I have a challenge, can you distinguish which character set/s belongs to Japanese & Mandarin?

There are of course differences between Kanji / Hanzi but the "difficult" part is knowing which language is which simply by glancing (unless you know either 日本語 or 中文 that is).

In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two "alphabetical" languages based on their spelling?

no

In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two "alphabetical" languages based on their spelling?

Yes.

Idiot (English)
Idiot (m) Idiote (f, French)
Idiot (m) Idiotin (f, German)

Pretty sure weeb is the same in all languages

No because it is too small and my eyes aren't that good anymore :)

First one is weird, therefore Chinese.

1. CN/JP aren't alphabets.(excepting hiragana and katakana) they're a logographic language, much like the Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

2. JP's kanji stole something like 95% of its characters from CN. the only real way to tell at a glance if a sentence is JP or CN is by looking for hiragana or katakana in the sentence, as JP usually has a few of them per sentence, while CN does not.

hope this helps your linguistic endeavours! :)

I can tell, but that's because I can read both. Someone who's never learnt either language probably can't tell the difference between the sinographs, but could distinguish the language based on presence of hiragana, which are distinctly rounder and less dense

The kana aren't alphabets either. They're syllabaries. The closest they get to alphabetic are the characters that represent the single vowel sounds, A, I, O, E, U... aaand N for some reason, but those are very restricted in how and where they're allowed to be used.

I wanna say 1 is japanese and 2 is chinese, based purely on which seems more complex and swishy.

But Egyptian Hieroglyphs aren't a logographic system. They have logographic elements as well as alphabetic, syllabic and ideographic.

As someone who cannot read either language, I normally go by the rule of thumb that if it has a lot of curves it is probably Japanese, otherwise I assume it is Chinese. If we can throw Korean into the mix then I just need to see one circle and that's how I determine if it is or not. It's not a perfect system, but I would surmise that I can guess the language well above half of the time.

Also aren't the characters for Chinese shared across all spoken versions, if so, why did you specify Mandarin instead of just saying Chinese?

it's a list of characters (from left to right: japanese forms and traditional chinese forms). i can't tell fot all characters but it seems to be true for those i know. (?)

i don't speak any of these languages but i dabbled with learning to write ..

plus: sinojapanese characters often have distinct forms from their siblings in simplified or traditional japanese. so it's possible to tell which is which without the presence of kana

I'm leaning towards the first one being Japanese and the second is Chinese.

Just based on hunch, I have no experience with either.

On these charts, no idea.

In real texts, it's not that hard because Japanese text usually has kana in it. I can't read kana, but I can recognize some of them as being kana, even if I don't know what syllables they represent.

Yes, also a lot of words ending in -tion exist in German, English, and French (though in German they are capitalized because they are nouns). For example "information" or "nation".

If near identical counts too, it's even easier because most of these same words exist in Italian with the ending -zione, Spanish with -ción, etc.

huh, the more you know.

I've always called them alphabets because of their phentic similarity to abcde/etc as each character represents one sound.

I can tell the difference, at least with simplified hanzi vs kanji, most of the time. When I was in Japanese language school, a lot of Chinese students would end up with small mistakes in Japanese as there are some other fairly minor writing differences. I can't remember if it was that Japan was more strict or the writing was taught slightly differently.

Across language, there are some fun coincidences in completely unrelated languages that have words that mean (nearly) the same thing with (nearly) the same spelling, though of course I can't conjure one from the depths of my not-yet-awake brain; I'm sure wikipedia or something. I think 'Interlingual homograph' is the term related to those. I still like Japanese letter (手紙 lit. hand paper) -> Chinese toilet paper and other fun ones in non-alphabetical scripts.

Alphabets are finer grained. Every alphabetic letter is either a consonant or vowel. Sometimes a letter can be one or the other depending on the specific language and context, but nonetheless, consonant or vowel.

Syllabaries pack two or more of these into a single character. Most of the kana are consonant-vowel pairings, with the exception of the six I mentioned previously, and as a result you can end up with a lot more symbols than a pure alphabet would need.

You can also go the other way into abjads, which generally only write consonants. Vowels take the form of optional marks on those consonants. Hebrew and Arabic are the best known examples of these. And you'd be less inaccurate to call those alphabets to be fair.

In Hong Kong, Macau (both speak majorly Cantonese), and Taiwan (mostly speaking their own flavour of Mandarin, Hokkien, and a few other ones too depending on where you are), they use traditional Chinese characters while the mainland PRC (huge pot of all sorts of dialects and other bits, but Mandarin is the standard language) is simplified, and somebody who knows one is not always able to read the other.

Worth noting that while something like 95% taken from Chinese it was taken from traditional Chinese and then underwent it's own simplification process independently from Chinese. This leads to a lot of subtle and sometimes huge differences between some related kanji and hanzi.

That's why it was so confusing!