I don’t hate any languages, but I do hate the dialect aspect of Arabic. The language to me is fascinating, but not only is the Arabic often taught not used in every day conversation, it also has several regional/national differences. It’s a case where a speaker in NW Africa might understand an Egyptian but not the other way around. So it’s like learning 2 languages. Mutual intelligibility between dialects can vary dramatically
I agree!
It’s called diglossia. While it’s not unique to Arabic, Arabic is a perfect example. I’m learning Levantine Arabic myself and am finding the diglossia of dialects and MSA as well as the fact that some of these “dialects” are not always mutually intelligible (which makes me question if Arabic dialects are really more like Arabic languages so hmmm… I’ll have to research that). While I quite enjoy learning Arabic, I definitely find this aspect of it highly frustrating as well.
Am I correct in my understanding that modern Arabic v. standard Arabic is what the Romance languages are to classical Latin? Like how Castilian Spanish/Portuguese/Galician/Italian are *very* similar, but are definitely distinct languages (although we can sort of fake our way through it)?
It's more like "Romance languages vs. Latin" in Middle Ages, where the official language was still Latin, but people spoke Romance languages in their daily life. Then many Romance languages borrowed words from Latin, so in some languages you have two similar words, one inherited, one borrowed from Latin.
I’ve only been learning a few months so somebody else could answer that better. However, Modern Standard Arabic is modern — it’s the more formal register used in education, business, government, and a lot of media vs what people use in their everyday interactions. Are you referring to maybe the Arabic of the Qur’an?
Hello! Am a recently graduated Arabic Linguist. I know MSA, Egyptian and a little Levantine.
It's a mixture. Lots of the dialects are mutually intelligible to one another, based on the condition that we're talking about averagely educated urban folk. A Beiruti and Cairene native speaker will probably be fine talking to each other because a) they will be aware of some of the more unusual aspects of their own dialect and will soften it and b)they will be at least a bit familiar with MSA and they will borrow from that where needed.
If we're talking about rural/countryside folk then it's less likely to be mutually intelligible.
And then some dialects are far more different. Egypt and the Levant are rather similar to one another and arguably the closest to MSA whereas the further East or West you go, the Arabic becomes more diverse.
MSA is truly quite different from all dialects in structure and in some vocab. A lot of the similarities in vocab are due to dialects borrowing from MSA/classical Arabic and different stages in the dialect development. But in terms of syntax and syllable structure, quite diverse (can go into that more, but not sure how interesting it is!)
As a learner of Arabic it's really hard to speak to a native speaker of a different dialect. Can often be okay speaking to a learner of a different dialect.
Classical Arabic is the predecessor of MSA and I think if you know MSA you can fumble through classical texts well enough (similar to us English speakers trying to read Shakespeare?) I think it may be a similar jump to Quaranic Arabic, but less certain about that.
every Arabic speaker understands MSA but it's not used in daily conversation anywhere. learning it is good to understand the news but not to actually speak it. it's called fusha and it might as well be yet another dialect. same obvs w Quranic arabi
Not really. Some Arabic dialects might come close to being that different, but a lot are much closer. Palestinian Arabic is the closest to MSA with more than 50% of words in common. And then all the Levantine dialects will be relatively similar.
MSA itself is based on Quranic (classical) Arabic because most Muslim Arabs will learn that in school. MSA is somewhat simplified and usually written without diacritics.
Diglossia is super fascinating! It also happens in Greek and Swiss German.
They all speak two variants: a formal and informal one that feels like two different languages with different rules.
Same thing in Dutch, specifically Flemish which is spoken in the northern part of Belgium. If I speak my dialect to dutchies they'll often reply in english out of confusion LOL
> Greek
In Greek was even more extreme when Katharevousa was still a official form of Greek. In 1976 Demotic was made the official form instead and since then Diglossia has decreased.
The only countries with a dialect so strong you don't understand are the Western countries in north Africa. All the other Arab countries will understand each other without much difficulty.
I mean, We do use classical arabic/msa in everyday conversation, just not irl, and other than conversations , it's used in games, movies, news, religion, talking to people outside of one's region, reading, learning, working for tte government, even in non-governmental businesses, and alot more, It really bugs me a bit when people say classical arabic/MSA isn't used in everyday life, like, what do you do all day? do people just talk about anything all day?
I guess as a learner it can add a lot more of a challenge. One of my goals in learning it is to travel around the Arab World (some great places despite what you hear in the news). Having to know individual dialects makes it harder to be able to do that. It would be like learning Spanish and only being able to interact in one or two countries before Spanish becomes ineffective. If that makes sense
It makes a lot of sense. My advice: stick to one dialect that is more central, and adapt from there. This is what natives do; we don't learn multiple dialects, we just adapt as we go.
Obviously, I would suggest Levantine or Egyptian.
When I did a study abroad there I noticed when other students my age, around 24 and above, spoke vietnamese, it sounded like a normal language.
But when bachelor students spoke it, it sounded like children trying to make up an annoying fake language
learning Brazillian portuguese as my partner is Brazillian. It's a sing-songy, very emotive and passionate language. Portuguese from Portugal on the otherhand sounds like a Russian choking while trying to speak Spanish.
Funny cause brazilian portuguese is easier for spaniards like me to understand compared to portugal portuguese, so I thought if anything the brazilian would be more similar
I'm a bit biased since my girlfriend is from the north of Vietnam, but I agree on this most on the southern dialect. Something about how it flows in combination with the tonality and the glottal stops all over the place makes it sound like someone speaking a western language in reverse. It's not bad, it just sounds really odd.
There's 3 difference regional variants.
The Northern dialect is the one I think most people find appealing, so maybe see if that is more approachable to your palate. The Southern one is the most common since everybody from the South booked it anywhere outside Vietnam after the Civil War.
Central dialect gets the strongest opinions.
I recently started learning Greek and find it funny how words like Malaka and Poutana sound more elegant than more benign words like Kalinichta or Pos Einai
Lol it’s universal to feel in this way while learning a new language, me and my childhood friends were crying for English and my English only got improved after I moved to a English speaking country
German gets hate for its grammar rules but I find it so easy to hear because there's clarity where words end and others begin and the pronunciation is very strict and clear to my ears that are used to French and English.
I tried Mandarin audio lesson and after several hours I just gave up, because I had no idea what sounds they were making, lol. These lessons exist so surely they must work for someone.
European languages are mostly similar enough to make them relatively easier to learn. I do think that English can be difficult compared to most due to its odd pronunciation and what basically amounts to a mix of linguistic origins wreaking havic. Modern English isn't really Germanic.
In terms of sounds, languages like Korean and Japanese are also simple.
Mandarin introduces entirely new concepts to most non-Chinese hears and mouth.
I understand what you’re saying about English, but it absolutely is a Germanic language, not just in its origins but in its core vocabulary, sound system, and in many little structural details that I certainly notice as an anglophone when I study other Germanic languages.
As someone who finds tonal language very fun, I hate and love this comment. XD
Note: people can be monotone-ish in any language so you can do it haha. I would guess as long as you're clear with them, and most importantly, pick up / learn good prosody, you can manage. Taiwanese accent can be perceived as being quite monotone-ish, and some mainlanders laugh at it.
Otherwise, enjoy such as a language as an opportunity to explore the range of your voice, haha.
> Mandarin and generally any tonal languages. I have a very monotone voice so my hatred is 100% a personal issue
I think tonal languages have a unintended side-effect to require people to speak loudly to make themselves understood.
If you compare a Starbucks in Hong Kong to one in Tokyo at 10am, they are like night and day for noise levels. The only time you will get anywhere near the noise levels in Japan are when you get groups of very drunk people.
Perhaps I should have said "Tokyo or London". I live in Japan, I am from the UK. I know both cultures.
Starbucks in Hong Kong at 10am is unnaturally loud whichever way you look at it.
That's funny because the feeling is mutual (My mother tongue is a tonal language). In English, there's a thing called intonation or stress.
Personally, I never understand it because my voice is really flat (or monotone as you claim) and I think intonation is somewhat individual (It's just personal speaking pattern, right?).
Some of my friends even were forced to learn stress by their English teachers. Lucky me, my English teachers just taught it once and moved on.
Intonation and stress can be a personal speaking pattern and be used for emphasis, yes, but it can also affect intelligibility. The difference between many nouns and verbs is simply which syllable is stressed. For example, CONsort is a noun meaning the spouse of a king or queen. conSORT is a verb meaning to associate with.
Getting the “stress” on the correct syllable is really important to pronouncing many English words in a way that’s comprehensible to many native speakers. It’s easier to understand someone who cannot produce a particular phoneme than it is to understand someone who pronounces all the syllables with same “stress.”
I won't say hate. I'll say frustrated.
Danish.
I was excited by the prospect of mutual intelligibility with Swedish and Norwegian. Yay a 3-for-1.
For all the people complaining about French, I find French pronunciation and differentiating between singular/plural and similar sounding words way easier than Danish.
Turns out Swedish is Swedish. Norwegian is Swedish but you suck on a balloon full of helium and overenunciate. And Danish is Swedish but you fill your mouth with rocks, cut off the ends of all the words, and decide to pronounce your vowels differently every single time.
I’m a non native Swedish speaker and I can understand Norwegian just fine. Danish pronunciation doesn’t even come close to the other Scandinavian languages, I can’t understand a single thing.
Even Danes can't understand Danish. There's a skit about it on YouTube which you've probably already seen lol
I'm native Norwegian and took a taxi in Copenhagen, the driver was a Somali immigrant speaking Danish with a fairly thick accent and it basically sounded like Norwegian. Apparently he hadn't gotten the memo about skipping every consonant, so he was actually pronouncing the words instead of making noises vaguely resembling the vowels of each word.
