We all speak the same language in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Except the norwegians can't spell it and the danes can't pronounce it.

@Wiiezner

4 жыл бұрын

Du er da en fjollet type, Hva? ;)

@andreeadobre3190

4 жыл бұрын

Looool 😂

@adelheidbreidvik

4 жыл бұрын

Well, the Norwegian thing is deffenetly true, we can’t even agree with each other how to spell basic words. Like why do we, a contry of only 5.3 million people need to ways of writting??????

@airdragon4203

4 жыл бұрын

loveley because some of us want to write proper Norwegian (nynorsk) and some of us want to write danish (bokmål)

@angeljamais8541

4 жыл бұрын

ROTFLMAO!!!

I'm Polish and when I hear someone speaking Russian, it sounds like I'm listening to a Polish person that has sustained some sort of a traumatic brain injury.

@jodinha4225

4 жыл бұрын

Malleus Maleficarum that’s basically correct

@agnesstrzykowska4300

4 жыл бұрын

Oh, really? Czech people have great fun listening to Polish, Poles make jokes about the Czech language, Slovak and Polish are often confused, the Czech and the Slovak sometimes have hard times to understand each other despite the history of belonging to Czechoslovakia for many years, Russian had been taught in schools in all communistic countries, so most of the Chech, the Slovaks and the Poles can communicate with one another...at least the intelligent ones.

@Pilum1000

4 жыл бұрын

I'am Russian and when i listen you (personally), your sounds like as a parrot which was choked a hot potato... and and convulsively trying to get rid of it...

@malleusmaleficarum6004

4 жыл бұрын

@@Pilum1000 That sounds like a problem(a personal one), maybe you should talk to your doctor about that the next time you see him, because I could not care less.

@Pilum1000

4 жыл бұрын

@@malleusmaleficarum6004 You could not care less because you drunk neuroleptics regularity.

I find a similar triangle happens where Portuguese speakers can easily understand Spanish, Spanish speakers can easily understand Italian, and Italian speakers can easily understand Portuguese. Never knew why this was the case where my portuguese and italian grandmothers would have quasi fluent conversations in their native languages without skipping a beat

@asligaletto8196

2 жыл бұрын

Italians actually understand more Spanish than Portuguese.

@mattonellascheggiata9302

2 жыл бұрын

I can't understand Portuguese at all. It's like russian to me. Even the writing is very difficult to me. I can understand pretty well Spanish, but only the writing. About listening, I can understand it if it is spoken slowly and without a thick accent, but I can do a conversation. About french... Ah, the pain. The writing is like super easy, I can understand everything, but the listening wtf, they just make sounds to me. Romanian is another level of unintelligible

@SleepingTurtle1

2 жыл бұрын

I find (European) Portuguese easier to read, but Italian easier to understand when spoken. Brazilian Portuguese I can understand written or spoken, but that's because my Spanish is Latin, and I'm more familiar with Brazilian Portuguese.

@Flometis

2 жыл бұрын

Portuguese-Italian communication is easier if the Italian speaker is from the South, were certain sounds are similar to the European Portuguese ones. When I was an Erasmus in Lisbon, my brother came to visit and he couldn't speak a single word of Portuguese, but he communicated easily with old people sitting at cafés thanks to his knowledge of a Southern Italian dialect. That would have been harder from someone coming from the North. Same for me: when I first got to Portugal, I had already taken classes for more than a year. The friend who was with me was waaay better than me at speaking, but he hardly understood the thick Portuguese accents. That was less of a problem for me.

@rhythmicmusicswap4173

2 жыл бұрын

Italian hardly can understand easily protguese, Spanish is, way easier for us, and sometimes French, especially for the North West Italian people, considering our dialect was influenced by the French

My parents grew up in a rural area of Guangzhou and I grew up speaking rural Cantonese. Whenever I hear Thai or Vietnamese, I feel like I'm listening to rural Cantonese except that it's gibberish

@thisisjeffwong

2 жыл бұрын

I think there are more Sino-Korean words that are similar to Cantonese than Sino-Vietnamese words that sound like Cantonese. The Vietnamese really took the nasal sounds and ran with it though. Wish I could understand.

@japanpanda2179

2 жыл бұрын

Isn't there a theory that relatives of the Thais and Laos, at the time called the Yue people, were the ones in South China before China owned it?

@JackLuong

2 жыл бұрын

@@japanpanda2179 It was Vietnam. Yue = Viet

@japanpanda2179

2 жыл бұрын

@@JackLuong Just because the Viets were named after the Yue doesn't mean they're the same. The main non-Chinese people that live in South China now are Zhuang, related to Thai-Lao.

@MeMe-tw4xb

2 жыл бұрын

I’m Vietnamese and I feel the exact same about Cantonese and Thai LOL 😂 it always sound like very specific Vietnamese accents (not the city one I grew up hearing) but gibberish lol

Asymetric intelligebility: people from Liverpool think they speak english.

@kawaiidere1023

3 жыл бұрын

Symmetrical intelligibility: nobody speaks English correctly

@666Blush

3 жыл бұрын

@@kawaiidere1023 except for the British 💀💀

@thekathal

3 жыл бұрын

@@666Blush funnily enough, it’s theorised that the standard american accent (the generic one) is actually the most historically accurate way of speaking english, if you take out any slang

@666Blush

3 жыл бұрын

@@thekathal yeah, I’ve heard that before too, however since British is the language founded in Britain, when the British public speaking standard changes so does the standard overall, the way we used to speak is the way southern Americans sound now well closest too, but that’s not the way British people sound now and so it’s not the standard.

@thekathal

3 жыл бұрын

@@666Blush yeah, I suppose as a British person I should’ve known as much lol

I'm English, and when I went to Germany (knowing no German) some Germans found it easier to understand me if I spoke in an American accent

@klaseniusproductions7591

4 жыл бұрын

probably because of american tv/movies/songs

@googane7755

4 жыл бұрын

Americans generally speak English more clearer than say other strong accents like scottish or irish + exposure helps too.

@mats7492

4 жыл бұрын

as a german, understanding the english is sometimes hard indeed. its already quite difficult in south london, dont get me started on the scouse and geordies... almost impossible..

@DawnchaserTheAdventurer

4 жыл бұрын

which american accent? Were you emulating the Californian or Pacific Northwest Accent? Or going more Joe Pesci with a New Yorker accent? cause when the Georgian government was/is hiring volunteer English teachers, like, 80% of the Americans in my volunteer group were from the west coast, cause we have milder regional accents than the heavy southern and Nor'east accents

@notdaveschannel9843

4 жыл бұрын

@@mats7492 Did you mention south London as specifically more difficult than other parts of London or just because you happen to live there? I'm curious because I lived in London for years and never got an ear for any specific differences in accent between different parts.

Oh cool, as a swiss-german I know this well, every swiss-german understands german but barely any german understands swiss-german.

@gregor-samsa

2 жыл бұрын

that's true except for about 5 Million people living in Baden (Western part and Baden-Wuerttemberg the Bundesland in the southern to the west of bavaria) in the border to France. The problem with Swizz German is - it us almost never written down.

@JenniferKGraf

2 жыл бұрын

Tut mir ja auch leid😭 wenn ich mir Videos angucke frag ich mich immer warum man für alles andere Wörter braucht🤣 und überall ein -le ranhängt! (Bitte mit Humor nehmen!)

@ak5659

Жыл бұрын

My cousin lived in Vienna for about 20 years before transferring to Switzerland. When she arrived she called her boss to complain, "You told me you were tranferring me to a German speaking area! There's no German here!"

When I was in language school in Spain, a classmate of mine was Italian. He used to turn up to class completely disheveled and sometimes still drunk from the night before and often fell asleep in the last row. Turns out, you can apparently get extra vacation days in Italy if you use them for educational purposes. So he booked a language course for Spanish where he pretty much understood everything from the get go and spent the three weeks partying and sleeping on the beach. Still aced the final exam though.

@felicepompa1702

2 жыл бұрын

Even normally us italians have around 4 months of vacation each school year, 3 in the summer and the rest is spent mostly in festivities like christmas, easter and more

@molimolinana

Жыл бұрын

@@felicepompa1702 that's about the same in Spain then

@Pollicina_db

Жыл бұрын

@@felicepompa1702 È stesso in Croazia, non capisco come gli stranieri possono avere così poco giorni per la vacanza e altre cose. Quando la facoltà inizia dopo tre mesi sono già molto stanca lol.

@camelopardalis84

Ай бұрын

@@Pollicina_db I hate that after learning Italian for about eight weeks twenty years ago and learning French for about eight years mostly before that, I understand about 80% of what you've written in Italian as I would had you written it in French.

I'm a portuguese native speaker and when I was a child I used to play a lot. The games, however, didn't have portuguese audio. So I used to play it in spanish because it was really easy to understand even though I have never studied spanish

@franco2359

3 жыл бұрын

Yes the same, I remember when I was a child and played Pokemon, but I didn't know how to speak English at that time, so I chose Spanish as the language of the game because it is closer to Portuguese (also my native language). I couldn't understand everything, but at least I could understand 70% of the information, if it were English I would understand nothing at that time

@caiosiqueira6138

3 жыл бұрын

@@franco2359 tu também é brasileiro?

@franco2359

3 жыл бұрын

@@caiosiqueira6138 eu sou 😆 só o nome que pode me ajudar a me disfarçar

@Amghannam

3 жыл бұрын

I speak French (and a very little bit of Spanish) and I live in Portugal now, if I read Portuguese, I can basically understand the general meaning of everything written. But when you guys speak, I understand nada.

@arthur_7144

3 жыл бұрын

@@Amghannam not even brazilians can understand portuguese people 😂

I was sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam about 15 years ago, talking with a fellow American about how difficult it was to figure out if the conversations we heard were in English or Dutch. Right then, a big group sat down next to us, ordered beers and started talking quite loudly. After about five minutes, my friend and I decided that they had to be Dutch. We couldn’t understand a word, and the phonemes were Dutch-y. As we finally made up our mind that we shouldn’t be able to understand them, one of their beer glasses exploded, spilling beer over the table, and the lady closest to us leaned over and said, “that was unexpected, wasn’t it?!” Suddenly, it was like a switch had been flipped and I could understand every single word as they spoke in their surprisingly thick Essex accents. It was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had with language.

@MartijnterHaar

5 жыл бұрын

When I was in Los Angeles a lot of people thought I was English instead of Dutch. Which was flattering, but also surprising, because although I tend to stick closer to the RP that is taught in high school than most other Dutch people, who mix in more American cultural influences, no English person would ever mistake me for a native speaker.

@MoveOnUpMusicEvan

5 жыл бұрын

Yeah it’s like if you ever hear someone from Birmingham (the proper one in England) it’s pretty hard to understand them even though I’m from Leicester (also in the Midlands) so I assume it would be nye on impossible for an American to understand them first time hearing them

@RobBCactive

4 жыл бұрын

I worked in Switzerland, my German became fluent, Swiss people knew I wasn't German, Swiss or Austrian so they guessed Dutch. On the other hand last year after plenty of practice an Austrian German teacher was flabbergasted, when he found out I wasn't Swiss. Small accent differences are more noticeable the closer the speech is to your own. There's an online English teacher, who I detect slight tiny flaws in her RP, whereas her early childhood city accent sounds totally natural and perfect on her, so makes me feel she's more genuine in that. Yet, few people would find the regional dialect equally intelligble, unless they spoke it. Maybe the city folk would be disturbed by slight flaws due to speaking RP frequently for professional reasons.

@kkech1

4 жыл бұрын

Americans not understanding their own language, classic.

@RobBCactive

4 жыл бұрын

@@kkech1 it's not really that unusual, Americans often have little exposure to typical British English

An old boss had a rather cute story on a similar note. She was born in Pakistan to an Urdu speaking family, but moved to Australia as a toddler, so spoke Urdu at home, but learnt to speak English with an Australian accent. She used to also lecture at a local university as a side gig, and had some students who were from India and spoke Hindi which is mutually intelligible with Urdu. They assumed because of her Australian accent she was monolingual, and would commentate on her classes to one another. On the last day of semester, one said to the other "how are you?" in Hindi and she replied "I am well thanks" in Urdu. She said their reaction was hilarious.

Speaking as an Irishman, I look forward to the day when the Irish, Welsh, English, and Scottish accents become completely unintelligible to each other, since as it is they’re not far off.

@eddiewhitaker9613

2 жыл бұрын

@Bluewolfe as someone who is english i can safely say i understand scotsmen very well, but im northern and i feel like southerners probably cant, because being very close to a lot of scottish people, i have heard that they actually prefer northerners

@sabrinusglaucomys

2 жыл бұрын

I laughed that you're "looking forward" to this rather than simply anticipating or even dreading it

@peglor

2 жыл бұрын

Which one of the many Irish accents are you talking about here? Apart from some of Northern Ireland (Where the accents evolved from Scottish accents in the first place anyway) they're not only different to each other, but dramatically different to Welsh and Scottish accents - which are also dramatically different to each other.

@belltowersubductions5104

2 жыл бұрын

@@peglor It was more sorta a general humerous statement aiming at how different the various dialects of English found in Britain and Ireland are from one another, and how it would be funny if, similar to what has happened inn the Nordic countries, the Dialects eventually became their own languages, I wasn't thinking too hard about the individual sub-accents found all across said Countries when I wrote that comment.

@baizhanghuaihai2298

2 жыл бұрын

My friend is from Uist and speaks Gaelic as her first language, and her husband is a native Irish speaker from the Cork Gaeltacht. They just speak to each other in Gaelic (Scottish Gaelic) and Irish and they understand each other. People who speak Donegal Irish understand Gaelic speakers well, too, and vice versa.

English: “Copenhagen” Swedish:“Chopemhagn” Danish:“Ghhhhaaunuummm”

@Eclipse-mf6hc

4 жыл бұрын

Reading: København Saying it: Kopenhawen Did you hear about the guys who were selling fake chickens on the black market? I heard they’re making a kylling

@sahilpatel0701

4 жыл бұрын

Naem17 in Swedish it’s actually Köpenhamn (shœ-pen-hamn)

@dinamosflams

4 жыл бұрын

I CAN'T LMAO

@FishingForLife28

4 жыл бұрын

Its our city, we'll call it what we want 😂

@lukefiras8735

4 жыл бұрын

@@Eclipse-mf6hc You mean a kyllingsuppe 😂😂😂

When I went to Berlin, sometimes I forgot I'm meant to speak German and often replied in Luxembourgish, and the people there were always super confused and it took me a while to realise. Along the German-Lux border, Germans here are so used to Luxembourgish that often conversations are held in German and in Lux at the same time with no problems understanding one another, yet when I go to Berlin I always somehow forget that's not how it works :D

@LuJoTu

Жыл бұрын

Every once in a while I'll happen upon some Luxembourgish, and the same thing happens every time: "I got almost none of that. Is my German broken? Have I been stuck in America too long? What is that accent?" Then..."ohhhhh. Phew."

