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imminentmailing463 t1_jd8xdzq wrote

Korean names often do get swapped. The footballer Park Ji-Sung was very often referred to as Ji-Sung Park. Same is true of several other Korean footballers. Son Heung-Min is a current example. Often talked about as if Son is his given name, or referred to as Heung-Min Son.

Also, possibly part of that reason Korean names may get switched less is because we aren't even aware of the family/given name order. To use your example, I'd imagine plenty of English speakers think 'Bong' is his given name and 'Joon-ho' his family name.

Whereas I think we have a little more cultural familiarity with japanese names, so we recognise certain names as family and certain ones as given names, and switch them to be the order we recognise.

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Gstamsharp t1_jd93td1 wrote

That last bit sounds very plausible. Since the end of WWII we've had a very close relationship with Japan with a ton of cultural exchange. Americans are just more familiar with both Japanese naming customs and the sound of which names are given vs familial.

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Lraejones t1_jd9amgc wrote

Can confirm, I communicate via email with people from all over the world for work and typically use first/given name in the email salutation. Japanese names are easy to recognize first and last, as are the more common Korean last names like Park or Kim. Vietnamese on the other hand is often tough for me to discern first name. There's no typical convention by country in terms of name order in email addresses. It seems to be based on whether the company is more traditional/formal or not.

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Gstamsharp t1_jd9ie9a wrote

>Vietnamese on the other hand

Oh, that's easy. It's whichever name isn't Nguyen.

An exaggeration, of course, but it is true a whopping 40% of the time.

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Exist50 t1_jd9vzdx wrote

> Americans are just more familiar with both Japanese naming customs and the sound of which names are given vs familial.

Tbh, I don't think it's common knowledge for Americans either. Not rare knowledge, perhaps, but I'd be surprised if that was true for the majority.

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mr_ji t1_jda50m9 wrote

Helps that the list of common Japanese names is fairly short.

Then when you learn Japanese and realize it's mostly mixing and matching a few common things like season, weather, common descriptive adjectives, and child/girl/boy at end, it becomes really easy to recognize.

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jdl_uk t1_jd9iwma wrote

Zhou Guanyu (Chinese driver) had problems when he first joined F1 as nobody knew how to say his name properly and the software that generated the graphics for TV always did it wrong (it treated "Zhou" as his given name).

Took a while for them to sort that out

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TanaDragon t1_jd9r7gw wrote

Good example because I don’t think they ever had that problem with Yuki Tsunoda. But then again F1 is a lot more familiar with Japan than China.

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jdl_uk t1_jda2tev wrote

I think because he (Yuki) reversed his name so it was in the western fashion, as other Japanese drivers have in the past.

This may be less to do with F1 being familiar with Japan, and more to do with Japan being familiar with F1 and other western influences

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