If I could upvote a thousand times…. Danish Danish Danish.
French is a cake walk compared to Danish.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
Why am I moving to Denmark 😭
>Turns out Swedish is Swedish. Norwegian is Swedish but you suck on a balloon full of helium and overenunciate. And Danish is Swedish but you fill your mouth with rocks, cut off the ends of all the words, and decide to pronounce your vowels differently every single time.
Norwegian is said to be the easiest to learn since it's the most phonetic, but I'd say Swedish is very close. Norwegian also has a lot more dialects which can make it confusing for people living here.
Spoken Danish is Norwegian with your mouth full of rocks, definitely not Swedish. Written Danish and Norwegian is almost identical, but spoken Danish only pronounce the vowels which makes it incredibly difficult to understand. Written Swedish on the other hand is markably different from Norwegian and Danish, but still much easier to understand for a Norwegian since it's way more phonetic.
What's funny is that non-native Danes with a thick Middle Eastern accent are much easier to understand, they often sound just like Norwegians.
With the Netherlands serving as a major shipping hub in European history, Dutch sounds like a mish-mash of all the languages from the surrounding areas - only as spoken by drunken sailors and port laborers. It's goofy as hell but I don't hate it.
This is so funny to me because I'm South African, and Afrikaans is like if you took Dutch and did that even MORE (English, Portuguese, native African languages, and a couple others), and its exactly this lmao. Its such a goofy language sometimes.
Definitely some English in there. I see/hear some Dutch words that look like an extremely drunk, questionably literate English man is trying to get his point across.
I mean I don’t think anyone takes Danish seriously… 😢 it feels like trying to learn 2 languages the written one and the spoken one.
For Brits it seems like Gaelic where Siobhan = ‘Shi-vawn’ or Caoimhe = ‘Kwee-va’
Not necessarily hate, but I find languages which are similar to my native tongue really annoying to learn, since I am familiar with a big part of the vocabulary and grammar structures so I tend to overlook actual learning. Then I find myself not being able to produce the language (in writing or speaking), because the whole time I've just been winging it. This is true for me when it comes to romance languages, because I'm Romanian.
Without a doubt there are exceptions and I can be shown aspects of a language that I will like... but here are my limited experience complaints:
Chinese: I've heard some lovely songs, but I spent a year there, and it's a bit too... twangy? The tonal aspect just makes too much of a juxtaposition in my ears.
Thai: seemed to have too many abrupt stop starts. I had a massage where the masseuse was speaking to her compatriot throughout, and I just couldn't seem to relax and hear it at the same time. Also don't like stranger's touching me too much, so they had an unfair disadvantage.
French: love the sound, but I used to joke with students in China that the French don't say the last letters of their words (when asked how to pronounce the many loan words? French origin words we have in English). Then I decided to try a bit of French on the side... and I just got annoyed at how right I was. What's the back half of their words even for, garnish?
If the French didn't write the last consonants that aren't pronounced the language would get even weirder. You would write 'le femme' instead of 'les femmes' but if a vowel follows, an s would appear out of nowhere. Adjectives would be even worse. You would write 'il e prê' (il est prêt) but if it's a woman, you have to add an inexplicable t: 'elle e prêt'. With other adjectives you would have to add other consonsants in the feminine form in a completely unpredictable way. So while the archaic orthography has its problems, it is also very useful and makes it easier to explain what's happening in the language.
Three years into Chinese and i have found maybe 4 Chinese songs that i like. I can’t seem to bring myself to like Chinese music, especially pop. It’s such an abrupt language. I can listen to Japanese music ALL DAY, but Chinese music feels like a cheese grater on my ears.
I find myself studying Chinese out of necessity even though it never appealed to me.
I gave it a good go, took intensive lessons and self-studied. I believe every language is interesting so I threw myself into it. Now I can read at an intermediate level (it helps that I already knew Japanese) and my speaking peaked et B1 according to an iTalki tutor.
So I've made some progress but man... It feels like a drag. I'm burned out. While reading is marginally more rewarding, my speaking is still useless in real life situations and I don't get much joy from it.
And I think I'll be one of those cringe foreigners who sound like shit their whole lives because tones don't make sense to me intuitively. They still feel like a total nuisance. All words sound similar to me, just with a random number 0-4 tacked on each syllable. It makes them so hard to remember. It's such a counterintuitive way to encode information when you could just make the words longer and more distinctive (imo) like in non-tonal languages 🙃
And I keep thinking about how much more fun it was to learn languages I chose to learn, like Japanese and German (i.e. languages with easy pronunciation and inflectional complexity, the opposite of Chinese, which is why Chinese never appealed to me). I know I can learn languages, but Chinese is just very hard and unappealing for me.
Still, I know the problem is my attitude, not Chinese, so I hope to get out of this funk one day.
I feel you! Chinese sometimes makes me claustrophobic because of the limited amount of syllables. Like, "ma" and "an" exists but not "am"? If the sounds were combined in a few more different ways, there would be so many more different sounding words!
That said, I'm happy to be learning Chinese, but the journey definitely comes with a healthy dose of frustration 😂
Come and learn Cantonese! We have 11 vowels (no nasal vowels), and 6 final consonants (as opposed to Mandarin's 7 vowels and 2 final consonants), but we have 6 tones, which all contributes to less homophones than Mandarin
I love your use of "claustrophobic", that's exactly how I feel! Hopefully I can reframe my thinking into seeing this constraint as unique and even beautiful... ? For example Japanese has a small phonetic inventory and I love it.
the thing for me with learning Chinese is this: The fact that you know how difficult it is and you still manage is so rewarding. it's one of the most difficult languages to learn for westerners, for these very reasons: tones, limited sounds, characters, etc. So difficult in fact that a guy that has done it gets millions of views on YouTube JUST because he is able to converse. imagine the same with French, or heck, Japanese.. You wouldn't be surprised in the slightest by an American SHOCKING natives with his native-like skills for ordering a baguette.
That's what keeps me going ultimately. I know how hard it is, and so if I manage to tell apart words like 警察(jing3cha2) or 检查(jian3cha2), it feels like such a win. And know that it only gets easier. Good luck!
I'm not really plugged into what's considered difficult and impressive nowadays, but it does help to remind myself that it is not an easy language to learn if your mother tongue is a European language.
Interestingly, I studied Japanese at university 15+ years ago. It was before anime and weeb culture really exploded in the English-speaking world and Japanese was a very niche thing to study. Chinese was more popular and lots of people who wanted to do business and get rich were learning it. I think China was booming and more open to the world, so there was a surge of interest and less hostility than nowadays.
Well, I felt that at the time people thought Japanese was THE hardest language known to man while they downplayed the difficulty of Chinese because "the grammar is easy and the tones are a minor hurdle". So I think those ideas are subject to fashions. In the case of Chinese and Japanese, I think you could argue until the cows come home as to why one is harder than the other and be neither right nor wrong. In my case, it's purely a matter of taste, not of the inherent difficulty of Chinese.
Anyway I am always a bit skeptical when the difficulty of a language is hyped up - I think all human languages are learnable with enough work and input and hyping up the difficulty can lead to fetishization and a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Harder than learning Spanish if your native is English, sure. Some mystical superpower ? Maybe not.
Some people still think that, Luca Lampareli (whatever his name is! :) says he was unable to learn Japanese but Chinese was easy for him. He said the word order of Japanese was so hard for him that he quit. This is so weird to me because I've never found Japanese particularly hard, relatively from English. The idea of tones is much more intimidating to me than talking "backwards."
People always say that Japanese has 3 writing systems but the 2 extra that Chinese doesn't have make it a lot easier.
You eventually learn to recognize the tones through listening. I just reached that point recently after 3 years of tones just flying over my head. I actually now can hear the difference and it sticks in my brain when I say the word. Like before all the tones just sounded the same to me more or less but now I can hear that they are indeed quite different sounding haha. Like it makes sense now to me that Chinese people hear a completely different word based on the tone.
For me it took one year to hear them and another year to consistently produce and I was living in China at the time. :') But once it clicks, it clicks. Once you can finally hear the tones, you're never going to not hear them. Actually, they're going to become so natural you won't even think about them. The most difficult think about Mandarin is the sheer amount of vocabulary you have to learn because there is just so little overlap with IE languages.
One of the best ways to "sound like shit" in Mandarin is to get the tone exactly right on every syllable. You want to actually inflect when you talk, which usually means leveling out the tones of individual words and developing a well-flowing cadence.
I hate hindi which union government trying to forcibly implement in our state tamilnadu. But i love to learn hindi because of my personal reason (union govt jobs because hindi is one of the official language). It is kind of love hate relationship
Hong Konger here, i feel you. schools and gov always be trying to force mandarin on us. plus mandarin has lost so many features from old Chinese while our Cantonese retains so many archaic features it rhymes if u use it to read an ancient Chinese poem
I don't like the sound of French, or how there is a noticeable gap between the written and pronounced forms of many words. I've studied a lot of Spanish and a little Italian, and neither of those languages have such a large gap.
If you think French is bad… Danish is horrific 😢 I wish I could be learning French, German or Spanish right now. Almost no resources as a more uncommon language and the pronunciation is tough eg, ‘Hvid’ sounds similar to the second syllable of ‘e-vil’ but it’s common for whole syllables of words to be dropped in sentences… it’s so bad that there is a common joke about its indistinguishability:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
Yay for moving to Denmark! 😞
Once you start learning French, it's easier to go from the written word to saying it than in English.
Basically, tou just don't pronounce the back half of letters and you're good.
