Current Events > Why do Americans refuse to differentiate Asian languages?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like yall can tell the difference between French and Spanish but not Chinese and Vietnamese....Vietnamese is even written in Latin yall.

SMH

Are ya Chinese or Japanese?

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Chinese isn't even a language.

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Accolon posted...

Are ya Chinese or Japanese?

lol King of the Hill bringing that point home

It's all the same thing nice try

is this a serious topic or
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You mean Mandarin tc?

SaltyWet posted...

Chinese isn't even a language.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

cute, yes Mandarin and Canto among others. They share more in common the languages like German and English and French and Spanish

Abiz_ posted...

You mean Mandarin tc?

Nope Canto, since Im from SF Bay Area b

CruelBuffalo posted...

Like yall can tell the difference between French and Spanish

You overestimate Americans.

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It's funny as a Vietnamese person that when someone points to me asian signs and asks me how asians can read them, I answer them back, "I'm in the same boat as you."

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cuttin_in_farm posted...

You overestimate Americans.

side story: Nintendo Power had a story about a Karen back in the day berating their phone support because she was adamant that the StarFox Adventures game she bought was in Spanish because of the dinosaur language. Even after explaining she refused to listen to them lol.

in the hood, martial arts, sushi and Asian languages are known as "that shit."

*takes fighting stance in a fight*
"y'all, watch out! he knows that shit!"

*eats unagi roll*
"oh, you be eating that shit?"

*says "unagi roll" when ordering instead of the number*
"look at you, showing off speaking that shit."

the Wu-Tang Clan must've went through hell before that caught on, lmao
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CruelBuffalo posted...

French and Spanish

You know there are Americans who don't know that Spain and Mexico have different rules in Spanish right?

The entire vosotros/is/is/s thing I mean.

The average American knows jack shit about other languages, especially when you consider how many don't know shit about English.

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...Because Americans tend to be particularly ignorant when it comes to other languages. Hell, they are ignorant of accents, let alone languages.
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cuttin_in_farm posted...

You overestimate Americans.

We know that there are two languages in the world... American and not American

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RickyTheBAWSE posted...

in the hood, martial arts, sushi and Asian languages are known as "that shit."

*takes fighting stance in a fight*
"y'all, watch out! he knows that shit!"

*eats unagi roll*
"oh, you be eating that shit?"

*says "unagi roll" when ordering instead of the number*
"look at you, showing off speaking that shit."

the Wu-Tang Clan must've went through hell before that caught on, lmao

Latin Americans just be like for all Asians:

https://i.imgur.com/fUv63cb.jpg

lmao
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I mean, Americans are the least intelligent 1st world citizens on the planet. Its only natural.

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CruelBuffalo posted...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

cute, yes Mandarin and Canto among others. They share more in common the languages like German and English and French and Spanish

They're related, yes, but referring to one as "the Chinese language" has some unpleasant political connotations that I would hope are obvious.

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CruelBuffalo posted...

Like yall can tell the difference between French and Spanish but not Chinese and Vietnamese....Vietnamese is even written in Latin yall.

SMH

there is a reason for that. They are very different from English and use a different alphabet


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ill recognize these chinese letters when the chinese recognizes freedom of speech smh

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CruelBuffalo posted...

Nope Canto, since Im from SF Bay Area b

How many Canto speakers does CE have?

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Actually French and Spanish have more in common than Mandarin and Cantonese. Spanish and Italian speakers can largely understand each others spoken languages. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers can't. Writing system is almost entirely the same except when writing informally which is why many assume they are the same language. Though Wikipedia offers a number of articles in written Cantonese.

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CruelBuffalo posted...

Nope Canto, since Im from SF Bay Area b

I'm in the Bay Area, and most of the people I know from China speak Mandarin.

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Also to address the topic at hand, it's easy to try to attribute this to malice, but it's really a matter of A) exposure (and I'd bet a lot more people can recognize the orthography of Asian languages than the sounds) and B) Spanish and French have phonemic inventories that are relatively similar to English, and are both other Indo-European languages, while most Asian languages have different phonemic inventories, syllable structures, or other linguistic features like tones that English, French, and Spanish lack.

