2 eyes , 2 ears , 1 nose & 1 mouth...

<em>La Liseuse, you saw and heard your students in person and I think that's different than just looking at a photo. Body language and voice add a lot to pinning down the ethnicity.</em>

Definitely. There is a specific Japanese body language and set of facial and vocal mannerisms which are very distinctive: especially the particular body language of Japanese women. It's unmistakable. I don't think anyone would see a group of Japanese girls chatting in the street, for example, and mistake them for Chinese or Korean.

I managed to get 8 out of 18. But that's just like guessing. I know, sometimes there is something about a face that let's you instinctively think of one nationality. Once a Japanese friend showed me a picture of other students with whom he took a summer course. I pointed at a girl and said. "She must be Czech." Honestly, I can't say, what I found so Czech about her. It was just a hunch. She could have as well been American, German, Danish or whatever.

I once made an experiment on italki asking other users to guess my heritage, as one user believed that I was Native American (American Indian).

The guesses about my heritage were: East Asian. American Indian, Spanish speaker from Central America and a mix of Spanish and some indigenous tribe, Hawaiian, Alaskan, Filipina, Mongolian, Taiwanese Aborigine, Navajo from Arizona, Chinese, mix between Taiwanese mother and American/British father, Cambodian, Inuit, Peruvian, mix of European and Mongolian/Chinese parents, Japanese. In another thread, someone also came to the conclusion that I could be Iranian. Also, often people think that I'm Kasakh. There seems to me something very Kasakh about me.

So, even though there are sometimes faces that give us hunch, I do believe that in most cases we can't guess the ethnicity correctly just by looking at a face.

La Liseuse, you saw and heard your students in person and I think that's different than just looking at a photo. Body language and voice add a lot to pinning down the ethnicity.

Japanese have the same facial features like other East Asians. When you meet Japanese, Chinese and Korean you can often tell their nationality by the way they dress, their body language and the way they talk (I don't mean the language but if they speak quietly/noisily etc.) but I highly doubt that you can identify Japanese facial features that only Japanese have.

Try this quiz: <a href="http://alllooksame.com/app/quiz.php?tid=1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://alllooksame.com/app/quiz.php?tid=1</a>;. There you see 18 pictures of Japanese, Chinese and Korean people. How many can you identify correctly?

I tried this game also out with pictures of East Asian students of mine and showed them to my Chinese husband who was sure that he could tell Chinese, Japanese and Korean apart. He failed.

I'm of Japanese descent (but half German) and when I talk to Chinese they are in most cases 100% sure that I must be of Chinese descent. Once when I told someone that I'm German, they said "But why do you look so Chinese?" I said: "My mom's Japanese." The other person: "Oh, then your dad must be Chinese." They wouldn't believe me that I'm not Chinese at all. And it happened to me so often that Chinese are sure that I'm Chinese.

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