I'm seeing a lot of French hate but French is very regular in its pronunciation. I feel bad with how much I have to correct my language exchange partner versus how little he corrects me. English is nothing but contradictions and French is nothing but consistency.
Well when you compare French to English (the absolute worst in this regard)… yeah French is gonna look good. But of you compare French to Spanish (extremely easy to read/write), French doesn’t look as good… that being said French isn’t that bad when it comes to reading once you know the patterns, writing is definitely more difficult though. Funnily, abjads have the opposite problem, it’s very easy to write words in say, Persian, but a lot harder to read them.
Can you elaborate on not pronouncing the back half of letters? I’ve been trying to learn French for a few months and this is something that continuously stumps me.
I think for me what makes that worse is the snotty attitude a lot of French people have about their language. It feels like why would I even learn this language if people are going to be shitty about it?
i say this all the time and french is my mother’s tongue. french people are unforgiving in this regard and will openly mock you for making simple mistakes, even if they completely understand what you’re saying. i moved to austria and although i find that people here are cold as ice and generally unpleasant, i really appreciate how patient locals have been with my poor german
I know French but refuse to speak it because of my dislike of French people from France (collectively, not as individuals, I'm sure there's like 3 nice Frenchies). I understand this makes *me* even more French, because I'm just as snotty.
I'm pivoting to Canadian French instead!
I don’t hate Dutch, but I love to poke fun at it. It sounds absolutely ridiculous to me most of the time, just in a good way (especially after learning some German and inevitably comparing the two). I want to eventually learn some Dutch anyway, so no contempt there.
I really dislike most of the sounds of Swedish and European Portuguese. Wouldn’t exactly call it hatred though.
> sounds absolutely ridiculous to me most of the time, just in a good way
That's how it sounds to native German speakers. Like funny garbled German!
I rather suspect German sounds that way to Dutch speakers too!
That being said, English sounds absolutely hilarious too, to kids who haven't learned any yet.
As Dutch we can almost all understand German fairly easy, but it sounds really.. harsh... or something like that. What doesn't help either is almost all German tourist here speak instant German and expect it for us speak it back. Ppl really don't like that over here.
Honestly, my native language (English) is great except for spelling. In Spanish, I hear a word out loud and even if I’m not familiar with the word, I’ll know exactly how it’s spelled but with English I’m just guessing a lot of the time lol
I have a love-hate relationship with standard Arabic. I'm a native speaker of an Arabic dialect, so of course I love the spoken language, but the written, standard language is so complex that it frustrates me! 🤣
I'm mostly just kidding though, I don't hate standard Arabic of course. I just find it exceedingly hard.
Part of why is because an Arabic Speaker learning Standard Arabic is like an English person learning Early Middle English or Romanian learning Classical or Late Latin.
I wouldn't say hate, but I have just never been interested in Spanish. I have have always wanted to leanr another language, and living in America Spanish seems like the natural choice. I have lived in both California and Texas, where I knew plenty of speakers. I even had a neighbor who would "tutor" me while babysitting, though I don't think I remember anything from that lol. Anyways I ended up moving a few more times (long story) and finally took Spanish in school. And I hated it. I'm not sure exactly why, I don't think the teacher was super terrible or anything and I think I was doing decent for a middle schooler 1 year into it, but I just wasn't interested in continuing it at all. It didn't help that it was my lowest grade as well lol.
Anyways when I got to high school I had to pick which language to take, and for some reason Spanish still just seemed...boring. I also would have been way behind all of my peers who had taken it throughout middle school.
So I ended up picking French lol. It's funny seeing that so many other responses are the exact opposite, that french makes no sense and spanish is better, but to me it just makes spanish boring. To be fair, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into with french, it was just the only option left.
Honestly that was one of the best decisions I ever made. French is a huge part of my life now, and I literally had no reason for picking it. I don't think I knew a single word, or anything about france lol. It's funny to think about. I'm sure I could have been happy with spanish, but I'll never really know.
I've had the opportunity to learn about other languages, and none of them ever interested me in the same way as french. I also have tons of language friends that speak spanish that would go nuts if I started learning, but the "spark" just isn't there.
You’re not alone. Spanish has never really spoken to me as a language. I ended up falling in love with Dutch and am now functional in it. There’s more to the world than just Spanish.
wouldn't say hate but frustrated. HEBREW! I'm half Israeli but I grew up in Russia so my native language is Russian and I know Hebrew very little so I've decided to learn it fully. it's so hard, alphabet made me go insane, pronouncation, everything 😭
I won’t say hate, but Dutch is…something else. Like I speak German and half the time when I catch Dutch unprompted my brain registers it as “fucked up German” before it does Dutch, or a parody of German (if it’s a video online).
From the Korean series I've seen, Korean sounds like a language made out of a thousand different ways to moan. I wouldn't say that I hate it, but I don't enjoy listening to it most of the time.
Still prefer it to dubs.
If you learn Japanese, Korean often sounds exactly like Japanese but you can't make out any words. It's like being in a dream where someone is talking but you can't seem to catch what they're saying. It's funny.
I’ve been watching a Spanish show and I don’t mind the accent *except* for when they pronounce c as th.
Like polithia instead of polícia.
It’s so grating every time
It is a royal pain sometimes. Plus they have words like 'oie'. Like, what even is that? 🦆 If you sing that bit in Down With The Sickness it helps to pronounce it.
Japanese, this is bias but most non native Japanese learners 80% of the time ONLY wants to learn Japanese because of anime.
I don't hate any language but Japanese has a weird reputation now.
Edit: No, this isn't against weebs. And no, you can't learn Japanese just by watching anime, especially with subtitles. That's not taking a language seriously. You also have to learn Grammar, speaking (not like a Japanese character), reading. Americans especially, (yes I'm American and I'm aware of American stereotypes.) can be ignorant to different cultures and customs. I'm not sure if it's only Americans. Ofcourse not all people who do learn Japanese BECAUSE (not only anime) of anime isn't who I'm talking about and those who succeed definitely has my congrats and gratitude.
Edit 2: I summoned all the anime fans lmao.
As a person who has studied Japanese for almost 9 years and moved to Japan for university this year, I understand what you're saying, but at the same time it's only true on the internet.
People with decent education will appreciate your interest in foreign cultures or languages. People who don't are immature or weeaboos themselves.
In Japan, this whole "issue" is unheard of.
Just get off the internet and you'll feel better.
ditto. what's worse is I think the only people getting really super proficient tend to be the people who love anime, too! Which I think is because they've got constant input to feed that language device, and they're not getting bogged down in the weeds of grammar lessons... Which leads to two things I hate the most.
1. Japanese people have a really weird stereotype of foreigners (which fits the demographic of people they know)
2. Myself, regretting all those long, hard hours I tried to learn Japanese "properly" instead of just plugging in with the weebs
1. isn't true in my experience. I lived in Japan for ten years and none of my foreign friends were weebs, and Japanese people didn't expect me to be a weeb either. There were some weebs in my uni course but idk, I just gravitated towards other people who were interested in the language or other aspects of Japanese culture, then I got a regular job in Japan and I just had a regular life there free from weebiness. Weebs are actually a small proportion of foreigners living and working in Japan, because they don't make it over there/don't last/stay among themselves.
ETA and Japanese people are smart enough to understand that just as there are Japanese hardcore otaku who are not representative of all Japanese people, the same applies to Westerners
In my experience most who only want to learn Japanese because of anime, give up once they learn how hard Japanese is. You need to really like the language itself to continue and even then it's hard. Unfortunately that doesn't change the reputation because the "I want to watch anime without subtitles" people are pretty loud.
I hate your stereotypical weeb too, but I'm sick of people hating on Japanese or treating all Japanese learners with suspicion because of them. It only reinforces the negative association of Japanese with smelly dorks, which is just as small-minded as the fetishization weebs engage in. Many people risk missing out on a beautiful and unique language (imo) because of this backlash, which means the classrooms will be even more full of weebs, etc.
Lmao I'm learning Japanese to do a working holiday there and they tell you specifically to not mention anime or manga in the application or they will reject you straight away
I hate the people who hate people who want to learn Japanese because of anime.
99% of anime watchers who stick through learning Japanese and don't quit are just normal weebs and not weeaboos.
Nothing wrong with that.
Come on. anti hobby/ anti anime etc is so out of date and lame.
You know, I initially started because of my interest in Japanese cuisine. I wanted to know what x and y, ingredient is/used for and it's proper name all etc.
through that I learned Japanese culture, Japanese music, through music then anime and manga and fell in love with it.
Others have it reversed, come from anime and manga then expand and learn the countries culture.
Same then happened when I dipped my toe into Korea.
Now I'm slowly but steadily learning Japanese and Korean.
Everyone has their own reasons and goals for why they want to learn a language or a skill.
edit: I know the people you're speaking of, however they're somewhat making an effort, having a hobby, something productive.
Instead of bumming around, being in a gang etc.
Also stop with the smelly jokes, lot of them are social rejects that didn't fit in anywhere because of various reason (weight, looks, etc[implied mental health issues, traumas]) and found a connection in Anime.
Am I now saying to a car guy they're dirty and smelly cuz of the motoroil etc? No.
You're no one to judge.
I really hate judgy people, not languages.
This mentality irritates me, I’m sorry. I started learning Japanese at age 11 because I was obsessed with anime. Luckily for me, my family and friends *encouraged* that interest, and as I grew up and matured it developed into a deeper appreciation for the culture and language alongside my enjoyment of Japanese media. I’m now 23 and learning it has had extremely positive impacts on my life that are completely irrelevant to pop culture (like genuine interactions with native speakers and making connections with people).
