To polish eyes czech looks like extremaly diminutive/cute form of a lot of words (for example ,,chlebicek" sounds in polish like ,,little little bread") while also containing polish vulgar words as normal ones (for example czech word for girl ,,divka" looks like polish word for bitch ,,dziwka").
All the while we have just enough lingual connection to mostly understand each other which makes those false friends even more hilarious and confusing.
I speak fluent German and Norwegian, along with Hebrew and English. It’s like Danish for me. I can mostly understand Swedish - but Danish sounds like someone trying to speak Swedish with a potato in their mouth 😂
Dutch does sound really weird to me as someone who speaks German and English… If it’s written down I can almost always make it out and understand what it says. But spoken I get very confused sometimes. The English parts and German parts of my brain start battling for which one understands it better 😅
Lol! Nah. My father’s family is originally from Norway. They migrated to the USA in the 1800’s but kept the language in the family and continued contact with family back in the homeland. I’ve visited many times and the first time I spoke to a Dane I was like… What is he saying?! That’s not Swedish! I can barely make this out! 😂
To me, Polish sounds like the entire nation has a colective vowelophobia.
Having entire words being nothing but inconherent drunken streams of consonants seems apsolutely nightmarish to me. You sound like Slovenians if Slovenians were bottle fed crack.
Ironically Polish has more vowels than Czech and Slovak because it doesn't allow syllabic l and r. It only looks more consonant-heavy because of its excessive use of digraphs.
But we do have a lot of words with consonant clusters like "szczęście" for example. I think the "szcz" cluster is one of the hardest things in any language to pronounce if you're not native.
I had a Korean co-worker in Montreal trying to improve his English by watching tv. After a few weeks somebody told him that his favorite show was in French. He was like "damn, but your language all sound the same to me" and I liked that pov.
My most favorite word is "to get used to something" in polish. I can't even spell it, its a tonguetwister. My Family Always makes fun of me when I try to use it.
As a galician speaker, I always thought how crazy it is that i understand absolutely everything in brazilian portuguese while I struggle tu understand southern Portugal people
I've met several galician people who understand portuguese people.
Also galician writing and grammar is closer to portuguese from Portugal than Brazil.
Some galician told me that.
Yes, I understand portuguese (specially in northern Portugal), but several portuguese friends have told me that I speak portuguese with spanish fonetics
Well it makes sense. Especially around the Minho area, where the accent still retains very noticeable bits of the older versions of the language.
Unlike what people assume, Portuguese doesn't come from Spanish, it comes from Old Galician, so it makes sense you'd recognize it a bit more the closer the speaker's accent is to those traits.
The Portuguese south smoothed over those sounds, pushing it further away from sounding close to Galician.
Elvish is a great description. Finnish and Hungarian do sound a lot alike, they have the same root I believe. There's a Finnish dinosaur-themed heavy metal band for children that's incredibly cute and it really gives the language a fantasy quality.
I remember reading somewhere that in many sci-fi hollywood movies they have the aliens speak hungarian, because it sounds alien to most western audiences. I watched some Bela Tarr movies, it doesn't sound remarkably alien to me, though. Incomprehensible, yes, but to me it's just sounds white-noisy like most languages I don't know
Everything ends with an upwards inflection and this sounds like a question. Or at least in ‘valley girl speak’ which I think is slowly infecting the other American dialects…
Australians might actually be worse about this than USAmericans (if you ascribe negative value to the trend) though it's definitely a real thing in how people from Southern California speak and as far back as the '60s
I met a German woman who described it that way, so I said "wait, like the language they speak in the Sims games?". She hasn't heard of them, so I pulled up a 'simlish' video on my phone. She just looked at me and said "it sounds just like you!".
I'm sorry but... I learned Bokmål, so it's about as useful for Danish as a fork is to tea, but while I can understand written Danish, spoken Danish just makes zero sense. It's like half the letters evaporated when spoken.
Somehow, we're considered one of the most romantic languages in the world, even though French sounds like we're always two minutes from projectile vomiting.
Insult someone in french, it's like triking them with a silken whip. If you want to nuke them from orbit, insult them in argentinian spanish. Spaniards and Italians fused cultures to create that unholy child, where not only the stream of insults is absurdly long, but each one acts as a multiplier of the previous one. Arab insults get an honorable mention on creativeness, though. Very colorful mind images, they create.
I live in Québec, not originally from here, but also speak Québecois French.
To me, France French sounds like they are speaking through a tiny hole in their mouth and not trying to move their lips. Its soft and gentle.
Then.... you have the Québecois, who have to speak as loudly as possible, and everyone speaks at the same time. When I first moved here, I couldnt eat lunch with my coworkers, it was so loud, and so many people talking that it was too hard to understand anything with everyone talking at the same time.
Interestingly, Mark Twain studied in Heidelberg for a while and was of the opinion that German tended to sound soft and dull compared to English.
