Can you tell Koreans/Japanese/Chinese apart?

[Angelina]

Reminds me a bit of the can-you-tell-Koreans/Japanese/Chinese people apart thing .... 

 

Hihihihihihi

 

Not so politically correct

Mod note: this thread has been split from here.

[Guest realmayo]

Not so politically correct 

 

True I guess, but I don't think it's controversial. Put 50 Swedes in one room and 50 Italians in another, I bet you could guess which room was which. Same true for Asia?

[Demonic_Duck]

True I guess, but I don't think it's controversial. Put 50 Swedes in one room and 50 Italians in another, I bet you could guess which room was which. Same true for Asia?

 

Well, yes, if you compare like for like. If it was 50 Thai people and 50 Chinese, or 50 Portuguese and 50 Spanish, it would be a different matter.

 

Demonic, I said that wearing high heels is torture, wanted to make a disclosure that I don't think that men are the source of all evil.

 

I like to think most of us here are reasonable enough not to assume your views on one particularly absurd aspect of modern fashion automatically mean you hate men.

[Guest realmayo]

Well, yes, if you compare like for like. If it was 50 Thai people and 50 Chinese,

 

I reckon that's guessable but I don't know how to put it to the test! 50 people born in Harbin and 50 people born in Guangzhou? Doable too I think.

[Lu]

Same true for Asia?

Rooms full of Japanese, Koreans or Chinese? Yes, I think you should be able to tell them apart. There used to be a test somewhere where you could see if you could tell them apart, I think it's this one. I only have difficulty telling apart Taiwanese from these three countries.

Also I'm going to make a new thread, hold on...

[Angelina]

Well, yes, if you compare like for like. If it was 50 Thai people and 50 Chinese, or 50 Portuguese and 50 Spanish, it would be a different matter.

 

I can pass for a Thai and for a Portuguese and ...

[Angelina]

[Angelina]

Can't register. I will have to go with Hispanic because I can speak Spanish. 

[Walkingtree]

See for yourself:

 

http://alllooksame.com/exam_room.php

[Shelley]

I was told years ago that Chinese women were easier to tell where they came from.

 

  I can't remember the details but it was something along the lines of girls from XXXXX have big round moon faces and girls from XXXXXX have delicate noses and so on.

 

And I think if you spent some time studying it you may well do better than random guessing at 50%.

 

I think you never will be 100% correct because you will always get the the one that doesn't fit the type.

[Guest realmayo]

Walkingtree: is that test using 50 or so people from the same country together? I remember one online test which was just individuals and it seemed that whoever put it together was trying to promote the idea that it's impossible and racist to differentiate, which is a noble sentiment but to me failed the is-it-correct test.

[Walkingtree]

Good question RealMayo - I have no idea.

 

However, I was able to get 16 of the 18 foods correct, but only correctly identified 8 of 18 people. So I'd posit that the test is tricky but not impossible.

[Guest realmayo]

Sorry, what I meant is -- because the website wanted me to register and I didn't want to -- are the people shown indivdually, or as a big group of people all from the same place? My thinking is that it's possible to distinguish in the latter case, but unlikely individually.

[Angelina]

http://mashable.com/2011/02/10/average-faces/

[Walkingtree]

So I just read through the philosophy tab on the right side of the website. I think this site is setup as more of a curiosity rather than have a political motivation.

 

For the registration it seems the curator is just taking stats - the email is optional. As for the test they are just headshots of individuals. I certainly had some hindsight bias after it was graded, some answers seemed obvious only when the answer was revealed.

[Pokarface]

<<< Guess our ethnicity from the picture =-p

[zelda4u]

I think its a bit hard to guess. For example, my dad gets mistaken as japanese even though he's chinese. Some of my friends get mistaken for chinese even though they're korean.

[Simon_CH]

As a group they are very easy to differentiate. Individually I mostly if not always guess the region right, if not the country. I might mistake someone from Indonesia to a Malay, or a Chinese with a Japanese person at times but mostly I guess it right. I think online tests can be easily manipulated to produce the results you desire (take Chinese-looking Japanese guys to make a point and so on), but in Hong Kong locals can spot a mainlander without a single word being spoken. 

 

Many Asians who haven't travelled much curiously agree with Westerners that "they all look the same" - as in they're unable to tell where someone is from, whereas I often can. 

[Lu]

Is it really racist to say that people of one country overall look different from people of another country? It's a bit racist to shove individuals into a stereotype (you have a square jaw so you must be Korean), or to add additional stereotypes to those (men with square jaws = Koreans = wifebeaters) but the phenomenon itself is just a fact, isn't it?

But you need to have seen a certain number of people from country X to get an idea of what people from country X look like as opposed to people from country Y. I can tell Koreans, Chinese and Japanese apart (to some extent) but not Peruvians and Argentinians, while someone from Paraguay can perhaps do that just fine.

[Demonic_Duck]

n Hong Kong locals can spot a mainlander without a single word being spoken.

 

That must surely be due to differences in fashion and mannerisms, though, due to the fact they're racially almost identical.