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 |
are you asking why google can not distinguish? that idk. it should be possible to discern if a text input is japanese or chinese by just looking at the characterset if it is not exclusively using the unified unicode characters.
for me, as a writing stan, it is possible to guess what language is written. the presence of kana makes it, indeed, trivialy easy. but i have learned both chinese and japanese a bit (only in writing though, lol), so that i might be lucky enough to find a character to say for sure “that’s written different in chinese”. people who don’t know anything just see complex, chinese-ish characters and say chinese. (even wit kana present) the same ignorance is at work, when western people call a farsi or urdu text arabic, or anything written in cyrillic russian.
for languages written in latin, i e.g. usually have to look twice to see if a text is danish, swedish, or norwegeian, since i never learned any of these properly, and need to find the distinctive features.