To tell if the writing is Korean, check to see if the Oriental characters include little tiny circles. Japanese and Chinese don’t have them. (Japanese has a character that looks like a skinny, backwards lower-case “e”; Chinese does not.)
Apparently, we can. I live in Houston, TX, well south of the Canadian border, and I find Canadian coins in my change at least 2-3 times a year.
Backroads maple syrup deal gone bad?
Today’s the day for something more interesting… I got a Bahamian nickelin my coke machine change today.
Korean Hangul is actually fairly easy to tell from Chinese logograms, once you’ve seen examples a few times. The Hangul characters are not logograms - it is actually a small alphabet, but instead of being represented sequentially, they are grouped together into blocks of characters which represent syllables. The blocks will involve some characters being placed over the others, so at first glance the whole syllable looks like a complicated single glyph, but you will see the gaps between the characters and notice the same characters being used to make up the blocks.
If it’s a 100 won coin from South Korea, you’ll see 대힌민국 on the coin. If you’re extra curious as to what the Korean writing looks like, a great place to start is the Omniglot page on Korean writing.
Ahhhh, the old Bahamian nickel scam!
A while ago, I got an East Caribbean States quarter in my change. Same size as a Canadian quarter.
Canadian coins were the same size (and weight?) as US coins, but they have diverged. We now have dollar and two-dollar coins that don’t exist in the States; we no longer have a penny, and the existing coins are now all made of plated steel.
This resulted in a significant change in the weight of the dollar and two-dollar coins when they were switched to steel, enough that it was easily sensed when the coins were hand in the hand, and it required recalibrating all the vending machines.
I don’t think they were ever the exact same weight, except maybe the penny, but close enough to fool some vending machines when those only used size and weight. Nowadays, they use resistance or some other electrical property in addition to size and weight.
But the US does have a dollar coin and the Loonie was sized to be about the same as it (the old Susan B Anthony dollars, that is, but the current Sacagawea dollars are the same size). The Loonie is eleven-sided while the Sackie is round, so they’re not exactly the same size.
As for the Canadian penny, they may not be making them anymore, but there’s still a bunch circulating in the States. I got one in my change just a couple weeks ago.
Other than Canadian money, I very rarely get foreign coins. The only one I can think of happened a year or two ago when I got a Thai 1 baht coin (very similar in size to the dime). Wait a minute, I did get another foreign coin once, but it was while on vacation in New Zealand. I was only there for about 10 days, but still managed to get a British coin in my change. I forget the denomination but either a 5 or 10 p coin.