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Gstamsharp t1_jd93td1 wrote

Reply to comment by imminentmailing463 in ELI5: Why do English speakers switch Japanese names to have the family name last, but not Korean names? by JorWat

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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