@eriamelrrow6195

Жыл бұрын

When I was around 12/14, my sister and I met some children from Luxemburg (who had one English parent) while camping in France. We as Germans understood them quite well, but they couldn't understand us, maybe due to our bavarian-swabian dialect, so we spoke broken English mixed with German and they replied mostly in Luxemburgish and sometimes English, if we didn't get it. Found that super interesting

@2112jonr

Жыл бұрын

@@eriamelrrow6195 Fun fact: Many AI based German transcription tools cope well with German speakers until they have to deal with the Bavarian dialect. Had numerous problems with exactly that at a previous employer.

When in Paris, I was told my Quebecoos accent was "adorable" and that Parisiens like the Quebecois accent now, since Celine Dion became famous

@thibistharkuk2929

2 жыл бұрын

Most french people find it even sexy now ;)

@danymend5797

2 жыл бұрын

Je le trouve bizarre personnellement, après c'est un avis personnel, tout dépend des gens en réalité.

@luizalima8329

2 жыл бұрын

Québécois to me is the same as European Portuguese. Vaguely familiar but in the end impossible to understand when spoken too fast

@JStation3

2 жыл бұрын

Cool, as an American English speaker, I always wondered if Canadien French was different from European French.

@solenemb5546

2 жыл бұрын

@@JStation3 The accent is very different (in Quebec, they accentuate different syllables, while we always accentuate the last in France), some words are more used there than here and the other way round, some words are specific to one of the other, and there are even some very bad friends (like the famous "gosse" which is slang for "child" in France and a male body part in Quebec...) That said, there are also various accents and vocabulary in France, Belgium and Switzerland, although the stretch isn't as huge as between Europe and America.

I'm a Norwegian who often travels to the Roskilde music festival in Denmark. One particular heavy morning I was sleeping off last nights fun when a girl came over and "knocked" on my tent. She kindly asked if I could move my tent a little so she could fit hers in. She was Swedish, and asked in her native tongue. I responded in Norwegian and said something like " yeah sure, just give me 10 minutes, I'm a bit hungover". She responded in English saying " I'm sorry I don't understand Danish". I told here she had to wait 30 minutes.

@robinviden9148

4 жыл бұрын

I think I'm dying from laughter here... What's your dialect (because that could've something to do with the linguistic misidentification)?

@jg8711

4 жыл бұрын

@@robinviden9148 I'm from Oslo! :) So I pretty much have the easiest dialect for swedes to understand.

@theangryaustralian7624

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks for sharing this made me laugh

@Deathfrenz011

4 жыл бұрын

@@jg8711 That might be the issue right ther! :) I had a Norwegian friend (I'm Danish) and we would sometimes speak to eachother in our native tongue. He could understand me perfectly, but I could only understand him when he spoke Oslo dialect instead of the one from his hometown. He explained to me that Oslo dialect was "Danish with a Norwegian hat on and not actually Norwegian language". Was quite funny

@jg8711

4 жыл бұрын

@@Deathfrenz011 Jepp that is the short way of describing the Oslo dialect. But I feel I need to point out that a lot have happened in the last 200 years. So it's not the same. But close enough to be understood.

this is the most educational comment section I've ever seen in my life

@Geellun

4 жыл бұрын

It’s lovely, isn’t it?

@AndyZach

4 жыл бұрын

Pretty normal for NativLang. Not all KZread comment sections are obscene.

@brunoseixascorrea

4 жыл бұрын

Yeah, so cool!

@blacklambcta4271

4 жыл бұрын

Definitely cool

@ericmoore6769

4 жыл бұрын

No kidding. Us smart folx ain't alone after all !

When I was an English teacher in Japan, there were several students in my schools who had immigrated from Brazil, and we would often chat with each other in between classes, them in Portuguese and me in Spanish, because we could communicate more easily that way than in either English or Japanese.

@monhi64

Жыл бұрын

God damn you speak (at least?) English, Spanish and Japanese. That is a tough ass combo with probably 0% intelligibility between any two

I recall a time when I, a spanish speaker, had a lovely conversation with a portuguese man and an italian woman in a plane. Both the portuguese and I could understand each other perfectly, and while the italian lady struggled sometimes, she had an enjoyable time too! It's amazing how things like these happen!

I've made a game of this with my Portugese-speaking friends. I'll switch into Spanish, they'll speak Portuguese, and we'll see how long we can talk before having to switch back into English.

@rowynnecrowley1689

3 жыл бұрын

One of my favorite things is to converse with someone who doesn't speak my language and vice versa, and find that we understand each other anyway, based on a handful of similarities to other languages we each speak.

@andreesapissarra

3 жыл бұрын

How many times have you given up then?

@ajmartinez1470

2 жыл бұрын

Portuguese speakers usually have an easier time understanding Spanish than Spanish speakers do hearing Portuguese

@rusedgin

2 жыл бұрын

In the end, before English, you just resort to portunhol right?

@luizalima8329

2 жыл бұрын

@@rowynnecrowley1689 yeh, well, I’ve made the mistake once in Italy of ordering "leche" (what I thought was milk, as in spanish) only to be surprised with a full cup of whipped cream. I won’t make that mistake again ahaha

You know what's weird? I speak Spanish and I can understand French, Italian, and Portuguese ~80 percent of the time when it's written, but I can't really help when it comes to listening.

@susana3854

4 жыл бұрын

Ive found this is because you expect them to pronounce them the spanish way - once i learnt the pronounciations for portuguese my brain started being able to see how it would be written down and then i could make the connections to spanish as if i were reading it. Its so cool!

@charlessaintpe8574

4 жыл бұрын

I took two years of Spanish in middle and high school. Later, while playing Assassin's Creed, I could understand Italian nearly as well as Spanish. I'm also okay with French, so I just assumed that if you could fluently read one of those languages, you could read all of them. Then I made a comment to that effect somewhere on the internet. I don't really remember the conversation because it was years ago, but I think I offended somebody with my incredulous reaction when they told me I was wrong.

@nemoschmitz2374

4 жыл бұрын

@@charlessaintpe8574 you were right to some degree. I mean the romance languages all share 75-89% of their vocabulary. That's a lot! And their grammar is extremely similar. Basically the conjugation of verbs have the same system, even if French and Italian have different endings. Portuguese and Spanish seem almost identical sometimes except that you switch ción and cão or n and m and some other minor things. I'm German but I speak Spanish quite well. And later I learned Italian, Portuguese, French and Catalan (I don't speak them all equally well) They're all so similar, it always just took me a couple of weeks at most to get to the point that I felt I could read the new language almost as well as Spanish. It's just that of you tell a Spanish or Portuguese speaker that their languages are very close they just often completely deny it and argue against it because 'they have so many weird words and I don't understand shit' and so on. They often don't really get that what I mean is that in the big picture, looking at all languages in the world, Portuguese and Spanish (and the other romance languages) are like twins with minor differences. And Indonesian or Chinese or Finnish in that metaphor would be some random person from a place far far away whom you've never met before. I'm convinced every native speaker of a romance language can easily learn to read any other romance language fairly well (notice: I'm not saying 'perfectly') within a Relative short time, of they really want to and do not constantly just focus on and complain about every minor difference he encounters

@ZUB3RBR

3 жыл бұрын

I speak Brazilian Portuguese and I can understand spoken Spanish very well, but it's a bit more difficult to understand Italian and French

@FloweisPowerrr

3 жыл бұрын

I don't speak neither of these languages but I can tell them apart pretty easily. But Swedish Norwegian and Danish all sound the same to me Latin languages are different smh

For Scandinavia there's also the influence of media, especially for those who grew up with only a few tv-channels to choose from. Most Danes/Norwegians older than 30 or so grew up watching a lot more Swedish tv than the other way around. This was especially true for children's tv with the massive hits based on Astrid Lindgren's books (Pippi Longstocking etc.)

@magnusengeseth5060

Жыл бұрын

This can sometimes be really funny as a Swede living in Norway, since every time an older Norwegian wants to prove to you that he can speak Swedish, what they end up speaking is this old-timey tv accent that I don't think anyone ever spoke in their daily life, with the possible exception of Stockholm cabbies in the 40s or something. "Jåkkan pråtta sveenska"

@keagaming9837

Жыл бұрын

Pippi Longstocking was a Scandinavian show? Never knew that, honestly I always thought it was British or from one of the more rural Boston areas at the very least.

@Spacemongerr

11 ай бұрын

@@keagaming9837 The author of Pippi Longstockings, Astrid Lindgren, is basically a national hero in Sweden. There is even a reasonably sized theme park in Sweden, solely consisting of locations from her books. I still remember going in the giant village houses when I was on vaction in sweden as a child (the village was dimentioned for people 4-6 meters tall, to give the visitor the illusion that he was one of the semi-magical "small ones" in a regular human village.)

@nurrnena7798

5 ай бұрын

Same in Estonia - during the Soviet Times, Northern Estonia had access to Finnish television, and because it was a gateway to Western culture, these channels were extremely popular. My uncle and mother speak fluent Finnish thanks to these channels.

I'm Jamaican when he first explained the concept my mind went immediately like patois (patwah) and English, only to hear it in the end.😁

I find US tv puts subtitles on any speaker with a slightly foreign accent

@clickrick

3 жыл бұрын

You mean like anything imported from the UK? ;-)

@BigDogCountry

3 жыл бұрын

You're making the assumption that people in the US can read.

@sammig.8286

3 жыл бұрын

Actually, US TV is the one making the assumption that Americans can read, which is a pretty good assumption considering that most can.

@stevenrichards1539

3 жыл бұрын

When I first started watching a lot of British television shows I needed to use the subtitles, but 20 years later I am good.

@knigistudios9430

3 жыл бұрын

@@sammig.8286 it's just a joke tho

As a Romanian, this is so relatable. We can understand other romance-language speakers but they don't understand us ;(((

@wallachia4797

3 жыл бұрын

​@@ericolens3 In Romanian we have Bună, Bună Ziua or Salut for "Hello". Romanian vocabulary is only 15% Slavic and this influence is mainly only seen in religious vocabulary (as Bulgarians Christianized us and Romania is a very Christian country). In some respects, Romanian stuck closer to its latin roots than the western languages, for example, Romanian retaining its 6th case from Latin while if I am not wrong, everyone else lost it. There are also a lot of Romanian words which may seem foreign to you but that is simply because they've evolved differently, not because they are of non-latin origin. For example, we have the word "Lume" which means "world", it comes from Latin "lumen", which meant "Light", in time it came to evolve into meaning "everything under the light/sun", therefore "world". Or our word for "country", which is "Țară", it evolved from Latin "Terra", which meant "Land". "Depart" in French means "leaving", in Romanian "Departe" means "far away", they both share the same root. "Avanti" in Italian means to run or to charge, in Romanian "Avânt" means to prepare your momentum, to get ready. Again, in a language like Italian, the word "citta" means "city", but in Romanian the root evolved into "cetate", meaning "stronghold" or any sort of walled settlement which can defend itself, this was because the latinised population in modern Romania survived almost a thousand years of invasions (Huns, Gepids, Slavs, Magyars) through isolation in the Carpathian mountain range where "cities" were not viable for surviving, but "strongholds" were. Romanian was separated from the other Western languages for over one thousand years, time in which many root words from Latin changed meaning but the origins remain the same even if they dont't seem familiar to you, a Spaniard at first. Romania is just a part of the Eastern Romance languages, and it just so happens that Romanian is the only major language in this branch left. There used to be Dalmatian and others. Dalmatian used to be a sort of in between Romanian and Italian, you can check its vocabulary on Wikipedia. Comparing Romanian to Spanish is like comparing German to Swedish, they are different because they are part of different BRANCHES, not different language families. I hope this cleared it up for you, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

@prosquatter

3 жыл бұрын

@@ericolens3 French is more of a bastard child than Romanian as they have more Germanic origin words than Romanian has Slavic, but people are more used to French and the Germanic words in French are also familiar to them from English.

@590dami

3 жыл бұрын

@@ericolens3 italian bounciness is very clear, you can easely tell if you hear rioplatense spanish, both argentina and uruguay. there's a "singing" voice there for sure

@jellyfish0311

3 жыл бұрын

@@590dami che

@gwendolynsheperd9011

3 жыл бұрын

My latin teacher (romanian) father spoke with her father in law (father of the math teacher, french) in latin bc it was easier for them haha

I remember teaching English to young Spanish speakers and being so confused when they couldn't guess what "catholic" might mean... they all lived in Spain, a catholic country, and the Spanish word they used for catholic is "catolico." I was genuinely so confused by that

@pentelegomenon1175

3 жыл бұрын

The "th" sound is quite rare outside of English so I assume it sounds a little weird to non-Anglophones, like an English speaker hearing a click.

@bb2866

3 жыл бұрын

maybe they were extracting the urine

@julianmesa9641

2 жыл бұрын

@@pentelegomenon1175 Spanish does have the 'th' sound, but it only happens with c/z in central and northern Spain

@aleinadzap6040

2 жыл бұрын

Well, "catholic" is pronounced /kæθlɪk/ and "católico" is pronounced /kaˈtoliko/ so they sound pretty different despite the common root. For starters, in "catholic" the stress is in the first syllable and the "o" is silent. While in "católico" the "o" holds the stress, so it's super important. As a result, "catholic" is 2 syllables while "católico" is 4 syllables. Finally, if the kids were from Spain, they would have associated the /θ/ sound with an "s" or "z" instead of "t".

@nidohime6233

2 жыл бұрын

That is because spanish do we end the words unlike english. If you pay some attetion you can see that many english words look unfinished for a spanish perspective. For example the word catholic looks like you where saying "católico" but without an -o at the end.