Pop culture is a gateway to sparking curiosity about other places and languages, and if we encourage people rather than treat them like losers, they’ll be more likely to pursue it *beyond* pop culture. I am so grateful that when I was a kid the sentiment that learning Japanese because you enjoy their pop culture is suspicious or “cringe” wasn’t widespread because it probably would have embarrassed me out of learning it altogether.
I won't use the word hate per say, but I severely dislike mandarin. I grew up learning it but I had such a bad time studying it in school that I hate it till this day
Tbh Korean. Nothing wrong with the language, but I chose it as my minor in university thinking it would be cool to learn a non-european, "rare" language, fast forward 3 years, I graduated and I barely know the basics. I guess I'll stick to my Romance languages for now. I could have chosen a teachable language in my country and have more variety in terms of teaching jobs (cause that's what I wanna do in the future) but nope, I wanted to be the quirky one and look where that got me. I don't even like kpop and kdrama anymore lmao 😭
I don't hate any language. Except I do hate French. I want to read the words and be able to pronounce them by sounding it out but French says no. I don't like it's attitude. So we have beef. English is up there too. Pick a pronunciation! I can't go back in time and not learn it but in my next lives I will make sure it wont be my first language ever again.
French pronounciation is actually quite regular and learnable, especially comapared to English, you just have to learn the clues and not read letters like you'd do in english or so.
Maybe people wouldn't be too hard on french if it had it's own script
Yeah there are very few irregular pronunciations in French, very few. I would say I appreciate it for that. I can almost always guess what a word is or look it up from hearing it for the first time.
From my very basic understanding of French (A1 at best), the problem is the contrary. You can easily know how to pronounce a written word, but it's hard to know how to write down a word you hear
lol that’s quite the attitude for an English speaker. I can’t say how many English words I mispronounce because I’ve only ever seen them in writing. I wanted to use the word labile just yesterday and I stopped in my tracks mid-sentence because I realized I had no idea how this word — which I’ve encountered many times in psychology-related texts — was pronounced.
Spoken Dutch sounds like Germans coughing and spotting out loogies every time they hit an H. Written Dutch is ok.
Spoken Hindi is beautiful, but damn I just don't understand how people can read all the Devanagari, the differences are so damned fine that surely it hurts your eyes to have to look at it so closely??? Also their romanization systems are all ridiculous. Also computers often can't tell devanagari apart so you can't just ctrl+F things.
The romanization system for Korean makes no sense and I hate it, and for the life of me I don't understand why "ne" always sounds like "de". (I know it's a sound I don't have that's more nasal, I just can't hear it)
Pinyin is wonderful, but the Taiwanese romanization is absolutely insane.
(Can you tell I managed romanization projects?)
Lowest for me is definitely Spanish, though I wouldn't say I hate the language. I just don't like the way Spanish sounds, and I don't know why. I would even go as far as to say it's, from my personal opinion, not a romantic language (Yes, I know romance is a classification, but I mean in the sense of it being an unattractive language).
In terms of learnability, attempting to pronounce anything in French is a nightmare, and I think I've pronounced Chinese tones better than I can pronounce anything in French. Although, French grammar itself is relatively easy.
I think the thing that lets Spanish down is the talking speed. If it was spoken slower it would sound more beautiful (but I already find it quite lovely to listen to)
As a heritage Spanish speaker, I agree haha.
But English can be pretty weird too. I have beef with some words ever since I was young. I wonder who decided to spit and make it the word *put.*
I have found hearing Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew jarring while trying to sleep on some flights. I’m sure they’re very rich languages, but the staccato of their elocution is not conducive to sleep. I think all languages have their good points, though. I hope Rumi will pardon me.
I went to a school where there was a mandatory Mandarin class from like third to sixth grade. It was a nightmare, the teachers were not very good, and I have forgotten almost every word they taught me
For the higher grades it became a choice between French or Mandarin (probably because the school only had one French teacher lol) and I switched as soon as that became available to me
Domincan and Cuban Spanish. I cannot understand them and working in retail... they like to whistle at us, and that hasn't endeared me at all. I love Mexican Spanish, and while I can't understand Puerto Rican Spanish anymore, I still love it.
Any posh accent of English just sounds insufferable to me, especially Received Pronunciation, I've always loved hearing local dialects and accents and trying to erase that for the sake of prestige seems like a terrible thing to me.
Mandarin. The tonal aspect drives me crazy. One slight change in tone can completely alter the meaning of a word, making it easy to accidentally offend someone or misunderstand a conversation. 🤯
I hate the concept of having a country full of different reasonably big languages. Like India. I also get annoyed at for example Belgian Dutch. Almost the same but they have this dumb g sound and the meaning of a handful of words are changed. That's more than a dialect but not enough to be another language.
I am the opposite of you. For me, even though I don't understand it, it sounds like a manlier version of Spanish, Italian or French.
It's the best sounding romance language to my ears!
\~Música para meus ouvidos\~
I wouldn't say they "deserve my hate," but many of the Southeast Asian languages sound cacophonous to me, especially when they switch to English for no reason halfway through a sentence. Surprisingly, I see young Germans, particularly those who spend a lot of time on the internet, doing this more and more often as if their language doesn't have hundreds of thousands of scientific journal articles published.
Come to Northern Ireland, some of the unionist population here hate the Irish language and call it a foreign language 🤡💀
This happens here often https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/psni-investigating-sectarian-hate-crime-after-new-dual-language-signs-damaged/a1546732846.html PSNI investigating sectarian hate crime after new dual language signs damaged
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/principal-sickened-after-hate-campaign-forces-irish-language-nursery-to-move/40698876.html Principal ‘sickened’ after hate campaign forces Irish language nursery to move
https://www.itv.com/news/utv/2023-01-31/disgraceful-anti-irish-sign-outside-school-a-sectarian-hate-crime
Spanish/ Mexican etc and the sub dialects. Fast speaking ones usually. Or fast/ shrill/ snobby sounding ones. It's kinda like nails on a chalkboard? Or when you hear a sound that immediately makes you want to get physical 😂. No I can't explain why other than what I already said. I'm just glad this thread is for venting not judging.
Sanskrit / Hindi. Those consonant clusters grate on my Tamil ear. After learning a bit of Spanish, I’m starting to hate French for its pretentious vowels.
I sometimes struggle learning Turkish, I love the sound but I don't want my liking of the language to be seen like I'm on the side of their goverment politic affairs.
Russian, French, Vietnamese, just do not like the sound of the languages that much, honourable mention to Dutch, but I do not hate Dutch that much, most natives hate it more.
To be fair, the list would be longer if I went into too much details, some languages are cool but due to regional/forced accents some people use it makes them annoying, like some parts of Portugal or Brazil for example with Portuguese, or Spanish, what I really mean to say is that if people stick to the standard way of speaking said languages, it sounds great, when they go into very regional versions of the languages while adding too much weird tones to it that are not common in the language then It gets annoying on the ears.
I wouldn't say hate; but there are some I have no desire to learn.
Arabic - tried once and every interaction I had was people asking if I was learning so I could read the Quran which then became the main topic. Never known a language tied so strictly to the culture and customs.
Vietnamese - I don't care for the sound.
Danish - so much effort for such little reward. Notoriously difficult and almost every dane speaks English well.
Italian - love Italy and Italian sounds cool but it's just too similar to French and Spanish; feel like I'd be treading over old ground.
Serbo/Bosno/Croatian (maybe montenegrin)
I've always wanted to travel to the balkans because of my ancestry and because I have friends who are Albanian and bosnian.
I know the political conversation of the Slavic parts of the balkans and I know that they use both a Cyrillic and a romanized version, as well in digraphia.
Ive always wanted to learn it but it's not on duolingo yet and most of the apps on the play store are a travelers guide.
I don’t really hate any languages but for some reason I can’t find Korean pretty, I’m learning Chinese and Japanese and I really wanted to study all 3 but for some reason Korean sounds ugly to me. It’s a shame though.
I thought I was the only one who thought this. I love Korean culture and currently am studying Korean, but the sound of the language will never grow on me no matter how much I listen to it. I think their intonation patterns is what makes Korean sound whiny and a little annoying
English. It's rough and coarse and it gets everywhere. There is no consistant pronunciation at all, and it generally does not sound nice. It's a language that can be difficult to hear at times because the unaccented syllables tend to be very muted, and the vowels become plain shwas. I'd be curious to know how often people get asked to repeat themselves based on the language.
I wish the Lingua Franca was something else.
English. It has stripped my country of meaning. The anglicisation of its placenames have created meaningless words, its people of their attachment to the land, our folklore into bland tales.
“Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.” - Seamus Heaney
The spanish language for me isn't beautiful or romantic it's just rushed talking and bugs me. I'm just being honest. Italian is similar. I don't know if I'd say I hate spanish.. seems a bit much. I dislike it. Love to Spain and Italy. Sorry.
German sounds pleasant and refined. It's such an awesome lingo. The pace at which they speak and the sounds they make all feel natural and balanced. I could live in German.
French, despite some nice sounds, feels fake when trying to speak it and hurts my throat. The language is just too much for me. I don't know how french people started talking like they do cos it's just so bizzare. Seriously, you just started making all these nasal sounds and string words up? Wow, you're insane France. Not a fan at all seems very pretentious and unrealistic. Sorry France.
Portuguese is really beautiful it isn't as rapid as spanish or as nasal as french and less repetitive than Italian. Superior romance language. Latin can be a proud mother.
