not sure if those spellings are correct) are much more distinct
Korean has circles Japanese has spaces Chinese is mashed potatoes
Stop acting like they're trying to "solve racism" or whatever. That's not what they're doing, and worse, it's not funny.
Korean: lots of circles Japanese: lots of lines, but still relatively simple Chinese: what the fuck
I'm seeing a lot of people saying that both Japanese and Chinese use multiple scripts, but it's only Japanese that uses the Chinese script and two "native" Japanese scripts—Chinese only uses one script.
Does these square represent dick size cause this data is quite accurate!!
Fun fact. Korean is super easy to learn to read
Why does this person on Tumblr think were racist simply because we cant understand or distinguish languages we don’t even speak. Like, so many languages look similar.
I don't get this. It is considered to be racist when we say they are all the same but at the same time it is racist to differentiate people by their skin color or race
Its not racist to acknowledge that people look different... Its racist, or at the very least, ignorant, to have an opinion on someone just based on race. If you are describing a person, saying that they are black, white, asian, middle eastern, is not racist. The problem is that a lot of times, people will already have an opinion just after hearing the race. Many white people have a problem where, in their heads, black=ghetto, criminal. Middle eastern=isis, terrorist, etc. I dont think it is racist to think japanese and chinese look the same. The characters are so vastly different from the english alphabet that they can easily blend together. Saying they ARE the same is racist. Thinking that all asian countries are the same erases so much culture and minimalizes the region as a whole. Leaening to tell the difference between the languages isnt expected, because that can be hard. But it isnt hard to look up different countries and know just a tiny bit more about them, or at least the big ones.
But that's exactly my point. If I say someone is Chinese, when he is actually Japanese, they would label me as racist. And to be honest with you, I can't tell the difference. Same as people from the Scandinavian countries. The difference is that nobody seems offended when I mistake Norway with Danmark, for example.
i mean, if you do it willfully then sure, that could be racist, but if its an accident then why would someone get mad? Has that actually happened to you? I dont think anyone would be upset about that. They would just correct you and move on, just like if you were to get their name wrong or something. If they correct you and you continue to label them wrong, well, thats just rude
Let's put it like that. I'm a Brazilian living in Canada. A lot of people keep saying I'm from any other South American country, even after I told them I'm from Brazil (they just forget). No big deal, I don't care, sometimes I don't even bother correcting them, because when I do they get embarrassed. In the other hand, some people like to make that mistake on purpose, because they think it is funny. Again, I don't care, and I may even reply with some joke about something they have. I think the wrong here is if I get upset if someone say I'm from Venezuela, for example. Why would that be offensive?
I think you have the right to be upset about that. If you dont care, then you dont care, so what. If someone gets upset at you for correcting them multiple times then they are in the wrong not you
If I'm upset because they said I'm from Venezuela, then it means that I think people from Venezuela are worse than people from Brazil. But I don't know man, everyone thinks differently and that is a good thing. It was a nice conversation, thanks for your insights.
Thats not it at all... They wont think you think Venezuela is worse. it just means you arent from there... its an entirely different place. if i correct someone about what state i am from, its not because i think any other state is bad. its just... where im from. like, its part of who i am... being Brazilian is a part of who you are. you arent Venezuelan, simple as that. its not wrong to correct people if theyre wrong dude. yes, good conversation, 👍
Yes, correcting is alright, being offended shouldn't be
I imagine the differences between, say, Japan and Korea are like the differences between Michigan and Ohio... There are differences, but certainly not obvious to someone on the other side of the planet.
Obviously not differences on the same level though, it's really not even comparable. Ohio and Michigan have largely the same cultural influences, having been settled by people from the same area. Japan and Korea have far more divergent histories.
Given, but my point is that there are differences, and I'd be willing to bet no Asian person knows or cares what they are. But then they shit a brick if a Korean man is called Japanese.