How can you tell whether a language is either Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese), or Korean?

7 Comments

1. Belie says:

   November 18, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   Because they look nothing alike.

   Japanese: こんにちは
   Korean: 안녕하세요
   Chinese: 你好

   In Chinese the tones give it away immediately. For Japanese and Korean it’s obvious to me because I don’t know the words of Korean, but also because Korean has a bigger variety of sounds than Japanese.

   Written it’s easy because Korean looks NOTHING like either Japanese or Chinese. I can understand confusion between Japanese and Chinese but if there is a whole sentence with only kanji characters (the intricate characters people get tattoos of) then it’s almost 100% going to be Chinese as Japanese has three writing systems and two of them are very basic looking.
2. »»»lilj««« says:

   November 18, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   I can hear a difference and see the difference in their writing
3. joe g says:

   November 18, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   those languages are very similar in how they sound but they do have distinct differences in terms of pronunciation or tongue. the only ways to tell the difference is either to study the languages or if you’re observant enough, just listening to them over time will give you an idea of how different they sound
4. Nick says:

   November 18, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   The same way you would tell if a language were english, german, hungarian, or basque…you look at the vocabulary, grammar, alphabet, and determine which of the list it most looks like.

   For example: Japanese has many Chinese characters, in addition to it’s own phonetic alphabets. Korean has it’s own distinct phonetic alphabet (and some characters). Written chinese is hard to distinguish in regard to dialect (as all dialects use the same characters), but sometimes you can tell which dialect it is by looking at the syntactical patterns in the characters. However if it is spoken chinese, you just need to listen to whether the words used are cantonese or mandarin, or any of the other dialects.
5. Brittany says:

   November 18, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   very very easily my child

   just study one of them for 3 years
   and you can tell the difference

   say you study japanese
   and you hear a japanese person speak , obviously that is familiar
   you listen to a chinese person (mandarin) obviously the phrases arent familiar

   same goes with the writing
   well because obviosuly they all look different

   hope this helps
6. dart says:

   November 18, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   Ummmmm. Different languages…they look (writing) VERY different, and they SOUND very different.

   Just as the PEOPLE have different sets of features….

   bit prejudiced are we?
7. yokucielo says:

   November 18, 2009 at 5:11 pm

   It’s easy to tell them apart in both written form and speaking.

   When you’re trying to tell them apart in written form, Korean is obviously easy. They don’t look as confusing as Japanese or Chinese since Japanese and Chinese use Kanji/Chinese character. You can sometimes see Hanja (Chinese character) in some Korean writings but that’s only when it’s necessary.

   Some people get confused telling Japanese and Chinese apart (in written form) because they both use characters, except Japanese uses Hiragana and Katakana. Chinese only use characters in their writing.

   To tell them apart when it comes to speaking, Korean has somewhat confusing pronunciations. Well, not confusing but there are many pronunciations. Chinese is completely different from Japanese and Korean when it comes to pronunciation. The "r" is more of English "r", unlike the Japanese and Korean pronunciation of "r". But this only applies to some.