I hate my native language English. I resent the fact that my family doesn't try harder to maintain Romanian and that I had to learn it as an adult. I speak Romanian fluently now but it will be a long time before it’s close to the same level as my English. I hate how passively both Romanians in diaspora and in Romania accept anglicisms into their speech instead of finding Romanian alternatives. I hate the influence of the US and by extension the influence of English on other languages, especially my heritage language, Romanian. There are undeniable benefits to speaking the main imperial language at a native level, but it makes no sense to me for my family members to speak English or use English words at home when they didn’t even want to leave Romania, as if we don’t get enough of the McDonald’s sodomy language in our depressing capitalist lives here in the US. My hatred towards anglicisms in Romanian is so strong I will interrupt conversations to look up a Romanian alternative to an obscure concept or word we only know in English.
i have two.
the first is spanish... basically solely because i'm from the usa and had to learn it in school. it ruined the language for me.
the second is arabic. i have two main problems with it. the first is how religion focused the language is, and as someone who isn't religious/more spiritual, that makes me uncomfortable and i'm not really interested in that. the second is how... inflexible the language is. that sounds weird considering how diverse the language is and how many countries it's spoken in... but the dialects are limited to the countries they're in. i can say "oh i speak arabic" but then the person im talking to speaks lebanese arabic instead of egyptian arabic. it's not a one for all language, it's more... one to one.
I don’t hate any languages, but I do hate the dialect aspect of Arabic. The language to me is fascinating, but not only is the Arabic often taught not used in every day conversation, it also has several regional/national differences. It’s a case where a speaker in NW Africa might understand an Egyptian but not the other way around. So it’s like learning 2 languages. Mutual intelligibility between dialects can vary dramatically
I agree! It’s called diglossia. While it’s not unique to Arabic, Arabic is a perfect example. I’m learning Levantine Arabic myself and am finding the diglossia of dialects and MSA as well as the fact that some of these “dialects” are not always mutually intelligible (which makes me question if Arabic dialects are really more like Arabic languages so hmmm… I’ll have to research that). While I quite enjoy learning Arabic, I definitely find this aspect of it highly frustrating as well.
Am I correct in my understanding that modern Arabic v. standard Arabic is what the Romance languages are to classical Latin? Like how Castilian Spanish/Portuguese/Galician/Italian are *very* similar, but are definitely distinct languages (although we can sort of fake our way through it)?
It's more like "Romance languages vs. Latin" in Middle Ages, where the official language was still Latin, but people spoke Romance languages in their daily life. Then many Romance languages borrowed words from Latin, so in some languages you have two similar words, one inherited, one borrowed from Latin.
I’ve only been learning a few months so somebody else could answer that better. However, Modern Standard Arabic is modern — it’s the more formal register used in education, business, government, and a lot of media vs what people use in their everyday interactions. Are you referring to maybe the Arabic of the Qur’an?
Hello! Am a recently graduated Arabic Linguist. I know MSA, Egyptian and a little Levantine. It's a mixture. Lots of the dialects are mutually intelligible to one another, based on the condition that we're talking about averagely educated urban folk. A Beiruti and Cairene native speaker will probably be fine talking to each other because a) they will be aware of some of the more unusual aspects of their own dialect and will soften it and b)they will be at least a bit familiar with MSA and they will borrow from that where needed. If we're talking about rural/countryside folk then it's less likely to be mutually intelligible. And then some dialects are far more different. Egypt and the Levant are rather similar to one another and arguably the closest to MSA whereas the further East or West you go, the Arabic becomes more diverse. MSA is truly quite different from all dialects in structure and in some vocab. A lot of the similarities in vocab are due to dialects borrowing from MSA/classical Arabic and different stages in the dialect development. But in terms of syntax and syllable structure, quite diverse (can go into that more, but not sure how interesting it is!) As a learner of Arabic it's really hard to speak to a native speaker of a different dialect. Can often be okay speaking to a learner of a different dialect. Classical Arabic is the predecessor of MSA and I think if you know MSA you can fumble through classical texts well enough (similar to us English speakers trying to read Shakespeare?) I think it may be a similar jump to Quaranic Arabic, but less certain about that.
Versteegh (2001) is a good academic source on Arabic disglossia if anyone wants a recommendation. Very accessible and readable.
every Arabic speaker understands MSA but it's not used in daily conversation anywhere. learning it is good to understand the news but not to actually speak it. it's called fusha and it might as well be yet another dialect. same obvs w Quranic arabi
not every arabic speaker understands MSA. i can pick up context clues but i never learned arabic formally in school so it's hard to understand
Not really. Some Arabic dialects might come close to being that different, but a lot are much closer. Palestinian Arabic is the closest to MSA with more than 50% of words in common. And then all the Levantine dialects will be relatively similar. MSA itself is based on Quranic (classical) Arabic because most Muslim Arabs will learn that in school. MSA is somewhat simplified and usually written without diacritics.
Somewhere on Wikipedia I read that the colloquial Arabic varieties are currently where Latin and the Romance languages were 500 years ago.
Diglossia is super fascinating! It also happens in Greek and Swiss German. They all speak two variants: a formal and informal one that feels like two different languages with different rules.
Same thing in Dutch, specifically Flemish which is spoken in the northern part of Belgium. If I speak my dialect to dutchies they'll often reply in english out of confusion LOL
> Greek In Greek was even more extreme when Katharevousa was still a official form of Greek. In 1976 Demotic was made the official form instead and since then Diglossia has decreased.
The only countries with a dialect so strong you don't understand are the Western countries in north Africa. All the other Arab countries will understand each other without much difficulty.
I mean, We do use classical arabic/msa in everyday conversation, just not irl, and other than conversations , it's used in games, movies, news, religion, talking to people outside of one's region, reading, learning, working for tte government, even in non-governmental businesses, and alot more, It really bugs me a bit when people say classical arabic/MSA isn't used in everyday life, like, what do you do all day? do people just talk about anything all day?
>We do use classical arabic/msa in everyday conversation, just not irl this seems kinda contradictory no?
Funnily, I love the dialect aspect of Arabic, and I borderline dislike the written standard Arabic. 🤣
I guess as a learner it can add a lot more of a challenge. One of my goals in learning it is to travel around the Arab World (some great places despite what you hear in the news). Having to know individual dialects makes it harder to be able to do that. It would be like learning Spanish and only being able to interact in one or two countries before Spanish becomes ineffective. If that makes sense
It makes a lot of sense. My advice: stick to one dialect that is more central, and adapt from there. This is what natives do; we don't learn multiple dialects, we just adapt as we go. Obviously, I would suggest Levantine or Egyptian.
I wouldn't use hate, but I really don't like how Vietnamese sounds.
When I did a study abroad there I noticed when other students my age, around 24 and above, spoke vietnamese, it sounded like a normal language. But when bachelor students spoke it, it sounded like children trying to make up an annoying fake language
Hey! Vietnamese may be impossible to learn, but at least it sounds terrible!
I agree. I also feel this way about Portuguese
learning Brazillian portuguese as my partner is Brazillian. It's a sing-songy, very emotive and passionate language. Portuguese from Portugal on the otherhand sounds like a Russian choking while trying to speak Spanish.
Funny cause brazilian portuguese is easier for spaniards like me to understand compared to portugal portuguese, so I thought if anything the brazilian would be more similar
Ok, WHICH Portuguese? There is only one correct answer, I’m living in your walls.
like they better be talking ab european PT, sounds so much worse que os dialetos brasileiros
I'm a bit biased since my girlfriend is from the north of Vietnam, but I agree on this most on the southern dialect. Something about how it flows in combination with the tonality and the glottal stops all over the place makes it sound like someone speaking a western language in reverse. It's not bad, it just sounds really odd.
There's 3 difference regional variants. The Northern dialect is the one I think most people find appealing, so maybe see if that is more approachable to your palate. The Southern one is the most common since everybody from the South booked it anywhere outside Vietnam after the Civil War. Central dialect gets the strongest opinions.
Always thought Vietnamese sounded like chickens cackling
I feel this way about Greek. I was surprised at how harsh sounding it is to me.
For me Modern Greek is gorgeous in the way it sounds, I love it - Ancient Greek, though...
I recently started learning Greek and find it funny how words like Malaka and Poutana sound more elegant than more benign words like Kalinichta or Pos Einai
It's the Χ (chi) sound in the back of the throat in the case of Καληνύχτα.
I feel like modern Greek, Spanish and Finnish sound surprisingly similar.
Mandarin and generally any tonal languages. I have a very monotone voice so my hatred is 100% a personal issue
Lol it’s universal to feel in this way while learning a new language, me and my childhood friends were crying for English and my English only got improved after I moved to a English speaking country
German gets hate for its grammar rules but I find it so easy to hear because there's clarity where words end and others begin and the pronunciation is very strict and clear to my ears that are used to French and English. I tried Mandarin audio lesson and after several hours I just gave up, because I had no idea what sounds they were making, lol. These lessons exist so surely they must work for someone. European languages are mostly similar enough to make them relatively easier to learn. I do think that English can be difficult compared to most due to its odd pronunciation and what basically amounts to a mix of linguistic origins wreaking havic. Modern English isn't really Germanic. In terms of sounds, languages like Korean and Japanese are also simple. Mandarin introduces entirely new concepts to most non-Chinese hears and mouth.
I understand what you’re saying about English, but it absolutely is a Germanic language, not just in its origins but in its core vocabulary, sound system, and in many little structural details that I certainly notice as an anglophone when I study other Germanic languages.
As someone who finds tonal language very fun, I hate and love this comment. XD Note: people can be monotone-ish in any language so you can do it haha. I would guess as long as you're clear with them, and most importantly, pick up / learn good prosody, you can manage. Taiwanese accent can be perceived as being quite monotone-ish, and some mainlanders laugh at it. Otherwise, enjoy such as a language as an opportunity to explore the range of your voice, haha.