I'm Romanian, and for me comes easy to learn the other Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese) because all these five languages have their origin in Latin. For example in Italian Sunday is domenica, and in Romanian is duminica. Just a letter difference. Mother is the same, mamma in Italian, and mama in Romanian. The Italian word is longer by one letter. My children speak Romanian fluently, and French and English. We live in Canada. I want them to learn our mother tongue, because I'm sure it will help them in future. And I've read somewhere that people that learn multiple languages since childhood can understand complicated problems better than the people that learn one language all their lives.

@rorychivers8769

2 жыл бұрын

I sometimes wonder if this is just a function of perspective - you are forced to consider languages on an abstract level when considering their different approaches, which in turn forces you to understand that there are any number of ways to approach a problem, rather than get trapped in what seems to be the only obvious solution. It gives you the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture, in other words. Good on you for raising your kids trilingual anyway, all languages are an empowerment.

We were four Swedes (from the north of Sweden) sharing an apartment with a girl from Denmark. None of us Swedes could understand her without her speaking very slowly and repeating things over and over again, but she understood us perfectly. After a few days she just started to talk to us in English instead while we kept speaking Swedish - it worked out great, but it was pretty strange when you think about it 😂

@yehudacavalli3927

5 жыл бұрын

Probably because you guys were from the North, right? People in Skåne might have less of a hard time, because they're dialect is already very similar to Danish in the way it sounds, and also because they might be more exposed to Danes speaking, especially people in Malmö that can go back and forth easily through the Øresund bridge.

@smez

5 жыл бұрын

@@yehudacavalli3927 yeah, Skåne is basically Denmark for us ;)

@yehudacavalli3927

5 жыл бұрын

LOL right!

@petitio_principii

5 жыл бұрын

Wow, I'd guess it would be more likely that she would speak some Swedishized Danish hybrid. I've watched once some Scandinavian movie or series (with English subtitles) where the characters' dialog even suggested these asymmetries can cause some sort of racist-like prejudice, with people from one country regarding the other as dumber.

@smez

5 жыл бұрын

@@petitio_principiithat's pretty much what we were trying at first, but we still had big problems understanding her so English was much easier. Haha yeah, maybe we are a bit dumber, since she could understand us without any problems 😅 But I think that Swedes are generally easier to understand for Danes than the other way around, as we tend to speak more like words are written (depending on the dialect, of course) while the Danes use more diphthongs and don't separate words as clearly but have more of a "flow" when speaking (written Danish is much easier to understand than spoken Danish for a Swede). And, as someone said earlier, a Swede from the south would probably have a much easier time understanding Danish than we had as well, as their dialects are more similar to Danish while ours is very different.

When I had my first job as a cart pusher at a store, one of my coworkers was an Argentinian man who didn't speak English. I am from Italy, and for some reason, the way he spoke Spanish just clicked. I could help him communicate with everyone else, even though he couldn't understand me when I spoke Italian. It was a really interesting episode that stuck with me. Thanks for making this video to clear up the phenomenon

@valentinocozzi

5 жыл бұрын

Si, allora l'italiano serve a qualcosa!!! WOW!!

@pocketlanguages

5 жыл бұрын

If I am not mistaken, Argentinan Spanish is strongly influenced by Italien settlers.

@pooskyfilms547

5 жыл бұрын

Yes it is! They have very similar cadences and accents. It inspired me to learn Spanish, which I am fluent in now.

@MrBraveheart1191

5 жыл бұрын

Sonja Bojelin Absolutely, this is so notorious even on Argentinian Spanish accent, it is much closer to Italian than to Spanish from Spain

@vincelamb4063

5 жыл бұрын

The Italian influence is strong enough that the Argentinians I know don't say "Adios" or "Hasta la vista" to say goodbye, they say "Ciao."

I know two friends who have the loviest habit: they both speak their own language (Dutch and German) and understand each other perfectly. I have always loved how this back and forth of languages worked out

I was once triangulated in an asymmetric intelligibility situation. I had an Egyptian friend who was trying to order from an African-American cashier at a restaurant. Everyone was speaking English but I had to interpret for both of them.

My mum who is czech speaks to polish people in Czech and they respond and polish and they have full blown conversation and understand each other perfectly

@Leviwosc

5 жыл бұрын

My mother in law is Slovakian and she speaks and understands Czech perfectly. She also speaks Hungarian and Russian fluently. But she gets immensely confused by Polish. She says that the Poles turn everything around. Southern Slavic languages are even more of a challenge for her. Does your mum understand Slovakian? And do you know whether she can easily understand Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Slovenian?

@helpahoe920

5 жыл бұрын

Leviwosc she understands slovakian and hasnt tried to talk to anyone in any of the other languages but she says because she grew up in czechoslovakia she was around people who spoke slovakian a lot so that would make it easier for her to understand

@zuzannas3985

5 жыл бұрын

I once tried to understan slovakian and it turned total gibberish for me (a polish person), but the other way around was different, I spoke polish and the guy understood perfectly. He ended up responding in english to my polish, that must have sounded very funny for bypassers

@demkoolya

5 жыл бұрын

Im Ukrainian and can speak both Russian and Ukrainian fluently. I find that Polish is similar in many ways orally to Ukrainian, as is Belarusian. Slovakian and Czech to me sounds like a mixture of both russian and ukrainian, so I can somehow discern what all these people would say to me. But I think Russian speakers find it incredibly difficult to understand most other Eastern European languages. The Baltics are a whole other story though...

@Acirnie

5 жыл бұрын

@@Leviwosc I can't speak for his mum, but as a Czech I can tell you that a big majority of Czech people will have no problems having a fluent conversation with Slovaks. These languages are just really close. Although it is true that it works better for Slovaks as some of the younger Czech generations have slight problems understanding Slovak language. Also I might add that when I was in Slovenia, I could understand a lot of Slovenian language thanks to the similarity between Slovak and Slovenian, but they had no idea what I said when I spoke Czech.

I’m from Australia, and when I went to the U.S, there was a shopkeeper in a scent store, and I remember she told me I have a ‘lovely accent’ and that she’s ‘always wanted to go to Europe’ after I told her I was from Australia. She then proceeds to ask me how I knew how to communicate in English... I was so confused? I said ‘English is the main language over there’, and then she replied ‘Oh... I’m sorry’. We didn’t talk much after that, but I still made a purchase of soap that day in the store. 😂 I learnt from that moment onwards that what you think someone may know, is not exactly what they may actually know. But pretty much every other American I encountered knew where Australia was and that we speak English

@TheRealSpeedWolf

3 жыл бұрын

I'm pretty sure she confuse you with Austria, I was talking with my Austrian friend but I click by accident the auto-correct and it type Australia when I meant to type Austria, he wasn't very pleased.

@isahere7015

3 жыл бұрын

SpeedWolf, I actually didn’t think until you brought it up! Thank you. I kind of feel closure knowing that in a weird way now, lol

@MACRStratum

3 жыл бұрын

@@TheRealSpeedWolf Austria, eh? Put another shrimp on the barby, mate!

@GUITARTIME2024

3 жыл бұрын

She thought Austria.

@TheRealSpeedWolf

3 жыл бұрын

@@isahere7015 haha, NP

I'm Tunisian, had a hard time when I visited Lebanon (or to be more accurate, Lebanese people had a hard time fathoming what I say) that I decided to speak English (nobody speaks standard Arabic in everyday life). Note that I understood about 80% of their dialect but not the other way round. Tunisian and Lebanese are supposed to be dialects of the same language!

@hemlocklannister6206

2 жыл бұрын

It's very sad that even though these so called Arabic "dialects" are so mutually unintelligible, due to authoritarianism in the Arabic world, they are not allowed to be classified as separate languages. They are looked down on and are not even taught formally. No one even speaks MSA or Fus-ha in day-to-day life. I'm an Indian btw and this knowledge deters me from learning Arabic. If I would I'd start with Egyptian Arabic, since it has the most number of speakers.

@rorychivers8769

2 жыл бұрын

It's funny, the thought of learning Fus-ha seems really boring to me, like who am I actually going to speak to, and you kind of just confirmed it. I have the exact same level of apathy I have to learning Latin, it's fun academically but I have no interest in going to the Vatican. I think Arabic would be way more popular if dialects were taught. I mean realistically, what are the chances of me ever becoming a poet or a newsreader in the Arab world? I just want to understand a bit, damnit.

@sephikong8323

2 жыл бұрын

It's because they are not the same language, Arabic (at least nowadays) does not exist as a cohesive native language, saying that Tunisian, Syrian and Omani speak the same language would be like saying Portuguese, French and Romanian speak the same language, they are related languages that descend from Latin, but they have evolved differently since

@rorychivers8769

2 жыл бұрын

@@sephikong8323 It's like trying to claim there is a single "Germanic" language . I mean I love learning Hochdeutsch, but I wont ever be able to use it at my local bakery... Plus it's a glorified conlang anyway :)

@sosoham9692

Жыл бұрын

@@rorychivers8769 are you really asking to Chang standert fusha Arabic to dailact academically,that just taking the charm of it,if you want to learn it ,learn it well,or not at all.

We ran into an unexpected asymmetry issue when we found that our overseas students from Hong Kong (but not mainland China) couldn’t understand our anatomy lecturer from Glasgow (but were okay with Australian English and Indian English speakers)

@anonymousonechannel

Жыл бұрын

I mean, I’m pretty sure this is because Scottish accents are a bit hard to grasp for non-Scottish people in general, rather than because Cantonese is somehow intelligible with Australian English and Indian English but not Scottish English lol. Glasgowian accents are usually at least understandable, so that’s strange.

@2112jonr

Жыл бұрын

Fair play to them. The majority of English speakers in England have HUGE difficulties understanding strong Glaswegian accents and dialects. Ask anyone south of Birmingham and it's almost totally unintelligible to them. People in the south of England in particular have the most difficulty understanding strong Midland, Northern and Scottish English accents as they only hear what's on TV and Radio most of the time, and rarely venture into the north of the country, making dialect and accent comprehension very much a one way thing if you're born in England.

Danish isn't a language, it's a throat condition.

@LuisAldamiz

5 жыл бұрын

LOL I understand that is the most vowel-rich language, at least in Europe, with 11 vowels! It must be difficult to master, unless native.

@benedictewrstad8379

5 жыл бұрын

It’s norwegian with a potato in your throut. Kidding. Or maybe not. I like our danish neighbours anyway.

@raptor48480

5 жыл бұрын

@@LuisAldamiz I am proud to speak Quebec French as we have 14 vowels or 19 if we count nasal vowels

@TuberoseKisser

5 жыл бұрын

Lmao

@finnishwehraboo8377

5 жыл бұрын

LØL

As a Norwegian, every time I go to Denmark I'll just get really drunk and it actually works!

@mvl71

4 жыл бұрын

I understand so many things when I'm really drunk. Or at least I _think_ I understand. Probably. I think. Not sure, can't remember much...

@puyol8700

3 жыл бұрын

Works the other way around, too! I have a good Norwegian friend whom I often have a hard time understanding while sober (he's from Fredrikstad), but it works out just fine once we're a few beers in. Generally speaking, I have an easier time understanding Bergen dialect (to my understanding what is regarded as "Nynorsk") than dialects with grammar and vocabulary more similar to Danish. Fredrikstad dialect, to me, is just a competition of how many weird sounds you can sing in the shortest possible amount of time.

@kl1541

3 жыл бұрын

There was a real incident when a swedish police saw a man slept outdoors in the thick snow, he approached him but the man was drunk so the policeman thought the man was a dane

@thehoogard

3 жыл бұрын

There was this hilarious newstory a couple of years ago about the police arristing a man in sweden, who they thought were danish. Turns out he was just drunk.

@die8quadratmeter

3 жыл бұрын

I’m polish and it worked for me to when I went to Kopenhagen

This reminds me when I went to Slovenia to see a concert there with friend(we are from croatia) Slovenian and croatian are both slavic languages, but I have real hard time understanding slovenian. I remember speaking to locals, in croatian, who replied in slovenian. I asked them to talk in english, and I started speaking in english as well. Then they told me, that I can speak in Croatian, they understand me. In the end, I was talking in Croatian, and they would reply in english, and I always found it fascinating, why it is so, from linguistic perspective

Sometime ago When I was in Turkey, me and my father met 2 guys who we thought were Russian, since we both knew Russian, we decided to have a chat with them They told us they were Ukranians, which at first didn't seem like a big change since Ukranians also know how to speak Russian, it was only after me and my father were talking to eachother in our native language (Serbian) and vice versa, that we realized why they can understand our "Russian" better that we can understand theirs So basically, our Russian wasn't perfect, it had a lot of Serbian words in it, Serbian grammar etc etc But it was still somewhat understandable since Serbian is also close to Russian, but their Russian was perfect, since they were from Donbas, and also, Ukranian is much closer to Serbian than Serbian to Russian, so they basically had the advantage of understanding our crap Russian, while we had to try and understand their official Russian, btw, that's also the reason why they could understand me and my father speaking Serbian as much as we could understand them speaking Ukranian

@zelena_helena

2 жыл бұрын

Some time ago I heard Serbs speaking Serbian on a street of Odesa and as a Ukrainian speaker, I understood maybe 50% from speaking and 50% out of context. Russian is the most close to Bulgarian btw

@easytiger6570

2 жыл бұрын

I am ukrainian and this happened to me when visiting Croatia, communicated with croats in our native languages, understood them fully, but they apparently struggled to understand me. Some words are more similar to ukrainian because both languages are slavic and that's where white Croatia was, and some words were more similar to russian because of how church Slavonic influenced russian

@user-pn7jz9vr2z

2 жыл бұрын

@@easytiger6570 yeah Croats probably have harder time understanding others Since for the past 30 years, they have been trying to distance Croatian from Serbian, thus making them ever so slightly more distant to other slavic languages

@easytiger6570

2 жыл бұрын

@@user-pn7jz9vr2z Lets not get political

@user-pn7jz9vr2z

2 жыл бұрын

@@easytiger6570 i agree

I'm Brazilian and for us is easy to understand Spanish without studying it, but for our neighbors is really hard to understand Portuguese without studying!

@WestCountryGurl

3 жыл бұрын

I'm a Spanish speaker, and I sadly don't understand much Portuguese at all. :( I understand Italian the best, and even L'Occitan French more than Brazilian. It's very weird how Portugal is so close to Spain, yet I don't understand much of it.

@Naharu.

