I'm so sick of people acting like all Northeast Asian languages sound the same when they CLEARLY DON'T. People who say this are just being flat-out IGNORANT and aren't paying attention to how the languages actually sound! Case in point: I had a German/Turkish friend in middle school who listened to a J-Rock song and at first thought it was Italian because she thought "Japanese sounded like 'ching chong ching.'"
Even putting aside the fact that Chinese has tons of syllables that Japanese doesn't, Chinese is a fucking TONAL LANGUAGE and Japanese ISN'T! THAT'S A HUGE MOTHERFUCKING DIFFERENCE. I don't understand why anyone would honestly have difficulty distinguishing the two???
Let me be perfectly blunt here: if someone asserted that French and German sound the same, they would be humiliated because EVERYONE knows those two languages sound completely different. And Japanese and Chinese sound JUST AS different. The only reason why this isn't publicly acknowledged is because Americans RESPECT Western European languages but DON'T respect Asian languages.
Honestly even Asians don't respect Asian languages! I've lost count of how many times my relatives have overheard me watching anime and done the stereotypical "ching chong ling long" bullshit! I had an argument with my mom about this recently, who said, "Korean, Japanese, Chinese--it really all sounds the same to my ears!" THAT'S BECAUSE YOU AREN'T REALLY LISTENING!
ASHDAKJDHAKFHKFHKDK *flips a table over*
EDIT: Just looked it up, and Chinese is apparently generally considered to be part of a different language family than Japanese and Korean, so yeah.
