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submitted 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by SilentStriker@piefed.social to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

This is evident when I show what handwritten Japanese (Kanji only without any Kana) looks like, they still mistake it for Mandarin (due them being logographic), the same applies towards google searches too, as when I type a Japanese word in Kanji (despite having the UI and browser set in Japanese or English) I still get results in Mandarin since all the websites contain the TLD .cn or .tw when I am looking for Japanese websites ending with (.jp).

If a person is clueless about distinguishing the differences between languages (especially ones that look similar when written even though they're different, kind of like when writing in French & English but they're still different languages), then they fall into the trap of "Is that French?" or vice versa for example, when in fact it's written in English. Does this word all look the "same" to you or not when telling the difference between 日本語 or 中文?.

tNzChL3Fg8nQSXN.png

You get the point, I still get comments equivalent to "is that Chinese?" when there's kana present within the sentence (which Mandarin does not have, as they write entirely in Hanzi). Some words are written the same but pronunciation is very different as they're unrelated languages. Does the same thing happen to let's say Norwegian & Danish (or any other European language) since both pairs use similar alphabets and have an identical writing system?

From Japanese or Mandarin, there are characters that look the same but have different pronunciations altogether like:

- 日本語 中文
擲弾兵 てきだんへい Zhì dàn bīng
艦隊 かんたい Jiànduì
陸軍 りくぐん Lùjūn
神社 じんじゃ Shénshè
地獄 じごく Dìyù
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[-] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 points 11 hours ago

are there also pronunciation differences for words that are spelled the same?

Through through tough thought, I can't think of any.

this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
17 points (100.0% liked)

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