3 жыл бұрын

can confirm, l am from Brazil and had to talk with some spanish-speaking people on the airport once. It was clear that l was understanding them better than they were me, but at the end we finally could understand a little so l could help them around

@andreesapissarra

3 жыл бұрын

It's the same in Europe. A Portuguese person usually can understand Spanish, but the Spanish person is going to have a hard time understanding us

@SEELE-ONE

3 жыл бұрын

I'm Mexican and understood Brazilian Portuguese easily while in Brazil (except that time I accidentaly ordered my marmita as take-out)... Just use short, simple sentences...

@coletrain546

3 жыл бұрын

Im a usa born mexican and Spanish is my 2nd language and I can only make out like 10% of words in spoken Portuguese cus I learned how they're pronounced also I can read and understand about 70% of written Portuguese so I can vaguely understand the Portuguese comments on videos

Literally all of the Slavic languages have some form of asymmetric intelligibility

@marekmichalovic8711

4 жыл бұрын

You should look up Medžuslovjansky/Interslavic - it takes advantage of this and creates an even more intelligible language

@VeggiePopper

4 жыл бұрын

Same with Romance languages. We Spanish speaking people can understand Italian and Portuguese. But Italians and Portuguese are not as mutually intelligible between each other.

@ppaaccoojrf

4 жыл бұрын

@RFT Except what he said is true. Portuguese speakers have an easier time with Spanish than the other way around because of phonology, yes, but Spanish speakers tend to have an easier time with Italian than Portuguese speakers do. Probably because of the cadence of the languages, or perhaps due to linguistic distance. Check out three way language exchanges and you'll usually see Spanish speakers being some sort of interpreters between the other two languages.

@juststeve5542

4 жыл бұрын

@daniiel mlinarics that's the divide between the Northern and Southern Slavic language branches. Czech, Slovak, Polish and Russian are all Northern, the rest of you are Southern Branch, but there are still some similarities, especially in the basics. I speak a tiny bit of Polish, and several years ago was watching the Eurovision song contest on TV with a load of friends (drinking games!) which was being held in Belgrade. They did the usual 10,9,8 countdown... By this point I realised I recognised the numbers and joined in with the rest of the countdown! To this day my friends think I can randomly speak Serbian!

@juststeve5542

4 жыл бұрын

@daniiel mlinarics your English spelling isn't an issue - I have to endure Americans ;-) OK, next challenge, try communicating with your neighbours to the North ;-) No, not Slovenia, the other one! :-D Sok szerencsét!

From one child of a teacher to another, I am grateful for your mother being a teacher! They don't get enough praise.

I'm Italian, and I used to live and work in Southern Spain a few years ago. I noticed that while my Italian relatives (who came as tourists and had never heard or studied Spanish) could understand the locals quite easily, the same thing didn't work the other way around. My family has lived in many different parts of the country, and our Italian sounds "pure", with no regional inflections/expressions/words, but the people we met in Spain had a hard time understanding us.

@histamine53

2 жыл бұрын

I noticed the same thing when I came to live in Chile, my Italian knowledge would make their spanish easy to understand but Chileans could not understand Italian, not a word.

@hannofranz7973

2 жыл бұрын

It's also a matter of exposure to a language. If you travel a lot or work with foreigners, live in a large city, touristy area or near a border, you are definitely at advantage to rural folks far off.

@gabi4205

2 жыл бұрын

That's funny bc as a Romanian, I can understand Italian and even Spanish pretty well. But you guys can't understand us haha

A number of years ago my mom and I went on a vacation to Cancun Mexico. When we were there we decided to eat at McDonald's. While standing in line we watched the order in front of us. The person behind the counter was a Mexican of course, and the customer was Australian. Both spoke fluent English, however, we watched with no small amount of humor as they struggled to communicate. The Mexican speaking fluent English could not understand the Australians accent. The biggest sticking point was a bottled water. To the Mexican, "bah-towed wah-uh" was unintelligible. Eventually my mom offered to translate because they could both understand her perfectly and she, them. Imagine it, two fluent English speakers at a complete impass without help from a third English speaker.

@richardemms3050

5 жыл бұрын

I have noticed the way some countries teach English is biased to a certain accent, usually to American. In Korea I noticed in coffee shops the word for 'hot' in hot coffee was 'hat' with a soft t in hangul, used as a loan word as Korean has a perfectly good word for hot. I tried ordering but in my British accent the word 'hot' meant nothing to them. Trying again with an American accent and they understood. I think in your example the Mexican server was very used to serving Americans all day and they probably didn't sound like they were speaking English, but 'McDonalds menu English', then this Australian came along and wanted something using a different term or pronunciation.

@alyssamiles2909

5 жыл бұрын

@Richard Emms Perhaps. It seemed that the majority of the tourists there were American. However, the Mexican girl behind the counter appeared to have a very good command of English. I'm sure if she had dealt with Australians frequently, there likely wouldn't have been any problem.

@dennisglorie9503

5 жыл бұрын

I'm a first generation Australian and English is my first language but I have trouble understanding a lot of the "aussie" Australians.

@alyssamiles2909

5 жыл бұрын

@@dennisglorie9503 is there alot of variation in the Australian accent?

@dennisglorie9503

5 жыл бұрын

There is quite a spectrum because Australia has so many different people living together. The 'typical' aussie accent is very high pitched, nasal and spoken very quickly with a lot of confusing slang, however in the cities it is less often heard. I used to work in the hotel industry and would have no issues talking to people with broken english from other countries but had a hard time trying to explain basic things to people visiting from regional areas. I've also had a few times both at home and abroad where I've ordered 'a cup of tea' and been given a cappuccino, which then results in conversation about when I emigrated from South Africa (despite having no connection to the country). I think there are some interesting videos on the accent types of Australia floating around on youtube. I'll go find some.

I'm from Spain and I've had these experiences in both Italy and Portugal. As far as I can tell, Portuguese people understand pretty much everything we say, but we have a much harder time understanding them. We would ask people if they spoke Spanish and the answer was always "no, but speak" and communication was very fluid. For me, if I can hear Portuguese and read the words at the same time, it suddenly becomes much easier than only listening or reading separately. Plus one time I was sitting next to a Portuguese kid in a ski lift and we started chatting in Spanish, and I was super impressed with his Spanish. And he said "I don't know any Spanish, I'm just speaking Portuguese but imitating what a Spanish accent sounds like to me". That was pretty amazing. Then in Italy it's the other way around; my first time there I was surprised that I could understand pretty much all basic tourist interactions, ie, prices, directions, explanations about menu items, but it was a lot harder than I expected for them to understand us. I've heard many people say that there's a rough "distance to Rome" gradient with Romance languages (though French is the odd one out that doesn't work because of all the Germanic influences) which basically says that it's easier to understand towards Rome than away from Rome, which is consistent with my experience. I'd like to test it with Romanian as well; there are in fact a lot of Romanians who come to Spain to work because of the language similarity. Within Spain we have 4 official languages, 3 of which are Romance languages (Catalan, Galician and Castillian, the latter is what the rest of the world calls "Spanish") and all three are mutually intelligible for basic interactions. (The fourth one, Basque or Euskera as it's said in Basque, isn't even Indo-European, so it's basically a nightmare to learn).

@arx3516

5 жыл бұрын

Catalan is far easier for italians to understand than Castillan, i remeber travelling to Barcelona with some friends, i was the only one who spoke a little of Catillan, but in the end my help wasn't needed since they had no problem with Catalan, wich to them sounded like a funny dialect! XD

@QoraxAudio

4 жыл бұрын

Catalan is best ofcourse!

@Leto85

4 жыл бұрын

'(...) speaking Portuguese but imitating what a Spanish accent sounds like to me.' That really is amazing! Especially considering the fact he was talking to you, being from Spain.

@BabaBugman

4 жыл бұрын

With french, you can understand spanish and italian easily, but it is harder for spaniards to do reverse.

@Leto85

4 жыл бұрын

@@BabaBugman That makes sense to me. With that little bit of Spanish that I speak I can hardly even read French, though Italian goes better.

I was born and raised in the US but my family is from Chile. I’ve been told that I speak Spanish like a Chilean with an American accent. I am an airline pilot so I not only visit Hispanic countries but I meet and help people from various places (including the US) who speak Spanish. Sometimes, the exchange is fluid and natural and sometimes I have to adopt an extra clear, paced, “standard” Spanish. Always an adventure.

I’m Norwegian, when I was a child we listen to swedish popmusic and watched swedish childrens programs without subtekst or dubbing. So we learned Swedish. My children 26-28 didn’t. They understands English far better than Swedish. There are a lot of total different words in Norwegian and Swedish. Written Danish and written Norwegian are very close. But it sounds very different. The most used Norwegian written language was originally Danish, because Norway was a part of Danmark for 400 years.

@2112jonr

Жыл бұрын

I've read that for English speakers, Norwegian is the easiest language to learn (not sure which one), as its roots are the closest to English. Despite English adopting about 50% of its vocabulary form French, we still use an incredible number of words that have Norse origins, especially in the Midlands and the North of England.

@FluxTrax

Жыл бұрын

​@@2112jonr Actually, Nynorsk is more similar to English as it has shedded much of the Danish and German influence. Somme words are strikingly similar

A friend of mine was lost in Italy once. She is a native speaker of English and had had no expereince speaking Italian. Another woman from the same tour was lost along side her who was a native speaker of Italian with no expereince speaking English. Both my friend and this woman had studied classical Latin, though, and they got by on that!

@Ahonya666

5 жыл бұрын

TheHappyBookwyrm that is so cool

@taintedmyth0s636

5 жыл бұрын

That reminds me of the book Shogun. There's an English sailor who talks to a Japanese samurai woman in Portuguese, then later on Latin.

@Kyoptic

5 жыл бұрын

Now this is beautiful language nerd-dom.

@treborsaldivar518

5 жыл бұрын

i don't believe this.

@lolaopal8884

5 жыл бұрын

There is a story of this happening between queen Elizabeth 1 of England and grace o malley the Irish pirate. Elizabeth could only speak English and grace could only speak irish

I work in a college department that's filled with international students. The French, Spanish, and Italian students hang out and speak some sort of transit language that's mostly cognates and English (though none of them speak English natively). It's super cool to listen to.

@beybladeguru101

2 жыл бұрын

Might be interesting to research it.

@chrisashtonlightell-west1189

2 жыл бұрын

What I wouldn't give to hear that

@ak5659

2 жыл бұрын

Check out the interlanguage called Interlingua. It's a complete language constructed from the common elements of the Romance languages. There're similar ones for the Germanic and Slavic languages, Folkspraak and Iinterslavic, respectively.

@beybladeguru101

2 жыл бұрын

@@ak5659 From what I understand, Interlingua is a pretty mediocre conlang. Interslavic, on the other hand, what really interesting to listen to as a Russian speaker; It's quite remarkable, actually.

@ingridfong-daley5899

2 жыл бұрын

Def look up the concept of 'interlanguage'. I've seen the exact mix that you're talking about, and it's both fascinating and relatively common. It's awesome that you have such opportunities to explore!

Canadian bilingual anglophone here. Once met a charming polyglot Malawi speaker in the Italian region of Switzerland. We had a heck of a time communicating in English, until we figured out we both did well enough to get by in French and spent the rest of the evening happily gabbing away 😊

@corystarkiller

Ай бұрын

That's because your Quebecois accent ruins your English. The rest of Canada has just gotten used to understanding your English.

Scandinavian languages for the win! This is a long post because I love this topic. TL;DR at the bottom. Just yesterday, I was speaking with someone in Greece who didn't speak much English but since he spoke Swedish as a third or fourth language, we could converse when I switched to Norwegian and I'm not even fluent yet. Also, learning to *speak* Danish is frikken hard for me (English speaker). I was wrong to think that learning Danish should be easy. After all, Danish *reads* almost exactly like Norwegian but has a ton of unfamiliar vowels. In fact, Danish has the most vowels of any language on Earth! So, I can read it but it sounds like gibberish to my (still-learning-Norwegian) ears when spoken. I assume that a native Norwegian speaker would not have this problem with Danish. Some Norwegians even lovingly tease that it sounds like their own language spoken with a potato in the mouth! I'm sure the Danes never ever tire of hearing this joke. ;) The funny part is that even if I speak Norwegian with my noticeably thick potato-ass North American accent and grammatical mistakes, Danes can understand me; for *they* understand Norwegian perfectly. As for Québecois French, I speak this too. I learned it from kindergarten but I spoke English at home. Ironically, it helps if you know English- as Québec French has become anglisized over time, even in verb conjugation and expressions. Maybe this is because the English minority, along with their culture, dominated the French-speaking population in most larger Québec cities and this has affected the language to this day. However, Québecois French has a lot of unique expressions which are *extremely* regional, heavily religiously influenced, and still uses a fair amount of very old words and grammar from the first French settlers to Québec in the 16-18th centuries. These were mostly trappers and fur-traders and later; fishermen, loggers and of course clergy. On top of this, the earliest French settlers to Québec interacted much with the indigenous First Nations' people groups such as the Iroquois, Mohawk, Algonquin, Chippewa, Ojibwa to name only a few. And so, modern Québecois still bears evidence of this by containing many expressions and loan-words that orginate within the cultures of Québec's first human settlers, the indigenous peoples. As for religion, the Québecois were devoutly Catholic for most of their history as are their descendents today- at least in rural areas. Many fun expressions and and some impolite words used today reflect this in rich and unique way: Religion, along with language, became a source of pride and cultural identity for French Québecois who resisted assimilation by the English minority in prior centuries. The English Quebecers not only controlled most of towns and cities because they were considerably more wealthy than the French Québecois, but were also Protestant; almost to a man. Of course, the assimilation *did* happen over time as English and French residents of Québec integrated more but it was less one-sided as both groups assimilated each other to some extent. When fur pelts, timber, and fish no longer carried the economic promise that they once had, most Québecois who hadn't already settled in the larger towns and cities, arranged themselves into smaller villages and hamlets from which many would not depart for generations, if at all. Farming and mining began to overtake other professions but logging, fishing, and whaling were definitely still a thing. These settlements were extremely spead out and interacted little with each other overall. In the days before modern tech and industry, the geography and climate made sure of that. Quite frankly, Québec is a👌#HUGE👌land mass with natural barriers like mountains, tundra, enormous forests, sea-sized lakes with large, ship-dissappearing waves and wildass animals. Oh, and it is home to a particularly vengeful winter demon who loves to feed on the misery of human and beast alike forever and always up North but only for 8-10 months in the southern Québec. For 5-6 glorious weeks, when the demon goes to Boston for vacation, then and only then does the lord take pity and Québec is given a short but welcome reprieve in something my parents told me is called "Summer." It's a beautiful and magical time. The summer in Québec is lovely though. 😁 The fact that agriculture and mining are trades that would require people to settle in one place, and ...the bitterly harsh winters... (good lord, the winters!), most people couldn't or wouldn't leave their small village or town for life. They would give birth there and die there as their parents did, and their parents before them. The geographical and cultural isolation of same-language-speaking but small-village-dwelling groups led not only to the inclusion of expressions and words from farm life and mining into modern day Québécois French but also to the formation of dialects with differences so pronounced that were became nearly unintelligible to one another. (This specific linguistic phenomenon also happened in Norway, for example.) Even the..uh farm animal based, religiously-themed motif for swear words. ☝That's an image that I had to live with when I was first learning Norwegian from my naughty friends and now you get to live with it too. You're welcome 😊 Another side effect of this phenomenon was that communities independently but simultaneously developed hilariously inventive ways to curse the weather or even use it as a stand-in to talk about other things since the weather was so integral to daily life and survival in these environments. Over time, words that came directly from daily farm life and mining culture soon found their way into the modern Québecois lexicon when village dwellers started to relocate again in the 20th century onwards to bigger towns and cities or when outsiders moved into the villages, turning them into towns and cities. With all of this being said, it is little wonder that the cosmopolitan, proudly urbanite, fiercely secular, French would have a hard time trying to understand French that: A) regularly uses words outaded in France for *centuries* B) has been influenced less by France for the last 400 years and more by local Native Canadian tribal languages and customs that a Frenchman or woman would find unfamiliar. C) has ALOT of expressions and words to do with heavy Catholic imagery, farming and other outdoorsy trades to which the average French city person has no connection. D) is so geographically influenced to the point that dialect differences make accents sound like different languages. TD;LR Mutual intelligiblity between certain related languages is definitely a thing but it becomes asymmetrical due to history, culture, and geography of over any other factors. Two entirely different languages (say Swedish and Norwegian) with little divergence in these factors would be more mutually intelligible than the SAME language with larger differences in these factors. This is why a Frenchman may struggle to understand a Québecois but the Québecois can understand the Frenchman perfectly. Yet, both speak French.

