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?.
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 |
Others have answered the question regarding other languages being mistaken for each other by non-speakers (of course this happens). Just wanted to add that Google has had a problem discerning Japanese and Chinese for the longest time and it drives me nuts. This is something a computer should easily be able to distinguish— we’re not talking about human recognition, we’re using an entirely different block of Unicode!
The most infuriating was when Google Maps’s text-to-speech insisted on using the mandarin pronunciation for kanji when navigating IN JAPAN. I’m glad it no longer does that, but at the expense of still not using Japanese… if you have your phone set to English, now it’ll use only the English that appears in road signs, and pronounce the words according to English phonics rules. Not as bad, but still… why? Why not just allow Japanese pronunciation of place names while in Japan? Why must my desire to hear “turn right” also come with having Kinkakuji pronounced “kihnkeighkuhji”?