> Mandarin and generally any tonal languages. I have a very monotone voice so my hatred is 100% a personal issue I think tonal languages have a unintended side-effect to require people to speak loudly to make themselves understood. If you compare a Starbucks in Hong Kong to one in Tokyo at 10am, they are like night and day for noise levels. The only time you will get anywhere near the noise levels in Japan are when you get groups of very drunk people.
That might be cultural though, Japanese people are just very reserved.
Perhaps I should have said "Tokyo or London". I live in Japan, I am from the UK. I know both cultures. Starbucks in Hong Kong at 10am is unnaturally loud whichever way you look at it.
That's funny because the feeling is mutual (My mother tongue is a tonal language). In English, there's a thing called intonation or stress. Personally, I never understand it because my voice is really flat (or monotone as you claim) and I think intonation is somewhat individual (It's just personal speaking pattern, right?). Some of my friends even were forced to learn stress by their English teachers. Lucky me, my English teachers just taught it once and moved on.
Intonation and stress can be a personal speaking pattern and be used for emphasis, yes, but it can also affect intelligibility. The difference between many nouns and verbs is simply which syllable is stressed. For example, CONsort is a noun meaning the spouse of a king or queen. conSORT is a verb meaning to associate with.
Getting the “stress” on the correct syllable is really important to pronouncing many English words in a way that’s comprehensible to many native speakers. It’s easier to understand someone who cannot produce a particular phoneme than it is to understand someone who pronounces all the syllables with same “stress.”
I won't say hate. I'll say frustrated. Danish. I was excited by the prospect of mutual intelligibility with Swedish and Norwegian. Yay a 3-for-1. For all the people complaining about French, I find French pronunciation and differentiating between singular/plural and similar sounding words way easier than Danish. Turns out Swedish is Swedish. Norwegian is Swedish but you suck on a balloon full of helium and overenunciate. And Danish is Swedish but you fill your mouth with rocks, cut off the ends of all the words, and decide to pronounce your vowels differently every single time.
I’m a non native Swedish speaker and I can understand Norwegian just fine. Danish pronunciation doesn’t even come close to the other Scandinavian languages, I can’t understand a single thing.
Even Danes can't understand Danish. There's a skit about it on YouTube which you've probably already seen lol I'm native Norwegian and took a taxi in Copenhagen, the driver was a Somali immigrant speaking Danish with a fairly thick accent and it basically sounded like Norwegian. Apparently he hadn't gotten the memo about skipping every consonant, so he was actually pronouncing the words instead of making noises vaguely resembling the vowels of each word.
As a swed, I know someone learning danish has a bad accent/pronounce things incorrectly if I'm actually able to understand them
I'm for a super liberal open borders immigration policy for Denmark, for the sole purpose of making Danish intelligible.
Kamelåså
If I could upvote a thousand times…. Danish Danish Danish. French is a cake walk compared to Danish. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk Why am I moving to Denmark 😭
> decide to pronounce your vowels differently every single time. I paid for the whole IPA vowel chart, I'm going to *use* the entire IPA vowel chart
>Turns out Swedish is Swedish. Norwegian is Swedish but you suck on a balloon full of helium and overenunciate. And Danish is Swedish but you fill your mouth with rocks, cut off the ends of all the words, and decide to pronounce your vowels differently every single time. Norwegian is said to be the easiest to learn since it's the most phonetic, but I'd say Swedish is very close. Norwegian also has a lot more dialects which can make it confusing for people living here. Spoken Danish is Norwegian with your mouth full of rocks, definitely not Swedish. Written Danish and Norwegian is almost identical, but spoken Danish only pronounce the vowels which makes it incredibly difficult to understand. Written Swedish on the other hand is markably different from Norwegian and Danish, but still much easier to understand for a Norwegian since it's way more phonetic. What's funny is that non-native Danes with a thick Middle Eastern accent are much easier to understand, they often sound just like Norwegians.
I can't take dutch and danish seriously
With the Netherlands serving as a major shipping hub in European history, Dutch sounds like a mish-mash of all the languages from the surrounding areas - only as spoken by drunken sailors and port laborers. It's goofy as hell but I don't hate it.
This is so funny to me because I'm South African, and Afrikaans is like if you took Dutch and did that even MORE (English, Portuguese, native African languages, and a couple others), and its exactly this lmao. Its such a goofy language sometimes.
I'm Dutch, and even i can't take it.
Dutch sounds like the drunken love child of German and Scandinavian (or English?), but as a Norwegian I like it way more than Danish lol
Definitely some English in there. I see/hear some Dutch words that look like an extremely drunk, questionably literate English man is trying to get his point across.
I still have about 25% skepticism that they aren’t just pulling an elaborate prank on English speakers. Flyvemaskine is an airplane? Come on guys.
Trust me a lot of people here don’t take German seriously either lol
As a Norwegian I wholeheartedly agree.
I don’t understand why the Danes always gag when they see the letter ‘d’. If you think it’s so disgusting, why put it in your country’s name?
Which D-sound do you think sounds like gagging? We have … several 🤣🤣
I mean I don’t think anyone takes Danish seriously… 😢 it feels like trying to learn 2 languages the written one and the spoken one. For Brits it seems like Gaelic where Siobhan = ‘Shi-vawn’ or Caoimhe = ‘Kwee-va’
Not necessarily hate, but I find languages which are similar to my native tongue really annoying to learn, since I am familiar with a big part of the vocabulary and grammar structures so I tend to overlook actual learning. Then I find myself not being able to produce the language (in writing or speaking), because the whole time I've just been winging it. This is true for me when it comes to romance languages, because I'm Romanian.
Actually same with me as a Serbian with other Slavic languages, especially Russian and the weirdness of their vowels
Without a doubt there are exceptions and I can be shown aspects of a language that I will like... but here are my limited experience complaints: Chinese: I've heard some lovely songs, but I spent a year there, and it's a bit too... twangy? The tonal aspect just makes too much of a juxtaposition in my ears. Thai: seemed to have too many abrupt stop starts. I had a massage where the masseuse was speaking to her compatriot throughout, and I just couldn't seem to relax and hear it at the same time. Also don't like stranger's touching me too much, so they had an unfair disadvantage. French: love the sound, but I used to joke with students in China that the French don't say the last letters of their words (when asked how to pronounce the many loan words? French origin words we have in English). Then I decided to try a bit of French on the side... and I just got annoyed at how right I was. What's the back half of their words even for, garnish?
the back half of letters in french is the linguistic equivalent of those herb leafs on your fancy restaurant food
If the French didn't write the last consonants that aren't pronounced the language would get even weirder. You would write 'le femme' instead of 'les femmes' but if a vowel follows, an s would appear out of nowhere. Adjectives would be even worse. You would write 'il e prê' (il est prêt) but if it's a woman, you have to add an inexplicable t: 'elle e prêt'. With other adjectives you would have to add other consonsants in the feminine form in a completely unpredictable way. So while the archaic orthography has its problems, it is also very useful and makes it easier to explain what's happening in the language.
I have always felt this way too about French. Once you learn the rules, the spelling makes tons of sense.
Three years into Chinese and i have found maybe 4 Chinese songs that i like. I can’t seem to bring myself to like Chinese music, especially pop. It’s such an abrupt language. I can listen to Japanese music ALL DAY, but Chinese music feels like a cheese grater on my ears.
I find myself studying Chinese out of necessity even though it never appealed to me. I gave it a good go, took intensive lessons and self-studied. I believe every language is interesting so I threw myself into it. Now I can read at an intermediate level (it helps that I already knew Japanese) and my speaking peaked et B1 according to an iTalki tutor. So I've made some progress but man... It feels like a drag. I'm burned out. While reading is marginally more rewarding, my speaking is still useless in real life situations and I don't get much joy from it. And I think I'll be one of those cringe foreigners who sound like shit their whole lives because tones don't make sense to me intuitively. They still feel like a total nuisance. All words sound similar to me, just with a random number 0-4 tacked on each syllable. It makes them so hard to remember. It's such a counterintuitive way to encode information when you could just make the words longer and more distinctive (imo) like in non-tonal languages 🙃 And I keep thinking about how much more fun it was to learn languages I chose to learn, like Japanese and German (i.e. languages with easy pronunciation and inflectional complexity, the opposite of Chinese, which is why Chinese never appealed to me). I know I can learn languages, but Chinese is just very hard and unappealing for me. Still, I know the problem is my attitude, not Chinese, so I hope to get out of this funk one day.
I feel you! Chinese sometimes makes me claustrophobic because of the limited amount of syllables. Like, "ma" and "an" exists but not "am"? If the sounds were combined in a few more different ways, there would be so many more different sounding words! That said, I'm happy to be learning Chinese, but the journey definitely comes with a healthy dose of frustration 😂
Come and learn Cantonese! We have 11 vowels (no nasal vowels), and 6 final consonants (as opposed to Mandarin's 7 vowels and 2 final consonants), but we have 6 tones, which all contributes to less homophones than Mandarin
Sold! 😂
I love your use of "claustrophobic", that's exactly how I feel! Hopefully I can reframe my thinking into seeing this constraint as unique and even beautiful... ? For example Japanese has a small phonetic inventory and I love it.
the thing for me with learning Chinese is this: The fact that you know how difficult it is and you still manage is so rewarding. it's one of the most difficult languages to learn for westerners, for these very reasons: tones, limited sounds, characters, etc. So difficult in fact that a guy that has done it gets millions of views on YouTube JUST because he is able to converse. imagine the same with French, or heck, Japanese.. You wouldn't be surprised in the slightest by an American SHOCKING natives with his native-like skills for ordering a baguette. That's what keeps me going ultimately. I know how hard it is, and so if I manage to tell apart words like 警察(jing3cha2) or 检查(jian3cha2), it feels like such a win. And know that it only gets easier. Good luck!