I was puking one time, and a danish guy behind me asked «Who? Me!?»

@dinamosflams

3 жыл бұрын

LOOOL

I have a speech disability, so I'm usually asymmetrically intelligible!

@grillygrilly

3 жыл бұрын

What speech disability?

@Freakschwimmer

3 жыл бұрын

That a pretty witty comment :D

@floatingsara

3 жыл бұрын

Lol !

@seagullokapi

3 жыл бұрын

ayy same

@rowynnecrowley1689

3 жыл бұрын

I used to pride myself on being able to understand most, if not all speech impediments/accents. Hairlip, traech hole, heavily accented broken English, whatevs. Nearly impossible to avoid in the Customer Service Industry. Can't do it so much anymore tho, cuz I can barely make out perfect English anymore as my ears are going to hell.

You are so smart and have such a great fluency for making your understanding of languages accessible to regular folk like me, Plus there's your wonderful voice and terrific attitude. Thank you for your marvelous channel, I always learn so much from you.

Fascinating content! Great job!

I had a very eclectic experience taking classes in Los Angeles. There were 15 students in my class, 10 of us were born in the US, 2 in India, 1 in Brazil, 1 in Venezuela and 1 in Germany. Conversation was ALWAYS interesting between us. Here's how it laid out. 2 of the USers were from Washington, D.C. and grew up in black neighborhoods. They could talk in a way we all just smiled cause they were having such a good time not being understood by the rest of us. However, the native New Yorker was able to get in on the jokes some of the time. I grew up in Minnesota and a student I made fast friends with early on was born in Ohio. We got along great. We were also the only two who could understand the guy from Alabama. His accent was thick like fudge. However, put him on the phone? Not a clue what the hell he was saying 90% of the time. But for some reason our third midwesterner, from Michigan, was confused by not only the Alabaman but myself and my Ohioan friend sometimes. Not sure why. The rest were California born, raised and studying and had NO clue what most of us were talking about sometimes. Just asking them for a pop (soda) would make their heads explode and the rest of us laugh. And it got even MORE interesting when you added the internationals. The German, thankfully, was fluent in English but predominately stuck with the Californians as it was the most comprehensible version of English he understood. The Venezuelan and the Brazilian would ALWAYS talk to each other in their native language which was fascinating to watch because Spanish is spoken in Venezuela and Portuguese in Brazil. Neither one spoke the other's language. I understand from speaking to them after watching this marvelous dance of the native tongue that the Venezuelan had better luck understanding the Brazilian overall but if the Venezuelan was having difficulty being understood by the Brazilian, she would use synonyms until they found a word that was similar enough in Portuguese so that the Spanish speaker could continue. Lost yet? Cause there's more. The Californians actually did okay with the Venezuelan's Spanish though only one of them could speak Spanish back. BUT the Californian who spoke Spanish was taught by her mother who was born in Colombia and so there were regional variances that had to be overcome. I could understand the German sometimes but could only respond in English because there is a large population of German speakers where I grew up plus my Father and Brother both speak it quite well but I was never formally taught. Finally, the pièce de résistance, the Indians were the most perplexing of all. One grew up in rural India, the other in a prominent family in New Delhi. He could speak Hindi, his tribal language and was only moderately comfortable with English when he arrived (don't worry, he got much better as time wore on). She could speak English but knew only four phrases in Hindi. Hello. Good bye. Thank you. Yes/No. That was it. I literally knew more Hindi than she did cause I was obsessed with Bollywood movies at the time. To make the He feel more comfortable and confident in the group, in our off time, He and I would sing our favorite Bollywood songs back and forth. I didn't know word for word what they meant but I at least knew the gist. She, like the German, was more likely to understand the Californians than the rest of the English speakers but oddly enough, by the end of the course, the She, the Venezuelan and the Portuguese were an inseparable group and none of us had any clue what they were speaking by the end of the year. Best class EVER!

@kanyewest9165

5 жыл бұрын

You can make a religion outta this

@killuastark1414

5 жыл бұрын

Thanks for that haha

@JazzyCrumbles

5 жыл бұрын

South American languages ended up being slightly more similar because of the massive native American language groups here, the closeness of spanish and Portuguese, and the influence of Yoruba and other similar African language groups that mixed in. It's a party down here haha

@omara.ramirezsosa7393

5 жыл бұрын

Beautiful story! thanks for sharing

@weremattc00lK1d

5 жыл бұрын

Not just languages but dialects play a big part in the whole understanding. I'm from North West England, a few years back my Dad went to New York and while there he tried getting some maccies. The woman at the till couldn't understand a word he was saying, like he was speaking a different language. Took him four attempts of saying "Big mac and coke, please" for her to work it out

I just call this the "talking to a toddler" conflict.

@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714

3 жыл бұрын

The child can understand you beter.

@max-bh2bk

2 жыл бұрын

Adult: "What do you want?" Toddler: "qnocnsiabw" Adult: "What?" Parent: "oh they want some water"

@lululula-kt5iv

2 жыл бұрын

that was genius

Thank you for this most wonderful video. I love languages. So I guess I have the passion. I love to help. So I guess I have desire. I work in customer service and many times I’ve been able to understand what my customer is trying to tell me, when they have limited vocabulary. I am english speaking only. I see it as a challenge and I really enjoy helping others. Thank you NativLang 💜😁

As i Spanish speaker I could have close to perfect conversations with fluent Portuguese and Italian speakers

Lol someday an Azeri pilot says "Uçağımız Bakı'ya düşecektir." which means "Our plane will land in Baku." in their language but while the verb "düşmek" means "to fell down" in Turkey Turkish. So, a little chaos wasnhappened in the plane. :D

@amirafiq70

5 жыл бұрын

Does this ever happen?

@serglian8558

5 жыл бұрын

Amir Afiq He says That this may happen,it might.

@Antyla

5 жыл бұрын

Roun Dair Nope, he definitely didn't. "Someday an Azeri pilot say *s* " That, in English, would be the indicative mood... Okay, kidding. He did say "someday", which to me qualifies enough for possible future(depends on the intonation, though).

@SgtTwilight

5 жыл бұрын

I remember hearing from an English teacher that non Native English speakers have trouble grasping English tensing rules, and my experiences on forums with large SEA and Latin American userbases tend to ring true of that. Maybe it was jut an accident?

@dianathescornofthemoon7762

5 жыл бұрын

- this is just a b1 speaker pls

From experience I can say that having a broad vocabulary in your own language (knowing many synonyms and rarely used forms, especially archaic) helps understanding closely related languages.

@FOLIPE

5 жыл бұрын

Artur M. I agree with that. Also, knowing secondary less common senses of words, that helps too.

@chrisyt402

5 жыл бұрын

Brālis no Lietuvas? :D

@MrCrashDavi

5 жыл бұрын

this

@ploosqva

5 жыл бұрын

Yes! Also, etymology. It should be taught where words come from. This way it's sometimes easier to understand in foreign context

@JohnJohnson-ox3uc

5 жыл бұрын

Etymology used to be taught as part of English, reading, and spelling. I don't really see signs of it in any of my kids' homework.

I definitely think the insane variation of Norwegian dialects helps out a bunch. When I hear Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese, they honestly sound like (in varying degrees somewhat obscure) Norwegian dialects to me. With that mindset, it's way easier to decipher what is being said than if my mind tells me that this is another, presumably different language. So attitude means a lot!

I'm someone who used a lot of traditional yorkshire dialect when speaking english and occasionally have a word from scots thrown in because of my exposure to it from having a small scottish herritage. It always felt weird growing up when I heard people struggle to understand tricky accents like in the scene from hot fuzz, and difficulty understanding scottish people talking because it felt very normal to me being so exposed to a mixture of accents sounds and dialect variety. I only really experienced the struggle of not understanding harder dialect/accents when learning foreign languages and it really makes my ear for understanding scots and hard english dialects feel like a super power now

I am Romanian and for the most part of my trip in Portugal I had the impression that people were speaking in my Moldovan accent but that I could not understand all the words they were saying. When in Italy I could understand everybody but nobody could understand me speaking Romanian. Same in Spain. But Portugal was the one that stayed with me the most. Romanian has a lot of words in common with Portuguese as well, and we pronounce them in the exact same way in N-E Romania. “Cu un kilogram de carne și un litru de vin nu se moare de foame “ is the phrase that is 100% Portuguese and Romanian. Thank you for all your beautiful work.

@Fenditokesdialect

4 жыл бұрын

Yeah but the rest of us Romance speakers can't tell what how you use all those words together cause Romanian has a case system and strap-on articles that the others don't use. To us it just sounds like a string of recognisable words but with no way of knowing how those words are put together into an understandable sentence.

@laiskomel

4 жыл бұрын

for me, as a brazilian, i can understand some romanian when written, but when spoken it’s quite difficult to get the words or the context

@dstrdm

4 жыл бұрын

Well I'm Mexican so I speak Spanish, “Cu un kilogram de carne și un litru de vin nu se moare de foame “ means With a kilogram of meat and a liter of wine you don't starve :-)

@kucam12mischablue

4 жыл бұрын

@@dstrdm latin brothers from the two extremities of the empire

@kucam12mischablue

4 жыл бұрын

@@Fenditokesdialect that is because we have been heavily influenced by the slavic sea that surrounds us

I used to work with this Jamaican guy who sat next to me. we had a guy from our Australian branch come visit us and our boss decided to have the Jamaican show the Australian around the facility. They were both speaking english but couldn't understand a word each other were saying. I understood both perfectly and ended up translating...English to English.

@Rayvn7

5 жыл бұрын

A Jamacain is perfectly easy to understand, unlike what this guy in the video says. If you don't know what a Jamacan is saying it's because he CHOOSES to use a bunch of slang or purposely sound bad. Just like if an American also does that, or if someone were to speak the way that Cosmopolitian writes, you would not understand 20% of what they are saying and you would look at them to indicate how stupid they are when you do understand them. But if a Jamaican uses only real English words, you can understand them easily. Jut like if a black American uses only real English words, instead of purposely sounding moronic, then any native or foreign English speak from any country will be able to understand them, but won't be able to understand if they purposely speak stupidly like some Jamaicans sometimes do.

@arbonthepirate

5 жыл бұрын

I didn't say that Jamaicans were hard to understand. Every person I worked with could understand they guy just fine. It was just the one Australian guy that couldn't. I have no idea why I am sure a linguist could break it down.

@arbonthepirate

5 жыл бұрын

I also had this situation happen to me with a Cajun man. I couldn't understand him at all but he could understand me just fine. His wife, who was born in california had to translate for me.

@normaninconnu3633

5 жыл бұрын

Jamacains have their own dialect of English (patwa/patois), which they speak among themselves.It is probably close to being a separate language.It only sounds moronic to morons who don't understand it or know of its existence.

OMG it's the scandinavia episode. not one minute in and I'm already excited

When we, a class of students from Germany, were in Florence (Italy) for our graduation trip we spent one evening at restaurant. During that we noticed that our classmate of Portuguese descent was talking lively to some strangers at the table next to ours. We asked him in astonishment if they happened to be Portuguese, too. But he replied that they were actually Italians and that it was surprisingly easy for them to understand one another...

Pennsylvanian "Dutch" spoken by the Amish is very hard for German speakers to understand but the Amish understand German just fine. I've seen tourist interactions take a turn for the strange when the Amish ended up speaking English because it was easier for the German to understand but the German just keeps speaking German because the Amish vendor understands it just fine.

@Lucas-yo3ut

5 жыл бұрын

Actually Pennsylvanian Dutch is some kind of a palatine dialect (the dialect Germans speak in a small area in the western half of germany) since many settlers came from there. Somebody from Rhineland Palatinate can actually understand them. But German dialects are often not mutually intelligible. Unless it's standard German. I'm from the countryside of south Bavaria. Someone from Hamburg or Berlin could not understand anything. But of course everyone can speak high German too. But that's another thing

@dhawthorne1634

5 жыл бұрын

I am aware that it the "Dutch" is a misnomer. I didn't however know where the dialect originated. I'll have to take note if there are ever any tourists who can actually speak with them. The only person I am aware of like that is someone from the German deli at Central Market in Lancaster. He can communicate fairly effectively with the German Tourists and the Amish, though it is likely he is 3rd generation seeing as he seems most comfortable speaking English and has no accent.

