(no subject)

[jinian]

Wow, I completely suck at this. http://www.alllooksame.com/ tests your ability to distinguish Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people on sight. Average is 7 right; I got four. Ouch. Hey, I can tell their writing apart. I read more than I talk, so surely that's the important part...

Should I be ashamed, though, is what I'm wondering. I don't actually care, so is it important that I be able to tell? I don't think all Asian people look the same. I can distinguish individuals perfectly well. I just don't know what the racial commonalities are. Interesting to learn that I'm bad at it, I suppose.

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

i grew up in a semi-segregated neighborhood onthe east coast so I'm always proud of myself when I can make ANY determination other than 'not white'. usually it helps if I have a close friend of a particular ethnicity, like, my friend who is chinese and japanese (and I've met his parents and know which one is part which) helped that way and having a native alaskan friend helped me understand more about native vs alaskan vs asian (she is actually part different tribes but there all I can do is recognize the names when she says them.)

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

(and yes, I got four as well, *cough*)

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Dead average - I got seven. shrug There were several where my first thought was "cute!" Especially #8, the guy with the long, thin face and glasses... but you can probably tell that I go for that kind of thing. ;) I think I'd have better luck with a test that evaluates ability to tell where a particular word is from. I thought the pictures were cool. :)

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

Report Card: Inversely Amazing
It's not easy to get all that wrong.

I only got 3. But I'm not surprised. I go to a school with fairly large asian population, but I've never known enough of them to form any coherent sense of what variety of asian. Apparently, I'm just plain confused.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Dunno what it shows, but I got 10 out of 18.

I find it ...

[(Anonymous)]

Really, really amusing that you're an outlier on this one, RJ.

Dunno why.


--Trinker

Re: I find it ...

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Hey, there!

FWIW, so do I.

Re: I find it ...

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I got 10 out of 18, too, but I'm an outlier in many places, not a nice, average, middle-of-the-road typical American like RJ. . . .

Re: I find it ...

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's me, alright. Just a nice, normal, midwestern kinda guy.

BTW I have this bridge I thought you might be interested in....

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

1) I wonder how many of them might have had a grandparent or two that were "something else," even someone from one of the other groups, so that there isn't a distinct type.

2) China is a huge country. Chinese people with years of ancestry from, say, Beijing don't look the same at those with years of ancestry from near the Burmese border or the extreme northwest.

3) Someone I know from elsewhere says that a bunch of her officemates took the test recently and that they scored as badly as she had—and that the officemates are all Asian.

4) I think the quiz-makers might be trying to make the point that Anglos can't tell the difference between Asians from different areas, and perhaps that we (for those of us who are Anglo) should. This is strengthened by comments I've heard from a wide variety of people suggesting that Asians can always tell the difference. But the experience of my friend mentioned in #3 suggests to me that this might not always be the case.

I took it...

[(Anonymous)]

And I found it interesting. The ones I knew I was right on, I was right on. The ones where I waffled, and tried to out-think the quiz, I blew. Not surprising. They did a good job of choosing some people who were in that category I've always called "C/J, J/K, K/C", where I'll think the look like either one of two, because it's a continuum or 3 dimensional space or something, rather than neat categories. Maybe it's a Venn diagram. Dunno.

One of the annoying things to me was that I had no way of knowing where the picture was taken, geographically. I think it would have made a difference, but maybe not. (Then again, that's more of a cultural/social differentiation rather than a facial features one.)

--Trinker

[seanmcguire.livejournal.com]

Well, it could be a problem if you, say, assumed that all Japanese folks were industrious and polite, all Chinese folks were downtrodden and clever, and all Korean folks were... um... I dunno, sex-starved puppy salespeople. Or whatever. You know, important to make sure one applies the right ridiculous stereotypes to the right people.

[jenett]

Huh. That was intriguing.

I got 9 out of 18. I seem to remember the fiance did better than that, when he mentioned doing it to me, which doesn't particularly surprise me.

I think it helped that I've had friends who were Chinese and Korean, and knew a fair number of people from various places (oddly, fewer Japanese than the other two) when in school. But I still don't know the most likely characteristics to look for - just have good instincts, maybe?

[firecat]

I got 4. Not too surprising -- I'm not very observant about people's faces. I can never even remember whether someone is wearing glasses or not. And if I were asked to distinguish among different types of Caucasian people I'm sure I would do dismally as well.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to do well on a test asking me to tell a Scot apart from a Norwegian apart from a German.

In fact, I think asking people to tell Chinese folk apart from Japanese and Korean folk is just silly, as there are so many ethnic groups within China, and it's such a massive area. It's like saying, "Which person has his entire ancestry from Wales for the past 25 generations, and which one came from anywhere else in Europe."