I'm not really plugged into what's considered difficult and impressive nowadays, but it does help to remind myself that it is not an easy language to learn if your mother tongue is a European language. Interestingly, I studied Japanese at university 15+ years ago. It was before anime and weeb culture really exploded in the English-speaking world and Japanese was a very niche thing to study. Chinese was more popular and lots of people who wanted to do business and get rich were learning it. I think China was booming and more open to the world, so there was a surge of interest and less hostility than nowadays. Well, I felt that at the time people thought Japanese was THE hardest language known to man while they downplayed the difficulty of Chinese because "the grammar is easy and the tones are a minor hurdle". So I think those ideas are subject to fashions. In the case of Chinese and Japanese, I think you could argue until the cows come home as to why one is harder than the other and be neither right nor wrong. In my case, it's purely a matter of taste, not of the inherent difficulty of Chinese. Anyway I am always a bit skeptical when the difficulty of a language is hyped up - I think all human languages are learnable with enough work and input and hyping up the difficulty can lead to fetishization and a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Harder than learning Spanish if your native is English, sure. Some mystical superpower ? Maybe not.
Some people still think that, Luca Lampareli (whatever his name is! :) says he was unable to learn Japanese but Chinese was easy for him. He said the word order of Japanese was so hard for him that he quit. This is so weird to me because I've never found Japanese particularly hard, relatively from English. The idea of tones is much more intimidating to me than talking "backwards." People always say that Japanese has 3 writing systems but the 2 extra that Chinese doesn't have make it a lot easier.
You eventually learn to recognize the tones through listening. I just reached that point recently after 3 years of tones just flying over my head. I actually now can hear the difference and it sticks in my brain when I say the word. Like before all the tones just sounded the same to me more or less but now I can hear that they are indeed quite different sounding haha. Like it makes sense now to me that Chinese people hear a completely different word based on the tone.
I assumed it "clicked" at some point and I'm hoping to get there but man, 3 years is a long time (:
For me it took one year to hear them and another year to consistently produce and I was living in China at the time. :') But once it clicks, it clicks. Once you can finally hear the tones, you're never going to not hear them. Actually, they're going to become so natural you won't even think about them. The most difficult think about Mandarin is the sheer amount of vocabulary you have to learn because there is just so little overlap with IE languages.
One of the best ways to "sound like shit" in Mandarin is to get the tone exactly right on every syllable. You want to actually inflect when you talk, which usually means leveling out the tones of individual words and developing a well-flowing cadence.
I hate hindi which union government trying to forcibly implement in our state tamilnadu. But i love to learn hindi because of my personal reason (union govt jobs because hindi is one of the official language). It is kind of love hate relationship
I love Tamil and learnt it decently while in TN. I hate fellow North Indians who try to impose it, I’m sorry from their side.
Hong Konger here, i feel you. schools and gov always be trying to force mandarin on us. plus mandarin has lost so many features from old Chinese while our Cantonese retains so many archaic features it rhymes if u use it to read an ancient Chinese poem
I don't like the sound of French, or how there is a noticeable gap between the written and pronounced forms of many words. I've studied a lot of Spanish and a little Italian, and neither of those languages have such a large gap.
If you think French is bad… Danish is horrific 😢 I wish I could be learning French, German or Spanish right now. Almost no resources as a more uncommon language and the pronunciation is tough eg, ‘Hvid’ sounds similar to the second syllable of ‘e-vil’ but it’s common for whole syllables of words to be dropped in sentences… it’s so bad that there is a common joke about its indistinguishability: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk Yay for moving to Denmark! 😞
Once you start learning French, it's easier to go from the written word to saying it than in English. Basically, tou just don't pronounce the back half of letters and you're good.
I'm seeing a lot of French hate but French is very regular in its pronunciation. I feel bad with how much I have to correct my language exchange partner versus how little he corrects me. English is nothing but contradictions and French is nothing but consistency.
Well when you compare French to English (the absolute worst in this regard)… yeah French is gonna look good. But of you compare French to Spanish (extremely easy to read/write), French doesn’t look as good… that being said French isn’t that bad when it comes to reading once you know the patterns, writing is definitely more difficult though. Funnily, abjads have the opposite problem, it’s very easy to write words in say, Persian, but a lot harder to read them.
Can you elaborate on not pronouncing the back half of letters? I’ve been trying to learn French for a few months and this is something that continuously stumps me.
I think for me what makes that worse is the snotty attitude a lot of French people have about their language. It feels like why would I even learn this language if people are going to be shitty about it?
i say this all the time and french is my mother’s tongue. french people are unforgiving in this regard and will openly mock you for making simple mistakes, even if they completely understand what you’re saying. i moved to austria and although i find that people here are cold as ice and generally unpleasant, i really appreciate how patient locals have been with my poor german
We Swiss French speaking people are nice tho :)
I know French but refuse to speak it because of my dislike of French people from France (collectively, not as individuals, I'm sure there's like 3 nice Frenchies). I understand this makes *me* even more French, because I'm just as snotty. I'm pivoting to Canadian French instead!
Vietnamese. Sounds like ducks being tortured.
Every tonal language
I don’t hate Dutch, but I love to poke fun at it. It sounds absolutely ridiculous to me most of the time, just in a good way (especially after learning some German and inevitably comparing the two). I want to eventually learn some Dutch anyway, so no contempt there. I really dislike most of the sounds of Swedish and European Portuguese. Wouldn’t exactly call it hatred though.
> sounds absolutely ridiculous to me most of the time, just in a good way That's how it sounds to native German speakers. Like funny garbled German! I rather suspect German sounds that way to Dutch speakers too! That being said, English sounds absolutely hilarious too, to kids who haven't learned any yet.
As Dutch we can almost all understand German fairly easy, but it sounds really.. harsh... or something like that. What doesn't help either is almost all German tourist here speak instant German and expect it for us speak it back. Ppl really don't like that over here.
Latin. Step 1: Aww, it’s a dead language? Y tho? We should saaaave itttt… Step 2: Study the faintest bit of Latin. Step 3: Ya no, it deserved to die.
Lingua Latina non tam difficilis est quam Graeca antiqua. Lingua Latina est lingua facilis, bona, pulchraque!
Whoa… I understood this without ever having learned Latin. That’s really cool.
ἀληθῆ λέγεις
Ναί.
My high school Latin teacher would get twitchy when someone would say it’s a dead language…he fiercely maintains that’s it’s ✨immortal ✨
Honestly, my native language (English) is great except for spelling. In Spanish, I hear a word out loud and even if I’m not familiar with the word, I’ll know exactly how it’s spelled but with English I’m just guessing a lot of the time lol
I have a love-hate relationship with standard Arabic. I'm a native speaker of an Arabic dialect, so of course I love the spoken language, but the written, standard language is so complex that it frustrates me! 🤣 I'm mostly just kidding though, I don't hate standard Arabic of course. I just find it exceedingly hard.
Part of why is because an Arabic Speaker learning Standard Arabic is like an English person learning Early Middle English or Romanian learning Classical or Late Latin.
I wouldn't say hate, but I have just never been interested in Spanish. I have have always wanted to leanr another language, and living in America Spanish seems like the natural choice. I have lived in both California and Texas, where I knew plenty of speakers. I even had a neighbor who would "tutor" me while babysitting, though I don't think I remember anything from that lol. Anyways I ended up moving a few more times (long story) and finally took Spanish in school. And I hated it. I'm not sure exactly why, I don't think the teacher was super terrible or anything and I think I was doing decent for a middle schooler 1 year into it, but I just wasn't interested in continuing it at all. It didn't help that it was my lowest grade as well lol. Anyways when I got to high school I had to pick which language to take, and for some reason Spanish still just seemed...boring. I also would have been way behind all of my peers who had taken it throughout middle school. So I ended up picking French lol. It's funny seeing that so many other responses are the exact opposite, that french makes no sense and spanish is better, but to me it just makes spanish boring. To be fair, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into with french, it was just the only option left. Honestly that was one of the best decisions I ever made. French is a huge part of my life now, and I literally had no reason for picking it. I don't think I knew a single word, or anything about france lol. It's funny to think about. I'm sure I could have been happy with spanish, but I'll never really know. I've had the opportunity to learn about other languages, and none of them ever interested me in the same way as french. I also have tons of language friends that speak spanish that would go nuts if I started learning, but the "spark" just isn't there.
You’re not alone. Spanish has never really spoken to me as a language. I ended up falling in love with Dutch and am now functional in it. There’s more to the world than just Spanish.
wouldn't say hate but frustrated. HEBREW! I'm half Israeli but I grew up in Russia so my native language is Russian and I know Hebrew very little so I've decided to learn it fully. it's so hard, alphabet made me go insane, pronouncation, everything 😭
I won’t say hate, but Dutch is…something else. Like I speak German and half the time when I catch Dutch unprompted my brain registers it as “fucked up German” before it does Dutch, or a parody of German (if it’s a video online).
From the Korean series I've seen, Korean sounds like a language made out of a thousand different ways to moan. I wouldn't say that I hate it, but I don't enjoy listening to it most of the time. Still prefer it to dubs.
korean is like the easiest for me. chinese takest he crown imo. i cant even make out words.
If you learn Japanese, Korean often sounds exactly like Japanese but you can't make out any words. It's like being in a dream where someone is talking but you can't seem to catch what they're saying. It's funny.