@Lucas-yo3ut

5 жыл бұрын

if you ever notice any tourist who can understand them, ask them if they're from the Saarland or Kaiserslautern area. Because this is where they originate. I've been there with a friend from Saarland and he could actually understand them. I could as well, since I had been living in Kaiserslautern for some time but not as effectively.

@Thumper17

5 жыл бұрын

D Hawthorne I actually was with German friends on an amish farm in Canada and they couldn't quite understand my friends German. She's from Munich, not sure of the dialect, accent or if she used any slang but I found that curious.

@Ekaekto

5 жыл бұрын

Interesting. I find it ok to understand. A typical asymmetric intelligebility is Dutch v. German though. :-)

6:48 Norway was under Danish rule from 1376-1814... that might be the resolution of that mystery.

@Carewolf

4 жыл бұрын

Well, as an original cause. The result is a shared vocabulary. Which makes Danish and Norwegian closer even to this day, though grammar and pronounciation is different. Also both countries have a wide range of extreme dialects that are further from their own standard tongue, than the other language. Swedish has different words, which makes it tricky for Danish and Norwegian speakers. Even if it is retardedly overpronounced just like Norwegian.

@mettehustad8007

4 жыл бұрын

And then under Swedish rule from 1814 until 1905

@bevanderson6245

4 жыл бұрын

Written records in Norway until the 20th century were kept in Dano-Norsk because the early record-keepers (priests or ministers) were often educated in Denmark (or educated in Norway by someone who had been educated in Denmark); some had trained for the priesthood and knew Latin, perhaps German (after the Reformation). e.g., Martin is recorded as Martinus (Latin influence), or Erik is written as Erich (German influence) in some cases. Then there are also three extra letters of the alphabet for each language, phonetic spellings of local dialects, as well as interchangeable letters of the alphabet, notably I/J/sometimes Y, and W/V, G/K, K/Q, D/T), and no Norwegian dictionary was written until 1917, so there were no standardized forms of spelling. In modern Norway there are two official languages (Bokmål and Nynorsk) that everyone learns in school, plus English as a second language from early grade school forward through the end of their formal schooling so they often know English as well (sometimes better) than native American English speakers. I studied modern Norwegian in the early '80s knowing that the three Scandinavian languages are mutually intelligible (at least in written formats) and knowing one meant I'd be able to read all three. That did not prepare me for all of the above, plus Gothic penmanship in the earliest records when I got my first computer twenty years later in '01 and started doing genealogy research in all three languages, starting first with Norwegian. The learning curve was more like trekking straight up the side of a mountain without safety lines until I found groups of people on various genealogy lists who could help with all of that as well as deciphering handwriting, abbreviations, and transcribing Dano-Norsk. I got a Dano-Norsk-to-English Translating Dictionary from a museum (they had extras), copyright 1875, but most of it is in Gothic type. Yikes! Altho Norway always functioned as a separate country, Norway was under the "protection" of Denmark until 1814 when Denmark was losing land during the Napoleonic wars. Norway signed their first constitution on 17 May 1814 (still celebrated today as Syttende Mai - like July 4 in the US), and was then under the "protection" of Sweden. The Norwegian intelligentsia pushed for separation because they felt there were too many influences on their language, and they also wanted to "Norwegianize Norwegian." Because the language and customs of Denmark were closer to Norwegian (considering past centuries and written records, etc.) Norway took the second son of the Danish royal family as their king and became a completely separate country again in 1905; his descendants are on the throne of Norway today. Because of a combination of taking Norwegian for two years (altho I forgot most of it because there was no one with whom I could practice the language), doing genealogy research in all three countries, and watching movies or television shows with English sub-titles from all three countries, I can understand some of the simple sentences and phrases and a few words here and there in spoken Norwegian and Swedish as long as they don't talk too fast. However, spoken Danish, is, to my ears, mostly unintelligible, and I find it extremely difficult to try to speak words in Danish; most words seem to be pronounced from the throat, it sounds very Germanic to me, and I can't imitate the sounds.

@floatingsara

3 жыл бұрын

Southern Italy was under Spanish rule for some centuries, North-West Italy under French rule and North-East Italy under Austrian rule. The funny thing is that mutual intelligibility goes better between Spanish and North-East Italian dialects than anything else.

@Tatwinus

3 жыл бұрын

@@bevanderson6245 the problem with danish is that every dane swallows a potato at birth but noone manages to get it all the way down into the stomach.

Very much informative. excellent deliberation 🙏

I am a blond/blue American but learned Mandarin about 50 years ago. Back then, as well as now, I would start a conversation in Chinese, to which I usually got blank stares often accompanied by "I don't speak English!". After I persisted in speaking Chinese to them, a light would go on, they would look at me in amazement, and would often say ,"You are speaking Mandarin! Your Chinese is so good! Your accent is better than mine!" Which reinforced my observation that their inability to understand me was not due to a defect in my pronunciation. Rather, there was a "switch" inside their minds, and it needed to be changed from default "foreign devil" to Mandarin, or no matter what I said, it would not be intelligible to the Chinese listeners. As for how that fits into your explanation, I would think that it fits better with the well dressed Italian theory.

I'm an Iraqi who probably understand many of the Arab dialects with no problem, yet when I speak with my own dialect to other Arabs, especially levant Arabs, they have a harder time understanding me. This is usually because of the Isolation Iraq experienced in the last 40 years where a whole generation of Arabs grew up without being introduced to Iraqi movies and music, while Iraqis still were able to watch Syrian, Egyptian and Kuwaiti movies, soap operas and music.

@YamenX0

5 жыл бұрын

Hello brother. I'm Syrian, and yes at first I had issues with your dialect, but after a couple of hours of listening, I picked it up quite well. I think the real issue lies in Megrebi region.

@edi9892

5 жыл бұрын

I once heard something in a pop song, that seemed Arabic to me, in fact, I would have sworn that it is, but when I asked a Moroccan about it, she could only say that it is most likely Arabic, but she couldn't not tell for sure!

@blakops000007

5 жыл бұрын

edi Link? Maybe I can help.

@YamenX0

5 жыл бұрын

I don't know if it's another dialect of Arabic or not (As I think Moroccans understand most other Arabic dialects). Maybe it's Maltese, as it shares many similarities with Arabic. If you have a link, please send it to me.

@blakops000007

5 жыл бұрын

Yamen S. Hi friend, yes the Meghrebis are a problem, but I actually was capable of picking up on some of what they say when they wrote it in Arabic. But the problem is that they talk too fast, their Arabic is misspoken, they have many French words. And even when they speak with each other they don't even use Arabic letters; they use latin symbols lol.

I´m german and I work in an office where we only have dutch client. So I was learning dutch at that time. My coworker, who is native dutch, called me and said that that she had a dutch client in the line, which she barely couldn´t understand because of his frisian accent. So she connected him to me. I was really afraid that I also wouldn´t understand him, if she as a native dutch had some trouble. But funny enough it was absolutely no problem to understand this person perfectly. I have no clue what the reason for this was, maybe my german helped me. But where I always struggle is with belgisch people, their dutch is really strange and they mumble all the words so much.

@clas683

4 жыл бұрын

Gildenkanal "Die Letzte Legion" I am not surpriced you could understand West frisian pretty good. In my opinion they have a clean prenounciation of words and they say ’G’ like the rest of the world. And ’you are’ = ’do bist’ in frisian (not ’je bent’) which is the same as german. I am a swede who has just red some frisian and listened to some frisian music and to me it looks like a pretty easy and lovely language to learn, shame it is declining.

@sunriselg

4 жыл бұрын

But at least grammatical genders make sense with Belgians.

@Arado159

3 жыл бұрын

I'm a native Dutch speaker from Friesland and have the exact same as you with Belgian Dutch (and other southern Dutch accents in general). As you say, it's like they mumble and just do not articulate things well enough to me. In turn, apparently many non-Frisian Dutch people can't understand my accent well, which I in turn find puzzling (I articulate everything so clear, don't I?? lol) . Interesting how that works.

@henrylicitra2906

3 жыл бұрын

I've been told I speak German with a very german sounding accent (native English speaker), but my vocab and grammar are not very good, which has made it tough practicing with fluent german speakers because they hear my German and start speaking quickly and I freeze up lmao

@tollieman5750

3 жыл бұрын

My native language is Afrikaans and my second language is English (currently also studying German) and to be honest Dutch to me sounds like Afrikaans but with a heavy accent. I can understand it easily as long as words are not joined together too much. I guess it makes sense because those three languages have similar origins.

I love your channel. I have been watching your videos non stop. I had went to a very awesome concert. I was sitting next to three men who were from Italy. I asked them a question they couldn't understand me, but the one thing I noticed they could sing every song in english. It's just hard to understand. Again I love your channel.

I would add that some communities speak slower and therefore they are understood more easily. This was revealed to me in my native Texas when I happened to go to a meeting and sat next to a visiting Scottish colleague. We had communicated solely through telecon in large meetings. I told him my apologies but I understood less than 50% of what he said and I relied on co-workers to translate his information after the meeting. I asked him if us Texans were as difficult to understand. I laughed and mentioned that "Texans talk real slowly."

@SamnissArandeen

9 ай бұрын

US Southern varieties tend to be slower, even extending to the music from those parts. Did you know that listening to country music was how Jackie Chan learned English? Apparently Texas and adjacent are just that easy to understand for first time listeners.

I'm Canadian, and I at least used to be fluent in Standard French _in spite of_ the Canadian education system, rather than _because of._ Some years ago I was helping a guy from Québec navigate public transit; because of his Québec accent I asked him to speak English to me, and I spoke French back to him. Beautiful-each of us using our non-native language to speak to the other in their native language. =3

@sammosqueda177

5 жыл бұрын

KooriShukuen I’ve done this many times with students who speak English as a second language. I use my horrible Spanish to talk to them and they respond back in English. I think it also helps them learn that it’s okay to make language mistakes lol

@Oxmustube

5 жыл бұрын

KooriShukuen I am french canadian and I have no problem understanding movies from the sixties, either in original french or translation from american movies, yet now I need subtitles. The shift that has happened in France over the last 30 years is remarkable. Especially due to the centralisation of vowels via the influence of Arabic speakers.

@saylitiwaciwin6762

5 жыл бұрын

@@Oxmustube Excusez-moi, de quoi parlez-vous lorsque vous évoquez la "centralisation des voyelles" ? Etait-ce le processus de désarrondissement des voyelles (ɔ -> ʌ) ? De plus, peu importe le changement phonétique, il me semble assez difficile d'attribuer le processus de divergence entre la version européenne et la version canadienne du français à l'influence d'une langue telle que l'arabe (surtout que les européens francophones ne maitrisent pas dans leur majorité l'arabe qui leur semble une langue étrangère), peut-être la centralisation faisait référence à l'affaiblissement des voyelles dans les dialectes maghrébins, était-ce le cas ? Pouvez-vous éclairer ces divers points, s'il-vous-plait :)

@Oxmustube

5 жыл бұрын

sayli tiwaçiwin Par influence de l'arabe, je parle surtout des locuteurs natifs de cette langue qui habitent maintenant dans la région parisienne. Puisqu'en arabe on retrouve moins de voyelles qu'en français, certains linguistes pensent que ceci pourrait expliquer la disparition de la distinction entre des paires comme Rome et arôme, pâte et patte, côte et cote, etc. Si une autre explication plus plausible existe, je serais extrêmement intéressé à en prendre connaissance. Si le terme centralisation est fautif, je m'en excuse.

@kellyhigh4087

5 жыл бұрын

I am a native English speaker and trained in Parisian/Standard French. I got a job that requires Quebecois French and as soon as any of them hear my accent, we both speak in Franglish or we end up emailing back and forth instead of speaking. I doubt I will ever get the accent. My English accent comes from the American South with some Minnesotan, so Creole French comes a lot easier than Quebecois.

I was serving at a hotel restaurant a couple of years ago and there was a table of Spanish people and a table of Italian people. The next day they came to eat and they sat tat the same table. It took me a few beats but I soon realised that each one was speaking their own language and I asked them about it. I was completely stunned to discover that people who spoke different languages could communicate. That moment stuck with me (as it did with you) for the reason that my former perception and my biases towards language were completely shattered. It was a beautiful experience.

@GdotWdot

4 жыл бұрын

I know a pair of friends at work who go out for a smoke together. One speaks Spanish, the other one Italian; they seem to understand each other perfectly.

@cozasful

4 жыл бұрын

@@GdotWdot It's just beautiful. It's the reason I wanted to learn Spanish cause after that I can learn Italian easier or vice versa

@lauragpm7582

3 жыл бұрын

@@cozasful tbh after learning Spanish the easiest for you to learn would be Portuguese :) you should give it a try .... Btwwww I'm Brazilian and I've been learning Spanish and I use Tandem it made my Spanish improve like 30 percent just by speaking to natives :)

@joaquinandreu8530

3 жыл бұрын

It's very easy for spaniards and italians to understand each other if they are a little bit cultured and know the meanings of the words that are different (i.e: presto/rápido strada/calle, etc.)

@SaffariRose

3 жыл бұрын

They are all sister languages so they share similar origins. I'm currently learning Italian and I practice with my roommate who speaks mostly Spanish (and English). The better my pronunciation, the better she understands me!

This is very interesting! I was taught many languages as a kid, so I ended up knowing 5 languages, and there’s some asymmetric intelligibility involved: I know Dutch, and thus understand Flemish quite well (because, to be honest, it’s basically the same language with an accent), and a bit of Afrikaans too. I’m not sure, but I reckon that Afrikaans speakers are way better at understanding Dutch than we Dutch people at understanding Afrikaans (though it still shouldn’t be too much of a challenge). I also know Romanian, which usually enables speakers to understand other romance languages, while speakers of those romance languages don’t understand Romanian as well. I think that’s because Romania is very isolated from other romance languages - it is instead surrounded by slavic ones, and is heavily influenced by them (while still maintaining its romance core, of course). I don’t have experience in this line of intelligibility because the only other language I interact with is Italian, but I know Italian too as I live in an Italian-speaking place. I would love to go back to not knowing either Italian or Romanian, just to see how that asymmetry would work...