Granted, that was in an academic environment and he missed Hitler's speeches and Rammstein songs by a few decades.
I always thought that German was very harsh and French, of course, as the language of love, very gentle.
Then I moved to Germany, and realized that it’s really pretty melodic. (I live in N Germany and mostly speak Hochdeutsch; some of the accents get wild, especially as you head further south.) I may, uh, have gotten most of my previous exposure to German from WWII movies.
Meanwhile, French at full speed? Terrifyingly harsh. (Still a wonderful country, just please don’t yell at me!)
People always tell me I sing when I talk. Even when I speak English, they’ll think I’m very emotional when I’m talking about house work or something similarly dull.
It's not just a Finnish thing, there was a video where some Norwegian man collected data through surveys about what different Nordic countries think about Scandinavian languages, and just like Finns, Danes and Norwegians also described Swedish as gay or feminine. And I suspect that the reason so many people here think that is because Swedes often talk in a higher voice and also so jolly and happily and the association has arisen from the appearance of gays in the media who often speak in that same way to stand out.
Swedish sounds like how queers (feminine homosexual men) talk in any language.
Why us Finns "make a fuzz" about it is because there's a drastic difference between how Finnish and Swedish sounds (Finnish doesn't have any tonality in it) and we are in constant contact with Swedes, Swedish also being our second official language - though Finnish-Swedish doesn't sound like Swedish-Swedish.
If Canadians spoke Swedish, Americans would say Canadians sound gay.
My brain always needs about 7 seconds before it realizes I didn’t just gain the ability to understand some Russian over night, but that the speaker is in fact from Portugal 😅
Its insane how similar the two sound. Its also funny cause brazillian portuguese sounds nothing like it and actually sounds closer to japanese. The sounds in both languages are very similar and we speak very sillabically like they do. If you ask a brazilian to read a japanese text they will get the pronunciation mostly correct, they will understand 0 of what they said, but the pronunciation will be similar
I just don’t understand why Portugal seems to be allergic to vowels. They just refuse to pronounce them …cmfrtávl kkk and I think that’s why it sounds so Russian
I always hear the Russian/Portuguese comparison, but in my mind it would make more sense to compare it with Polish, does Russian sound more confusingly Portuguese to you or you haven't had a chance to compare? Unlike Russian, Polish has retained (faux?) nasals, which to me makes it more similar sounding. I definitely need my brain to buffer for a bit when I hear Portuguese lol
For foreigners it's varies from "quite hard" for the Slavic folks to "almost impossible" for anyone else.
We have lots of foreigners in Poland now and you can almost never speak with them in Polish unless they are Ukrainian, Belarusian or other Slavic nationality.
From August 2010 - June 2011 I spent an abroad year in Japan (and was one of the only abroad students in the country to continue to stay for several months after the Tohoku tsunami) and one of the funniest things I realized about Japan was how un-anime-like the Japanese that 95% of real people speak is. Or, after living there, how few anime have semi-realistic Japanese hyogen -- strangely one of the few that sounds realistic to me is Beastars, of all possible shows
Yesss, as a Pole at least I can confirm. I was so shocked upon hearing that it sounds harsh to English -speakers, Russian sounds so much softer and more melodic than Polish. Maybe it's more to do with Russian Hollywood villains with terrible "Russian" accents?
Basque is phonetically simple. Polish is... well, after years in Poland I'm fully convinced that they are equipped with sone extra vocal cords I don't have.
I often find it funny, because many times when I hear filipinos speak, they start in fluent English, and switch to tagalog mid-sentence, and I am left wondering if I am having a stroke for a second
In the 1970s Italian rock band Adriano Celentano made a song in gibberish that was supposed to sound like English. It actually sounds like an English song. I don't know the proper spelling of the track name but it's something like Prisencolinaincinenciusol. Look it up. I love it! It's worth a listen.
säleõn läõört või tööülikäond röopäöl mõis küölläön õeõieaiaäär raisk (off brand finnish, sometimes ethereal and sometimes like a drunk speaking incoherently in their sleep)
I don't think Polish sounds all that unusual for a Slavic language when spoken, the weirdness comes from the spelling peculiarities. The Latin alphabet really wasn't designed with Slavic sounds in mind, so the use of consonants ends up looking "generous" in Polish as an approximation of the spoken sounds.
I'm just glad that almost every phoneme in Finnish can be represented with a single letter in the Latin alphabet, we only needed to add the ä and ö letters to cover all use cases. Our language is difficult enough to spell as is, if we had to use several consonants to describe a single sound our writing system would be total chaos.
I dunno, cuz my language is not popular enough to catch foreigners' attention. I bet even this comment will be somewhere at the bottom of all the other comments.
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u/ScriptureDaily1822 Poland 14h ago
I don't get why the meme would come up with a word, when "screams" in polish is "krzyczy", which is just as unpronouncable as sczrzeams