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I've taken Mandarin in school for three years and I can tell you that regardless of Chinese being the 'new language of the internet', Chinese websites are like entering a whole new world. Everything from the design to ads are completely different from what you'd expect on an English site.

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Japanese pages are similarly very different from English.

I suspect many languages have different "internets" though; there's a rather strong language barrier that prevents a lot of their users from experiencing other language's styles.

"Similarly different?"

5-2 is the same difference as 9-6, so yeah.

that's actually a good point. I often visit Chinese websites and I notice that many either copies the design of whatever service they were inspired by (i.e Youku v.s Youtube) or stick to a very simple tons of links with white background style.

Although Chinese characters are significantly more complex when compared to the 26 letters in English, thus web designers had to take different considerations for readability.

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