Nice session, Thank you.

As a Galician and Spanish speaker I find it very easy to understand Brazilian Portuguese speakers but much more difficult to understand speakers of European Portuguese (unless they come from the north of Portugal) but I have found that Portuguese speakers in general have no problem understanding me. My favourite moment of mutual intelligibility however was with Italian. I was on holiday in the south of France waiting for a train and overheard and understood an elderly Italian couple discussing the destination of the next train. When they then asked me (in very broken French) if I knew which was the correct train to where they wanted to go, I thought 'what the heck, I'll reply in Spanish'. What followed was a 20 minute conversation in which we talked about a whole range of things, them speaking in Italian, occasionally using the odd Spanish word they knew and me talking in Spanish using the odd Italian word I knew or using a Galician word which I thought would be closer to Italian because of the use of simple vowels where Spanish likes to use diphthongs. It was such a wonderful experience to be able to enjoy such a great conversation with two really lovely people, and while talking to them, 2000 years of history seemed to collapse and in that moment it was like we were just speaking regional dialects of Latin.

@frankendragon5442

5 жыл бұрын

Essentially, you were!

@yehudacavalli3927

5 жыл бұрын

As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker that hasn't much contact with European Portuguese, I find Galician much easier to understand. And Spanish also. I think Galicians and Spaniards pronounce more the vowels, like Brazilians, than the Portuguese people.

@CanisLupusSteparium

5 жыл бұрын

Really? I was on the impression that European Portuguese and Galician were closely related and mutually intelligible. Thanks for sharing.

@chrstopherblighton-sande2981

5 жыл бұрын

You are right in saying that they are closely related, very closely related in fact and both languages are mutually comprehensible. However European Portuguese has a considerably different phonology. The way they pronounce vowels and some consonants differs from Galician - whose phonology is more like Spanish (especially in the standard form you hear on Galician tv) to such a degree that it makes it more of a struggle to understand until you get used to it. The dialects of Portuguese spoken in the north of Portugal however sound much closer to Galician. There's also the Mirandese language spoken in north-eastern Portugal which to my ear sounds even closer to Galician.

@yehudacavalli3927

5 жыл бұрын

From my own experience, yes, I can understand better a Galician than a Portuguese person. I have a theory that Brazilian Portuguese also kept some old traits of Portuguese and Galician-Portuguese spoken by the Portuguese people that "discovered" Brazil at the beginning of the 16th Century, whilst the European Portuguese developed in a different way. While Galician and Spanish developed to a way that looks more like how BP developed. Of course, also BP was influenced by other languages from immigrants that came in the early 1900's. But that's only my personal theory.

As a Danish linguaphile I have read about this asymmetric intelligibility. And some suggest that one reason that Norwegians are better at understanding both Swedish and Danish, than Swedes and Danes understand them and each other could be because they are more use to hear different dialects of their own languages. The public TV and radio broadcaster in Norway have the policy that an employee should speak their own dialect on TV/radio, whereas both the Swedish and Danish public broadcast compagnies throughout their history favored (in the past, required) that employees spoke the standard dialect. Therefore the Norwegians are used to hearing their language being pronounced in many variations.

@brukarnamnet

5 жыл бұрын

Yes, this is very likely an important factor in explaining the asymmetry! Being exposed every day to quite extreme variation within our own language (some of the differences between dialects easily rival the differences between the official Scandinavian languages) both gives us a much larger passive vocabulary, and trains our brains to make sense of speech that sounds very different from our own. I assume "Norwegian" in this presentation means some version of a Oslo dialect. Though it represents the largest number of speakers today, that can hardly an average of Norwegian dialects... Both history and geography places it closer to the other Scandinavian languages. It would be interesting to see these kinds of calculations for other dialects. Personally, I normally have no trouble understanding Danish, but I wouldn't expect the average Dane to understand my dialect which phonetically is much closer to Icelandic than Danish :)

@Smulenify

5 жыл бұрын

There are dialects in Norway I find harder than Danish or Swedish, in fact some I really can’t understand at all! However I also find Danish easier than Swedish because I’ve been exposed to more Danish than Swedish on tv and on vacation.

@jrnandreassen3338

5 жыл бұрын

"The public TV and radio broadcaster in Norway have the policy that an employee should speak their own dialect on TV/radio" - This is mostly true, but the belt between Sande to Bamble never did. This rule you speak of is brand new by the way. We got told to speak "tilvent sosiolekt" like they do in Oslo or we had to convert to new norwegian, which is a purely constructed "dialect". So, according to NRK, we've never had a dialect worthy of TV. The first "hallodame" (woman who stood for presentation of each and every show) for NRK was a woman from Larvik called Kirsten Schøyen Seterelv. She chose to speak "bokmål" (tilvent sosiolekt - like they speak in Oslo) which is also a construct. She would never be allowed to do the job otherwise. Things have changed though. It took a comedian called Bård tufte to change this. After he got hired and had some successful shows they got used to the dialect.

@Smulenify

5 жыл бұрын

Jørn Andreassen True, people with Stavanger dialect still often get judged in Oslo (experienced that a lot), growing up the only Stavanger dialect on TV was completely different from the real dialects of the area, like Egenes meets Oslo dialect. Thankfully more and more actors get to keep their dialect. Teaching Norwegian in Oslo was a problem for le though, I wasn’t allowed to talk dialect which I understand.

@jrnandreassen3338

5 жыл бұрын

loveesc: Don't forget that bokmål, our main written language, was based on "DDD" (Den Dannede Dagligtale) which we got from Danish. And we have been colonized by Denmark, then Sweden, at one time both Denmark and Sweden. I like to think that we know both languages better because we are the smaller country. And genetically speaking we know from earlier on that it would be hell to pay if we didn't understand our Masters. I grew up with Swedish TV and only sometimes Danish TV. I'd wager that almost none of the reg'lar danes or Swedes have NRK (Our national broadcasting company). :)

Nice presentation. Thank you

I've got quite a few asymmetric intelligibility stories. Being Québécois, I can understand the French perfectly as my native tongue but if I speak to them the way I speak to my friends they won't get much of it. Reasons being the French is a significant cultural power, outnumber us by far and many of the movies/cartoons we'll watch as kids will have a European French translation so we're used to it, while Québécois are not very well known outside of Canada, even in the francosphere. But if we speak to them the way we speak on TV (there is quite a gap) they shouldn't struggle that much. And even though English is not my native tongue, I don't have to overthink it when I speak as much as I do with "proper" French even though I don't understand it as much, which is kind of odd. Probably the excess of English-language medias/movies/series, etc. make it easier to think fast. I also speak Spanish and I've learnt some Italian, but ironically I understand Brazilian Portuguese (which I never learnt) better than Italian when I hear them...

@ACBmonkey

2 жыл бұрын

I'm a France French speaker and my best friend is quebecois (pretty heavy accent) it was so difficult to understand him at first and he had no trouble understanding me but with time I was able to understand him perfectly. I found that the rhythm of words and sentences was also different not just pronunciation which is mostly what threw me off at first. Kind of like Australian English vs British English, quebecers tend to shorten stuff or not pronounce every syllable making words that in France would have four syllables two when he said them. This made me feel rushed to say things faster and made me feel my enunciation was redundant somehow haha

@SarahBent

2 жыл бұрын

I'm an Anglophone who works in an Acadian French school with many Europeans. I end up translating French to French fairly often.

I'm an English speaker (American.) I took 4 years of Spanish in school, but no one else in my house spoke Spanish, so I was kind of on my own. In my Junior year of high school, while taking 4th year Spanish, I was very sick. I missed most of the year, having to to complete the year as a self-taught home-schooler. While I was home, I found a channel that had foreign language shows every week. Most were something like Telenovelas, which we watched at school (when I attended.) One day, I was enjoying what I thought was a Spanish show, though it all seemed a bit...off. I could easily follow the story and understood the dialogue for the most part, but the words and pronunciation seemed slightly alien to my ears. When the show returned after a commercial break, flashing the title on the screen for just a second, I was stunned to see that it was actually an Italian show! I was so confused. How could I understand Italian?! I asked my teacher about it the next time I saw her and she laughed. "They are very close, the languages. Muy bien, Querida, muy bien!" My teacher was pleased and gave me an extra A for the day. She was Argentinian and spoke 7 languages. She wasn't very impressed with anyone (including her own children) who spoke less than 5!

@agostinagurgone5581

3 жыл бұрын

Deben ser muy buenas las clases de idiomas en estados unidos, yo tuve inglés toda la secundaria y terminé sin saber ni saludar. Pero luego aprendí, sin darme cuenta, como? Mirando películas en Hindi con subtítulos en Inglés. Leía y si no entendía algo, lo adivinaba por el contexto. Ahora entiendo inglés y también hindi. Ah I'm also Argentinian, from an italian family, so i understand italian too :p

@nobradors

3 жыл бұрын

When I read you were stunned to learn it was italian I thought... Could it be she was being taught Argentinian Spanish? aaand bingo! Italian immigration was huge in Argentina, so much so that it gave our Spanish an Italian kind of singsong.

@57thorns

3 жыл бұрын

Well, it is not that hard to learn Swedish, Norwegian, English, German and Dutch. They are basically variations on 2-3 languages. If you instead go the latin path there is French, Italian, Portuguese and Latin for your first four. Someone that does flawless Finnish, Russian, English and Chinese however is impressive, even if it is "only" four languages, because they open up a few dozen languages at least. Apologies to languages I forgot to mention.

@samsibbens8164

3 жыл бұрын

@@Wildwildmint Depends how often you keep practicing those languages. I read and watch shows and movies in English (when it's the original language), I watch tv shows in Spanish when that's the language the show was made it and I text my colombian friend a lot. I speak French with my roommates and basically everyone who's from where I'm from (Quebec). Initially my French got rusty when I learned Spanish because I was using Spanish 90% to 95% of the time and speaking French pretty much only with my mom when she wasn't at work, and not that much. I also didn't know some new slangs that had developed in Quebec, and sometimes I would accidentally use the Spanish version of a word instead of the French one. Once you've reached a very high level of proficiency it becomes much harder to lose a language, it's mostly initially when most of your time is spent learning a new language that your other languages get rusty.

@Likexner

3 жыл бұрын

@@Wildwildmint Not true. You will get rusty if you dont use a language, but you wont get worse at one by speaking another.

I’ve been studying Swedish and the first time I heard Norwegian I was really surprised. I was like “this sounds like it should be Swedish but it’s not.” It was weird because I could kind of follow along even though I’d never heard Norwegian before

@Redhotsmasher

5 жыл бұрын

Berkley Pearl As a swede I agree, Norwegian kinda sounds like "funny Swedish" in a sense, at least the "standard" (?) Norwegian you hear on TV. Nynorsk is way harder than Bokmål though, I remember reading Wikipedia in Bokmål and Nynorsk once and Bokmål just looked like "funny Swedish with some funny words" to me while the Nynorsk grammar felt really weird and confusing.

@WaffleAbuser

5 жыл бұрын

And then we have Tröndersk: kzread.info/dash/bejne/aGaMydCxYNLfXbQ.html

@thatallguy16

5 жыл бұрын

As a norwegian, I agree with nynorsk being weird and confusing. This despite me being from the west coast of Norway, where the spoken language is more similar to nynorsk than bokmål. Also, something I find quite neat, bokmål is a sort of norwegianized (made to be more similar to the norwegian spoken in and around Oslo) written danish, whilst nynorsk is an amalgam of all the southern (south of Trondheim) spoken dialects of norwegian. Bokmål and nynorsk are the results of us trying to make our own written norwegian, since we only used danish when writing up until 1814, when Denmark-Norway was dissolutioned, and Norway came under a personal union with Sweden (which I'm sure you're aware of, but it sets the stage for why we have two writing systems of (theoretically) equal value and status). The reality is that most people write using bokmål, but each municipality chooses whether bokmål or nynorsk is its standard. Even so, everyone learns both bokmål AND nynorsk in school, because they are both considered "part of our tradition and heritage".

@jespoketheepic

5 жыл бұрын

Norwegian simultaneously looks more like Danish and sounds more like Swedish.

@matteo-ciaramitaro

5 жыл бұрын

I've been studying Norwegian and the same thing happened to me lol

Sweet video! One more example: I am a Peruvian living in the Netherlands, so I'm a Spanish speaking person learning Dutch. And when I listen to German, I can understand some words in German from the knowledge I have been gathering on Dutch. Crazy right?

I (speaking, inter alia, Flemish) had something "similar" in Amsterdam. I understood everybody, but when I asked something to the dutch people, they'd (almost) always respond in English. Most of the time they'd say "Could you repeat?". So at first I thought they where just trying to show off there English or something like that. But apparently Dutch people, depending on the region, have it somewhat difficult to understand Flemish. So now I speak English when I'm around Amsterdam 😂

@Widdekuu91

Жыл бұрын

Haha, ik ben Nederlands, ik denk dat het wel te maken heeft met de plek in België. Zit jij wat zuidelijker toevallig? Of is het West-Vlaams? Als het een beetje K3-taal is, dan kunnen we het goed begrijpen. Maar zodra iemand van 'alé, de bel doet 't niet' naar "ge zijt une zot, mijne pinkers doen ut niet, ge moogt et vermaken, den auto staat ginder" gaat, dan wordt het wel lastig.

Whoa... thank you for sharing your stories. We may now have the internet's best collection of asymmetric intelligibility tales right here in the comments! What a treasure. I'm still reading my way through all of them. Oh and yes, I bought the nuts.

@johnmatkinson

5 жыл бұрын

NativLang so when I was a kid, my family (fairly generic US English speakers - think CNN anchor) went to Canada and brought my cousin, who at that time had never left Texas. We were doing fine until we visited a shop run by a recent immigrant from Scotland who spoke with a strong accent. My immediate family could understand both of them, but they could not understand each other. And that is within the same language!

@helpahoe920

5 жыл бұрын

Ooo I wouldn’t have bought the nuts if i were you

@Neldidellavittoria

5 жыл бұрын

Jacek Sas. Yes, I remember my Ukrainian grandparents sometimes had tea with a Polish couple and a Russian couple, and they each spoke in their own language but somehow they communicated. Alas, my mother never spoke Ukrainian to us kids, because it was the language she used to talk to my grandmother about anything they didn't want us to overhear. Who knows, it might've come in handy to know Ukrainian as well.

