People confusing Japanese and Chinese.

Chagen

Why do they do this? I hear people make fun of Japanese....except they sound like Chinese.

Come on. From what I can remember, Chinese is an isolating (one of the most isolating languages, by the way--most words in it are monosyballic) language, had modal particles, and doesn't conjugate verbs in the slightest. Japanese is an agglunitative (do note that agglunitative and isolating languages are direct opposites of each other) language that does conjugate verbs (though not by much).

Their phonologies are completely different, as well. And this was from memory and a quick search through Wikipedia. How can be people be this ignorant?

- Чагэн (Judging from a Wikipedia run, this should be the closest approximate of "Chagen) in the Russian variant of Cryllic. It may be off, though)

Bob

People are stupid.

You guys act like this is something new.

Forzare

I don't think the average person has actually listened to that much japanese or Chinese in their lives.

glennmagusharvey

^ You mean the average American person.

And yes, this does bug me too.

Forzare

Yeah, that's what I meant.

DYRE

Because both are Far Eastern languages, therefore they are the same.  Presumably, the Korean language and the Vietnamese language would get similar treatment, but... I'm not even sure if a lot of people know those languages exist...

That said, having to use technical descriptions like you did to tell why the two languages are different, doesn't really make it seem very convincing.

GLORIOUSLeader

GuitarBizarre

> How can be people be this ignorant?

Ahahaha. ha.

Forzare

"Чагэн (Judging from a Wikipedia run, this should be the closest approximate of "Chagen) in the Russian variant of Cryllic. It may be off, though)"

Why?

DYRE

Because Chuggles gonna Chug

glennmagusharvey

Because Russian is awesome.

Also, Vietnamese is written using Roman characters (albeit heavily adorned with marks, like Polish) and Korean has circles.  On the other hand, kanji in Japanese literally are Chinese characters, while katakana and hiragana look like pieces of Chinese characters.

CommandoDude

Anyone who listened to a few sentences of chinese and japanese could tell they weren't the same.

Unfortunately, most Americans will never hear even that amount. Anything and everything with dubbed language will be watched in their native tongue then in foreign. And anything without a dub won't be watched at all.

glennmagusharvey

^ Only if you were told that you were hearing two different languages, or if you were bored enough to pay attention.

If you hear overdubbed translations, or don't encounter the language frequently enough, you might pretty easily confuse Chinese and Korean, and possibly also Japanese.

┻━┻ ︵ ヽ(`Д´）╯︵ ┻━┻

I haven't seen anyone confuse them sound-wise aside from in YT comments which might as well be considered things that don't exist anyway, but i've seen plenty of Westerners not being able to tell the difference when it is written unless no kanji is used. I don't really blame them in that case, unless they actually are doing something like taking Japanese classes or whatever.

DYRE

^^^^ I'm pretty sure Chagen was talking about spoken Chinese/Japanese.  Otherwise, yeah I'd agree with you.

CommandoDude

^^^ You might not be able to say which language is which. But if you listened to sentences of japanese and chinese back to back you could definitely tell they're different.

Japanese is a very smooth language. Chinese is very choppy.

ninjaclown

^Not mandarin. Chinese is actually two languages, you know.

glennmagusharvey

No, it depends on the dialect.  Cantonese is choppy and clear while Mandarin is smoother than Japanese.

^^ No, it's one language with many (far more than two) dialects.

Gelzo

The distinctions between languages and dialects aren't very precise. You could make a fair case for either being true, IIRC.

ninjaclown

Point is, Chinese is not necessarily choppy.

glennmagusharvey

The writing system is consistent.  At least, for those who pronounce the written words.  (Some dialects, such as Cantonese, customarily use words that are not normally written, in speech.  There are writeable characters for these speech words but they are not used in normal writing.)

snowfoxofdeath

I told someone I was Chinese and they said, "Oh! Sugoi! I speak Chinese and Japanese too, I learned them from anime!" I was like "wut" and they explained that Chinese is Japanese in a "rougher" tone and Japan made it better. I was pissed.

The Mandarin speaking people see the Cantonese speakers as rednecks, and I think Cantonese sounds smoother because I'm more used to it. 

And yes, dialects vary by a lot. As far as Cantonese goes, I think the Hong Kong dialect accent whatever it is because I get mixed up sounds the most smooth (then again, probably because I'm used to it).

DonZabu

I don't know how anybody could get the two languages mixed up when one has tones and the other one doesn't.

Japanese and Korean/Chinese and Vietnamese, however, is more understandable. Even I can't tell which one is which half the time.

glennmagusharvey

^^ You mean the Hong Kong accent in Cantonese. :P (difference between accent/dialect, i think at least)

^ Noticing that Chinese has tones but Japanese doesn't is not easy; you'd have to listen to a lot of syllables and pay close attention.

ninjaclown

"You'd have to listen to a lot of syllables and pay close attention."

Therein lies the problem, who would?