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StarReaper13 posted...

You know there are Americans who don't know that Spain and Mexico have different rules in Spanish right?

The entire vosotros/is/is/s thing I mean.

The average American knows jack shit about other languages, especially when you consider how many don't know shit about English.

Mexico and other Latin American and South American Spanish-speaking countries have some differences, too, though not necessarily as prominent as the vosotros form.

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StarReaper13 posted...

The average American knows jack s*** about other languages, especially when you consider how many don't know s*** about English.

Also, this.

French and Spanish are also the most commonly offered languages in primary and secondary schools (hell, even at a lot of universities). Good luck finding high schools offering any Asian language in most of the US.

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ssjevot posted...

Actually French and Spanish have more in common than Mandarin and Cantonese. Spanish and Italian speakers can largely understand each others spoken languages. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers can't. Writing system is almost entirely the same except when writing informally which is why many assume they are the same language. Though Wikipedia offers a number of articles in written Cantonese.

If we're being this concerned over minutia, "Italian" isn't really a language. The language family is broken up into dialects, many of which make communication extremely frustrating especially if you're using something like a Sardegnian dialect in Milan. The "standard dialect" which is what most people mean when they say "Italian" is called Toscano named after the city of it's origin because that's where Dante Alighieri was from. Virtually everyone speaks the standard these days but it wasn't always so. Many places even today, especially in the north / south ends and islands are brought up learning one other dialect in addition to standard the way Irish is still taught today.

The best way I can describe it is to think of an American going to England and ordering fries and getting something very obviously not fries, then imagine that problem popped up with practically every word you knew except for the most basic ones.

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Tyranthraxus posted...

If we're being this concerned over minutia, "Italian" isn't really a language. The language family is broken up into dialects, many of which make communication extremely frustrating especially if you're using something like a Sardegnian dialect in Milan. The "standard dialect" which is what most people mean when they say "Italian" is called Toscano named after the city of it's origin because that's where Dante Alighieri was from. Virtually everyone speaks the standard these days but it wasn't always so. Many places even today, especially in the north / south ends and islands are brought up learning one other dialect in addition to standard the way Irish is still taught today.

What he posted isn't really minutia in this sense. Everyone knows what you mean when you refer to "Italian" as a language. For various political and social reasons that dialect was elevated and came to be considered the standard. This is true for most languages.

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It isn't minutia. Cantonese and Mandarin are different languages not dialects. Just read a basic Wikipedia article. This isn't they will confuse what a fry is like Americans in the UK, this is a they literally can't communicate because almost every single word sounds different.

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Sariana21 posted...

I'm in the Bay Area, and most of the people I know from China speak Mandarin.

SF is Canto.

TopKekBro posted...

there is a reason for that. They are very different from English and use a different alphabet

You realize Vietnamese uses the same alphabet as English, just with accent marks right?

The average American can barely speak english.

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SiO4 posted...

...Because Americans tend to be particularly ignorant when it comes to other languages. Hell, they are ignorant of accents, let alone languages.

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languages are hard and there are lots of them. and they're especially hard the more characters they have that look different from characters you're familiar with

this isn't just like some "average uneducated american" sort of thing either, people whose job is basically dealing with language and character sets get this wrong too. then again I think most of the unicode consortium is american so maybe you're right after all

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Geisterdrache posted...

Also to address the topic at hand, it's easy to try to attribute this to malice, but it's really a matter of A) exposure (and I'd bet a lot more people can recognize the orthography of Asian languages than the sounds) and B) Spanish and French have phonemic inventories that are relatively similar to English, and are both other Indo-European languages, while most Asian languages have different phonemic inventories, syllable structures, or other linguistic features like tones that English, French, and Spanish lack.

Geisterdrache posted...

