Learn How to Identify Any Language at a Glance With This Handy Guide
Smartphones, search engines, and translators can overcome language barriers quite easily, but what if you want to know how to do something yourself? This guide will show you all the tips and tricks you might need to identify almost any language in seconds.
A guide from linguist James Harbeck shows you how to identify just about any written language by looking for special characters, common spellings, and accents. You will learn that from French, Spanish and Italian, Spanish is the only language that uses the “ñ” symbol, and Italian has common words è (is) and e (and). You will also learn that the characters “Ô and “ã” are not appropriate for Portuguese, especially if the language is similar to Spanish. And an easy way to tell Japanese from Chinese is to look at the shape of the characters (Chinese characters are never round) and check the frequent use of the “の” character, which is not in Chinese. You can find more language identification tricks in the complete guide at the link below.