Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
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Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#2This is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?
Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#3This is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?
Pardon?
Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#4This is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?
If the text contains only plain, boring letters and you see the word "the" being used a few times... you're looking at a text in English.
Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#5Additional bonus: Korean uses lots of basic angles, squares, and lines and many Hangul have "three parts" eg. 한국어의 It's a beautifully simple writing system.
You can go quite a long comment chain in Japanese without seeing の. I always tell people "look for lots of simple characters that can be written with only 2 or 3 lines mixed in between a bunch of really complex characters".
来週は学校に行きません
Except with names, Japanese writing will have a bunch of Chinese characters with many "simple" Japanese characters sprinkled in between. To someone who doesn't read Japanese, both are "unintelligible" but I find people can identify the more complex Kanji from the more simple Kana quite easily and can point them out with pretty good accuracy, even if they can't read any of the kana.
The above example without Japanese characters if you'd like to see if you guessed correctly:
来週学校行Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#6I try doing this a lot when listening to people on the street and think I'm pretty good at it... Of course, I never truly know unless I ask!
Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#7This is all very helpful, but how do you spot English?
"our", "re", and "ise" (unless it's English from Oxford)
Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#8Additional bonus: Korean uses lots of basic angles, squares, and lines and many Hangul have "three parts" eg. 한국어의 It's a beautifully simple writing system. You can go quite a long comment chain in Japanese without seeing の. I always tell people "look for lots of simple characters that can be written with only 2 or 3 lines mixed in between a bunch of really complex characters". 来週は学校に行きません For those who don't know Ja…
Twist: When you see a pair of complex-looking Chinese character strings, but if one of them looks somewhat "simpler", then chances are that it's Chinese and the other is Japanese. Because Mainland Chinese people use simplified characters.
Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#9Wikipedia has a more elaborate and detailed guide to this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition...
but this article's approach is actually pretty handy and its tips are very practical.
Re: Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a Glance
#10Additional bonus: Korean uses lots of basic angles, squares, and lines and many Hangul have "three parts" eg. 한국어의 It's a beautifully simple writing system. You can go quite a long comment chain in Japanese without seeing の. I always tell people "look for lots of simple characters that can be written with only 2 or 3 lines mixed in between a bunch of really complex characters". 来週は学校に行きません For those who don't know Ja…
Being in Japan is always a bizarre experience as a student of Chinese. I can perfectly understand a number of signs and get the gist of a surprising amount of other written language despite not understanding a word of it spoken aloud.