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Are you seriously telling me you can't hear the difference between Mandarin and Korean? Mandarin and Taiwanese I'd understand, those are hard to tell apart, but nearly every single East Asian language has SOME sort of spoken tell. It's SUPER obvious written especially if you know how to tell the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters.

Mandarin Chinese: Five-tone system. Every syllable sounds isolated. Syllables NEVER end in consonants excluding "ng".

Cantonese: Six tones. Spoken a little faster usually, syllables can end in unvoiced consonants instead of open vowels or ng.

Japanese: No tones. World's fastest-spoken language, faster than Spanish. Very low syllable inventory. No "ng" sound except for Tokyo accent slurs the "g" in the middle of words. Unique stop syllable. Listen for "desu" or "masu" (sounds like "des" and "mas") to end sentences.

Korean: Sounds like Japanese but slurred a good bit. Noticeable accent. Words end with "ng" a lot. Listen for "seumnida" to end sentences.

Filipino/Tagalog: Listen for interspersed English words, very few people EVER speak pure Tagalog these days. Tagalog sounds very sharp, with finished consonants and a lot of plosives, k, t, p. Listen for the overenunciated "w" sound.

Once you get to SEA it gets a lot harder, I'd reckon not many people can know in a double-blind test which one is Khmer and which one is Burmese. The trick for SEA is that everything has writing on it. Vietnam uses Latin alphabet with a ton of accents, Thai, Lao, and Khmer have the same writing system with lots of letters that look like lowercase N and a lot of circles. (Khmer looks a little more complex) Indonesia and Malaysia also use the Latin alphabet, but there are some letters not used in one or the other that you can usually use as tells. Malaysia tends to use Chinese characters a little more as well.


You can tell 'em apart by appearance too. This is harder to explain though. Pretty much go watch Japanese TV for a month and you will IMMEDIATELY be able to identify afterwards.