French and Spanish are also the most commonly offered languages in primary and secondary schools (hell, even at a lot of universities). Good luck finding high schools offering any Asian language in most of the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP-IJZaY5gw

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kirbymuncher posted...

languages are hard and there are lots of them. and they're especially hard the more characters they have that look different from characters you're familiar with

this isn't just like some "average uneducated american" sort of thing either, people whose job is basically dealing with language and character sets get this wrong too. then again I think most of the unicode consortium is american so maybe you're right after all

Most people I know seem to be able to distinguish what italian, spanish, or french is when they hear it. Yet when they hear Japanese, Mandarin (dont want to get in that above), and Vietnamese or see the common written language many i know cannot tell them apart. I mean I dont speak any lick of Mandarin, Japanese but I can tell them apart. Same with French & Spanish.

How many asian languages are there? Around 2,300 if google is right. So maybe, JUST maybe it's because they're unfamiliar with all the different dialects and languages so they just generalize it as opposed to saying the wrong one and coming off even more ignorant.

If a call a Chinese person "asian", I'm accurate. If I call them Korean because I'm uneducated, I'm racist. Its simple really. Safer to use the blanket term than possibly be wrong.

With that being said; who else recognizes Russian as Asian?


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CruelBuffalo posted...

Most people I know seem to be able to distinguish what italian, spanish, or french is when they hear it. Yet when they hear Japanese, Mandarin (dont want to get in that above), and Vietnamese or see the common written language many i know cannot tell them apart.

I suspect part of why they can't tell them apart is because they don't even try. italian, french, spanish have words that sound sort of familiar sometimes so they actually listen to them and can hear differences. asian lagnauges I suspect a lot of people don't even bother listening to what it sounds like at all once they realize it's totally unfamiliar

side note but that post reminded me of this language guessing quiz https://www.languagesquad.com/ There was a better one I played years back with more different languages but this is an ok replacement

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SolidShadow3 posted...

How many asian languages are there? Around 2,300 if google is right. So maybe, JUST maybe it's because they're unfamiliar with all the different dialects and languages so they just generalize it as opposed to saying the wrong one and coming off even more ignorant.

If a call a Chinese person "asian", I'm accurate. If I call them Korean because I'm uneducated, I'm racist. Its simple really. Safer to use the blanket term than possibly be wrong.

With that being said; who else recognizes Russian as Asian?

how many of those 2300 are commonly spoken in United States. San Jose is 10% Vietnamese, yet many that live there cannot distinguish Vietnamese from Mandarin.

kirbymuncher posted...

I suspect part of why they can't tell them apart is because they don't even try. italian, french, spanish have words that sound sort of familiar sometimes so they actually listen to them and can hear differences. asian lagnauges I suspect a lot of people don't even bother listening to what it sounds like at all once they realize it's totally unfamiliar

side note but that post reminded me of this language guessing quiz https://www.languagesquad.com/ There was a better one I played years back with more different languages but this is an ok replacement

cool game; the Scandinavian languages were the only ones tripping me up

CruelBuffalo posted...

how many of those 2300 are commonly spoken in United States. San Jose is 10% Vietnamese, yet many that live there cannot distinguish Vietnamese from Mandarin.

You brought San Jose into this, so Imma run with that.

Whats the education system like there? I imagine it's about as good as the rest of the state which is.. not good. maybe that's why?

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@CruelBuffalo Is there a reason youre ignoring my posts itt

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You could try to you know, educate us if you know the difference......

As for why its there, being able to differentiate languages tends to be thanks to the culture you hang around. With the influx of Latinos into our population it goes without saying we are around Spanish speaking people often, and pick up their dialect even if we don't fully understand.

There isnt a huge influx of Asians speaking an Asian language so it goes without saying many are not use to the dialect.

I for example can pick up Japanese dialect and some sentences, but only because since middle school I grew up on subbed Naruto and Bleach. Its kinda ingrained into me. I wouldnt expect the rest of my family to pick it up though.

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The average American can't even tell the difference between a Japanese person and a Chinese person.

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CruelBuffalo posted...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

cute, yes Mandarin and Canto among others. They share more in common the languages like German and English and French and Spanish

Chinese, also known as Sinitic,[a] is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local language varieties that are not mutually intelligible. The differences are greater than within the Romance languages,

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europeans are the same
it's annoying

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Geisterdrache posted...

@CruelBuffalo Is there a reason youre ignoring my posts itt

my post about San Jose addresses your post. Couldnt quote since you double
quoted and Im on mobile