@HelgeTaksdal

5 жыл бұрын

The reason for norwegians understanding other scandinavians is due to our diverse dialects, and the dialects having a high status compared to Sweden and Denmark. We have the written language of the Danes and the spoken tone of the Swedes.

@Neldidellavittoria

5 жыл бұрын

Yaa Obenewaah, It seems to be also true of many Spanish speakers from Latin America. I'm sorry guys, no offence meant, but I've seen lots of comments over YT complaining when a film is dubbed in Iberian Spanish.

I’m surprised no one has said that nobody who speaks English can understand the Scots.

@ccheyenne

4 жыл бұрын

I lived in the US as a child but have spent the past 20+ years in Europe, mostly in my native Spain. My partner, who is Spanish but speaks English well, went to Scotland on vacation a few years ago and had a lot of fun with how people speak there. I had no problem at all with understanding, but he didn't understand anything the first day or two and then slowly started to understand and as he picked up the accent and common words he'd never heard (like wee for small). We also heard quite a bit of Gaelic which we obviously didn't understand at all. Honestly Scottish is lovely.

@moritamikamikara3879

3 жыл бұрын

Not _the_ Scots but Scots. I can understand an English speaking Scottish person... most of the time, but if they try to speak Scots thats a fucked language and its more Celtic than English so idk what they're saying

@olliert4840

3 жыл бұрын

@@moritamikamikara3879 Scots is actually germanic I believe, it's Gaelic that is celtic.

@moritamikamikara3879

3 жыл бұрын

@@olliert4840 I get that it's a mixture of English which is Germanic and like Viking or something but I just can't make head or tails of it

@morlandalamaga5899

3 жыл бұрын

When I travelled through Scodland, I just needed to realise what was pronounced in a special way. Then it was easier to understand that the London people... 🤔

Hi. I married a Norwegian and lived and worked in Norway back in the 80's. I studied hard to learn the language and was getting by after a couple of months. When I left 5 years later my Norwegian was indistinguishable from that of the natives, so I was told. I did find out that Scandinavian, German, Dutch and , importantly, English all share a root in Germanic. This really helped me to learn a substantial vocabulary very quickly. Along the way, because TV was pretty much trilingual, I picked up enough Swedish and Danish to hold a reasonable conversation in both of these languages as well. I only had to modify a few sentence structures, though I did have difficulty deciphering Danish pronunciation and pronouncing the Danish words myself, but the written word was very similar, so reading Danish was easy. The opposite, however, could be said of Swedish, where the written word often differs to the Norwegian but the sounds are quite similar making conversation easy but reading a little less so. Altogether, it was a fun experience and a skill that I have to this day, though mainly only comprehension as my facial muscles are no longer practiced in any of the three languages. I am confident though, that if I had to, I could pick up where I left off 33 years ago very quickly. The main legacy that I gained from learning another language, nearly 3, is a very keen interest in all languages, modern and ancient. And now I have found this channel were I can find out more. Great stuff.

In India this is very prevalent, if you know Hindi, you can understand bits of Gujarati, punjabi, basically North Indian languages, though some are easier than others. South Indian languages are the same except Malayalam and Tamil is more compatible, than Malayalam and Kannada per say.

@abhii__4675

10 ай бұрын

I wouldnt call it asymmetrical though, those speakers can understand Hindi as well, it wouldve only been asymmetrical had they been unable to understand hindi while hindi speakers could understand them, the languages are incredibly similar to one another.

Well, I live in Cyprus (ooofff, controversial politics). Both my parent and I speak Turkish Cypriot, however since they teach Modern Turkish in school, my Cypriot Turkish is less Cypriot than theirs. One day, while at a shop in "south" Cyprus (ooffff the controversy), the workers were arguing on what to do. I, despite currently learning Greek, didn't have enough knowledge of it to understand anything. But my parents, who can't even read Greek, did understand what the problem was. The cash register was broken. They understood it, because they spoke a stronger dialect of Turkish Cypriot, while my Turkish Cypriot was more "Turkish with a funny accent" than actual Turkish Cypriot. I was a bit annoyed like, it is ME that is taking Greek lessons but it is THEM that can understand Greeks when they can't even read Greek???? >:(

@adamantiumgonzalez8389

5 жыл бұрын

Bertú Hahaha, funny

@greatwolf5372

5 жыл бұрын

Interesting, given the Cross in your profile I thought you would be a Greek Cypriot.

@Zdrange03

5 жыл бұрын

Turkish Cypriot or Cypriot Turkish?

@atruv2089

5 жыл бұрын

Judorange1980 "Turkish Cypriot" refers to the people, while "Cypriot Turkish" refers to the language. Edit: I read my comment again and realised that I have used the terms wrongly XD

@atruv2089

5 жыл бұрын

Great Wolf I would think that too, to be honest XD. But, no I'm not. I just grabbed the Flag of Georgia because I like it, and coloured it to Orange-Yellow, because I like that colour XD. I am interrested in Christianity though, but the explanations on the internet just confuse me. Also I live next to the border which is next to a church, so I can head the church bell in weekend mornings XD. This one sounds calm and very beautiful, but I know some that simply sound loud annoying!

First of all I’ve just spent a solid 45 minutes reading this comment section since it’s super educational. Second, stories! I’m American but I studied Spanish for 6.5 years in school and a bit on my own. During one summer in college I studied abroad in Florence, Italy and found that I was very easily able to get around with my knowledge of Spanish and bits of Italian. After this I ended up returning to the same school in Florence for my Masters degree. The fact that I studied Spanish really helped me learn the Italian language. Since that’s what I’ve been speaking for the past 7 months, my Italian is better than my Spanish now. But in Italian class there’s another girl who speaks Spanish and sometimes we help each other out by comparing the two languages. I’m also an English tutor, and the mom of the girl I teach is Spanish. I hadn’t spoken Spanish in about 3 months but when she started speaking it super fast to me after I told her I speak it, I could understand everything she told me! I think this proves the theory of exposure to both of these languages. Eventually I want to speak both Spanish and Italian fluently. Also, I lived with a host family before I had to fly home (due to coronavirus and concerns about ensuing travel bans). When I first moved in I didn’t know much Italian at all, so I would substitute words with the ones I knew in Spanish. Some of these words were common to Italian as well, so they were mostly able to understand. But some others weren’t the same and I would know this when the person would give me a very confused look 😂. Now I’ve found that since I’ve been learning and speaking Italian I compare Spanish-Italian instead of Italian-Spanish like I used to.

@TheRealSpeedWolf

3 жыл бұрын

Good luck with that as Spanish and Italian are similar, your brain will awfully confused the 2 as one of them it just more dramatic in speaking, I speak French English Spanish German Thai Tagalog to a fluent degree, when I'm in Italy or Portugal I let my Spanish take over without even trying, I am pretty sure it's because of my French and English that Help with the different pronunciation of words.

@floatingsara

3 жыл бұрын

This is a beautiful experience! My two cents: keep on reading and speaking both languages, it'll prove effective. My mom tried to learn German but got confused with English since she had no occasion to practice none of them. Luckily for me, I am constantly exposed to German and English (and French) so I'm not having the same problem. Nowadays we have plenty of tools to do so. Greetings from Italy!

@pursuitsoflife.6119

3 жыл бұрын

I find that languages are like a living organism, almost like a pet, if you will. It grows, breathes, and extends its branches or arms into different parts of your life. I have come to America knowing English and French, and I have been picking up Spanish here quite easily with my English/Romance background. Try nurturing your pet, and let it grow big!

@rjfaber1991

3 жыл бұрын

I always find it funny how Italian is easy to understand for Spaniards and vice versa, since Italian and Spanish aren't actually that closely related within the Romance family tree. Italian is genetically a lot closer to French than it is to Spanish for instance. Of course French's completely different phonology is a stumbling block for Italians wanting to understand French, but I still find it funny how Spanish of all languages (or at least all 'major' languages, not counting Neapolitan, Emilian or other languages of Italy) ends up being the one most mutually intelligible with Italian. Then again, I suppose it's not too dissimilar to the Danish-Norwegian-Swedish example given in the video. Danish and Swedish are a lot more closely related to each other than either is to Norwegian, and yet Norwegian forms the middle ground of mutual intelligibility. I suspect that in both Spanish-Italian and Danish-Norwegian, historical politics has played a role. After all, Norway was ruled by Denmark for three centuries, while much of Italy was ruled by Spain (or the Crown of Aragon, to be more precise) for a similar amount of time.

@mariotheundying

2 жыл бұрын

Did you go to Latin America? How did you react to learn that some words have different meanings on different countries?

As an American who’s half-iranian(Persian), I can speak Farsi and English fluently. I find that it’s honestly very easy for English to pick up on Farsi, at first people are intimidated by the “Arabic” sound but a lot of the words are very “palatable” IMO. It’s cool to see reactions.

@sionsoschwalts2762

Жыл бұрын

I'm curious now!

I am an Estonian who has learned to speak Finnish. I’m sure that it’s easier for Estonians to study and understand Finnish than vice versa because of the way how our languages have changed over centuries. For exaple many Finnish nouns in the first case (conjugation) are like Estonian nouns already in the 3rd case (if it’s understandable to others without this grammatical feature).

@ItsFinRocket

Жыл бұрын

As a finnish person, i find it much easier to read estonian rather than listening to it. Mostly because the "speed" of speaking is so much different.

@Pelletajuton1

10 ай бұрын

Um, i always thought Estonians just natively mostly understand Finnish 😅 Especially orally. Quite the opposite is true the other way, or at least for me.. if there is time to stare at the words long enough, quite a lot becomes intelligible, but the speak is somehow more streamlined for speed and my buffer gets overrun pretty much instantly.. so i kind of assume Finnish sounds to Estonians like a soundtrack being played back at 25% speed 😝

I speak Slovak and It's incredibly easy for me to understand Czech, but it's not so easy for Czech speakers to get what I'm saying. I can also understand Slovenian and Polish but it takes a bit longer, and Croatian too. It's quite fun how these languages are connected.

@kristiangeorgiev5915

2 жыл бұрын

totally agree

@HeroManNick132

2 жыл бұрын

But 1 thing surprises me that usually the Czechs and Slovaks are able to understand better Macedonian than Bulgarian (even if these languages are like Czech and Slovak). Seems the hardest Slavic languages for the West Slavs to understand is Bulgarian. And me as Bulgarian I would say Polish is the hardest because of these pz, cz, sz sounds. If I read this very carefully I will be able to understand 30-50% but in conversation like 10-20%. Even if Czech and Slovak are challenging too they are surprisingly easier because they kinda sound like the Serbo-Croatian and the Slovenian language but more complicated.

@polishhussarmapping258

2 жыл бұрын

Do you understand written Polish better than spoken Polish?

@jakubzeleznik1232

2 жыл бұрын

It is pretty weird how similar Slavic languages are. I'm Slovak as well (though born and living in Canada) and have very little trouble with Czech. If I concentrate, I can also somewhat understand Polish and even a bit of Serbian, surprisingly. My parents who grew up in Slovakia can understand Czech perfectly, Polish near perfectly, and then also Russian. My mom's cousing also grew up watching Polish TV. He now understands Polish perfectly but can't speak it.

@clementpoon120

2 жыл бұрын

might be just me but i found slovak and czech more similar to ukrainian

*goes through notifications* meme... meme... watched... watched... NativLang... Dunno why I'm even subbe... WAIT! NATIVLANG! How good can this day get!?

@ramiromayorga_

5 жыл бұрын

João-Pedro Sampaio it'd be better with World Cup matches:'c

@gustavovillegas5909

5 жыл бұрын

LMAO SAME DUDE

@qwertyTRiG

5 жыл бұрын

João-Pedro Sampaio NativLang and Artefexian uploaded on the same day. That's a good day for linguistics.

@pedrosampaio7349

5 жыл бұрын

TRiG (Ireland) too bad I didn't catch it yesterday due to time zones and me being sick.

I'm Czech, and we have a lot of languages that sort of sound close enough to understand with enough goodwill from both sides. Recently, I was helping a Ukrainian woman in a store and we would get the gist of what the other one was saying pretty easily, even if it took two repeats and a bit of figuring out which of our words are similar, and it was just about store discounts. But the real story I want to tell is about Slovak. It's practically a sister language, most people understand it perfectly. It's less seamless for the younger generations who weren't exposed to Slovak TV (I got the tail end of that), but I'd say they still understand fairly well after a bit of acclimation. We even had some lectures in Slovak at school. When I was working at a post office, I had a guy come in and fire off in a language that absolutely perplexed me. I couldn't even tell where words begun and ended. He clearly understood me well and expected to be understood. He was getting really frustrated. An older colleague quickly took over the exchange. She then made fun of me for the rest of the day. The guy WAS speaking Slovak, though she admitted that he seemed to have a strong local dialect from the East of the country (far from the border). Needless to say, it was a big hit to my confidence.

I'd like to know about asymmetric or symmetric intelligibility among sign languages in the French Sign Language family. I sign ASL and can often get the gist of many sign languages around the world (where the spoken language of those regions would be unintelligible to me). But some are definitely easier than others. I wonder how easy it would be for them to understand me!

I'm Norwegian and i find swedish easy to understand, but i find danish a lot harder. It is also easier for Norwegians to understand Swedes than the other way around. When we grew up here in Norway we watched Swedish TV shows for children, so that might be why.

@OliverPerssonMusik

5 жыл бұрын

I who live in Värmland have a much easier time speaking to a Norwegian than someone from the south or stockholm area. When you reach Värmland, especially the more northern and western part, you can hear the transistion from Swedish to Norwegian. There are just some words that are different that you need to get used to to flawlessly understand Norwegian as a swede. Trenger can be confusing at first, as in Swedish that means tho push you between something tight. Rolig, means calm, but for us its "to be fun". as a Swede though, you guys sound so fucking happy and cute all the time, for us, its babytalking all the time.

@R0BIN_

5 жыл бұрын

Jävla norge tar våra barnprogram!!!!

@SepulchureValen

5 жыл бұрын

Emil, Pippi langstrømpe og karlsson på taket. Kan ikke huske noen andre.

@charliesieben5695

5 жыл бұрын

@KatjaKat01 Jo, husker jeg så Bolibompa og lilla sportspegeln som liten. Skrotnissen og Redda Joppe.

@OliverPerssonMusik

5 жыл бұрын

@@hari61017 from what i have heard, the oslo area atleast is very swedenized :)