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 |


Spanish and Portuguese
German and Russian
German and Dutch a bit
Spanish is my first language and one of the most embarrassing moments of my life was asking two people if they were speaking Portuguese and they said no, Spanish.
Which would be okay because we all have different accents… But we were from the same country.
German and Russian?! Maybe to a person not at all familiar with either Germanic or Slavic languages, but they are not as closely related at the other 2 pairs.
Yeah I almost didn’t put this one because I don’t get it, but several people I know have confused them.
most people go by sound. tgere is a phenomenon that (european) portugese gets viewed as ‘some slavic language’ by laypeeps. it is just arbitrary what people will think your language is.