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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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You type in English because it's the only language you know.
I type in English because it's the only language you know.
我哋唔一樣 (We are not the same)
One thing I love doing is to learn to say "I don't speak " as well as possible in a language I don't speak. If you're good enough at it, people will assume it's a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don't actually know. Apparently I'm pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn't know.
Most of what I got out of a Japanese class I took was how to say that I don't understand Japanese.
Watashi wa nihonjo ga wakarimasen.
The use of watashi wa would give it away. Japanese people basically never say I at all
I don't know much Japanese, but the bits I do know suggest it's a very different language than English. Not just different sounds, but also just a different approach to expressing things. Like, I think instead of saying "I'm hungry", they just say "hungry!" Presumably though, they do use "I" when it's needed for disambiguation.
For, example, if you're with a friend and someone asks "are you guys college students?" The response would probably be something like "He is but I'm not", right?
Not as much as you might hope but yeah
As a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, sometime I can pick out Japanese words because these languages all have the same roots, so I guess some words decended from a common word in the past, but now sounds different because of geography and separation.
I remember when I watched Steins;Gate and when the word [第三次世界大戰/Dai san ji se kai tai sen/World War 3] (Cantonese would be like: Dai Saam Ci Sai Gaai Dai Zin) was uttered, I was like: Holy shit, why is it so similar to Cantonese. Like the impact of the line being devlivered actually felt more intense, I felt the emotions of the soon to be billions of fictional deaths was being described
Also: [電話/Denwa/Telephone] sounds very close to Mandarin's Dian Hua
I also remember hearing how the Japanese word "ramen" is comes from a pretty different Chinese word.
It's cool though that a tonal language like Mandarin / Cantonese is strongly related to a non-tonal one. I wonder what happened there historically.
Excuse me I am more fluent in Gibberish than I am in English
Edit:too much Gibberish, not enough English
Wabby wabby wabba wabbo wabba wa ba bop?
I can't interpret that without the manual and tonal markers
Because I'm a fairly basic Chinese (Mandarin) learner, this gave me a moment of feeling dumb before realising it's Cantonese.
xD
Mandarin has too many speakers already, so I feel like using a more obscure language like Cantonese is more "brag-worthy" 😁