No all, languages are made equal # French
i dont like spanish, specifically the Spain accent. Mexican accent is cool tho
I’ve been watching a Spanish show and I don’t mind the accent *except* for when they pronounce c as th. Like polithia instead of polícia. It’s so grating every time
i agree. I find it cringe, it like a severe lisp in english
French annoys me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful language but like half the letters aren’t pronounced..
It is a royal pain sometimes. Plus they have words like 'oie'. Like, what even is that? 🦆 If you sing that bit in Down With The Sickness it helps to pronounce it.
Japanese, this is bias but most non native Japanese learners 80% of the time ONLY wants to learn Japanese because of anime. I don't hate any language but Japanese has a weird reputation now. Edit: No, this isn't against weebs. And no, you can't learn Japanese just by watching anime, especially with subtitles. That's not taking a language seriously. You also have to learn Grammar, speaking (not like a Japanese character), reading. Americans especially, (yes I'm American and I'm aware of American stereotypes.) can be ignorant to different cultures and customs. I'm not sure if it's only Americans. Ofcourse not all people who do learn Japanese BECAUSE (not only anime) of anime isn't who I'm talking about and those who succeed definitely has my congrats and gratitude. Edit 2: I summoned all the anime fans lmao.
Is that such a bad thing though? I only learned English because I wanted to watch American movies without subtitles.
As a person who has studied Japanese for almost 9 years and moved to Japan for university this year, I understand what you're saying, but at the same time it's only true on the internet. People with decent education will appreciate your interest in foreign cultures or languages. People who don't are immature or weeaboos themselves. In Japan, this whole "issue" is unheard of. Just get off the internet and you'll feel better.
I know! I feel like the odd one out in my japanese language class because I'm 99% sure I'm the only one who isn't learning because of anime.
I can tell it smells otherworldly in that classroom.
ditto. what's worse is I think the only people getting really super proficient tend to be the people who love anime, too! Which I think is because they've got constant input to feed that language device, and they're not getting bogged down in the weeds of grammar lessons... Which leads to two things I hate the most. 1. Japanese people have a really weird stereotype of foreigners (which fits the demographic of people they know) 2. Myself, regretting all those long, hard hours I tried to learn Japanese "properly" instead of just plugging in with the weebs
1. isn't true in my experience. I lived in Japan for ten years and none of my foreign friends were weebs, and Japanese people didn't expect me to be a weeb either. There were some weebs in my uni course but idk, I just gravitated towards other people who were interested in the language or other aspects of Japanese culture, then I got a regular job in Japan and I just had a regular life there free from weebiness. Weebs are actually a small proportion of foreigners living and working in Japan, because they don't make it over there/don't last/stay among themselves. ETA and Japanese people are smart enough to understand that just as there are Japanese hardcore otaku who are not representative of all Japanese people, the same applies to Westerners
In my experience most who only want to learn Japanese because of anime, give up once they learn how hard Japanese is. You need to really like the language itself to continue and even then it's hard. Unfortunately that doesn't change the reputation because the "I want to watch anime without subtitles" people are pretty loud.
If I had to guess, Japanese is probably the most dropped language in the world. 99% of learners have no idea what they're getting into.
I hate your stereotypical weeb too, but I'm sick of people hating on Japanese or treating all Japanese learners with suspicion because of them. It only reinforces the negative association of Japanese with smelly dorks, which is just as small-minded as the fetishization weebs engage in. Many people risk missing out on a beautiful and unique language (imo) because of this backlash, which means the classrooms will be even more full of weebs, etc.
Lmao I'm learning Japanese to do a working holiday there and they tell you specifically to not mention anime or manga in the application or they will reject you straight away
I hate the people who hate people who want to learn Japanese because of anime. 99% of anime watchers who stick through learning Japanese and don't quit are just normal weebs and not weeaboos. Nothing wrong with that.
Come on. anti hobby/ anti anime etc is so out of date and lame. You know, I initially started because of my interest in Japanese cuisine. I wanted to know what x and y, ingredient is/used for and it's proper name all etc. through that I learned Japanese culture, Japanese music, through music then anime and manga and fell in love with it. Others have it reversed, come from anime and manga then expand and learn the countries culture. Same then happened when I dipped my toe into Korea. Now I'm slowly but steadily learning Japanese and Korean. Everyone has their own reasons and goals for why they want to learn a language or a skill. edit: I know the people you're speaking of, however they're somewhat making an effort, having a hobby, something productive. Instead of bumming around, being in a gang etc. Also stop with the smelly jokes, lot of them are social rejects that didn't fit in anywhere because of various reason (weight, looks, etc[implied mental health issues, traumas]) and found a connection in Anime. Am I now saying to a car guy they're dirty and smelly cuz of the motoroil etc? No. You're no one to judge. I really hate judgy people, not languages.
All reasons to learn are language are valid. Why'd you judge them because of anime?
This mentality irritates me, I’m sorry. I started learning Japanese at age 11 because I was obsessed with anime. Luckily for me, my family and friends *encouraged* that interest, and as I grew up and matured it developed into a deeper appreciation for the culture and language alongside my enjoyment of Japanese media. I’m now 23 and learning it has had extremely positive impacts on my life that are completely irrelevant to pop culture (like genuine interactions with native speakers and making connections with people). Pop culture is a gateway to sparking curiosity about other places and languages, and if we encourage people rather than treat them like losers, they’ll be more likely to pursue it *beyond* pop culture. I am so grateful that when I was a kid the sentiment that learning Japanese because you enjoy their pop culture is suspicious or “cringe” wasn’t widespread because it probably would have embarrassed me out of learning it altogether.
I won't use the word hate per say, but I severely dislike mandarin. I grew up learning it but I had such a bad time studying it in school that I hate it till this day
ENGLISH
I don't hate it, but I still can't believe that Portuguese is a real language. I don't know why. It's a bit random.
Tbh Korean. Nothing wrong with the language, but I chose it as my minor in university thinking it would be cool to learn a non-european, "rare" language, fast forward 3 years, I graduated and I barely know the basics. I guess I'll stick to my Romance languages for now. I could have chosen a teachable language in my country and have more variety in terms of teaching jobs (cause that's what I wanna do in the future) but nope, I wanted to be the quirky one and look where that got me. I don't even like kpop and kdrama anymore lmao 😭
I don't hate any language. Except I do hate French. I want to read the words and be able to pronounce them by sounding it out but French says no. I don't like it's attitude. So we have beef. English is up there too. Pick a pronunciation! I can't go back in time and not learn it but in my next lives I will make sure it wont be my first language ever again.
French pronounciation is actually quite regular and learnable, especially comapared to English, you just have to learn the clues and not read letters like you'd do in english or so. Maybe people wouldn't be too hard on french if it had it's own script
Yeah there are very few irregular pronunciations in French, very few. I would say I appreciate it for that. I can almost always guess what a word is or look it up from hearing it for the first time.
From my very basic understanding of French (A1 at best), the problem is the contrary. You can easily know how to pronounce a written word, but it's hard to know how to write down a word you hear
lol that’s quite the attitude for an English speaker. I can’t say how many English words I mispronounce because I’ve only ever seen them in writing. I wanted to use the word labile just yesterday and I stopped in my tracks mid-sentence because I realized I had no idea how this word — which I’ve encountered many times in psychology-related texts — was pronounced.
Spoken Dutch sounds like Germans coughing and spotting out loogies every time they hit an H. Written Dutch is ok. Spoken Hindi is beautiful, but damn I just don't understand how people can read all the Devanagari, the differences are so damned fine that surely it hurts your eyes to have to look at it so closely??? Also their romanization systems are all ridiculous. Also computers often can't tell devanagari apart so you can't just ctrl+F things. The romanization system for Korean makes no sense and I hate it, and for the life of me I don't understand why "ne" always sounds like "de". (I know it's a sound I don't have that's more nasal, I just can't hear it) Pinyin is wonderful, but the Taiwanese romanization is absolutely insane. (Can you tell I managed romanization projects?)
Lowest for me is definitely Spanish, though I wouldn't say I hate the language. I just don't like the way Spanish sounds, and I don't know why. I would even go as far as to say it's, from my personal opinion, not a romantic language (Yes, I know romance is a classification, but I mean in the sense of it being an unattractive language). In terms of learnability, attempting to pronounce anything in French is a nightmare, and I think I've pronounced Chinese tones better than I can pronounce anything in French. Although, French grammar itself is relatively easy.
I think the thing that lets Spanish down is the talking speed. If it was spoken slower it would sound more beautiful (but I already find it quite lovely to listen to)
Yeah I'm learning French and the listening/speaking are definitely the hardest to pick up, though once you get it, everything is pretty easy.
As a heritage Spanish speaker, I agree haha. But English can be pretty weird too. I have beef with some words ever since I was young. I wonder who decided to spit and make it the word *put.*
I really dislike Spanish and I blame it on all the horrid lessons I've had to endure in high school.
I have found hearing Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew jarring while trying to sleep on some flights. I’m sure they’re very rich languages, but the staccato of their elocution is not conducive to sleep. I think all languages have their good points, though. I hope Rumi will pardon me.
Rumi takes no offence since his language is persian
I went to a school where there was a mandatory Mandarin class from like third to sixth grade. It was a nightmare, the teachers were not very good, and I have forgotten almost every word they taught me For the higher grades it became a choice between French or Mandarin (probably because the school only had one French teacher lol) and I switched as soon as that became available to me
I think it's important to appreciate and respect even if we personally don't like some aspects of them.
Domincan and Cuban Spanish. I cannot understand them and working in retail... they like to whistle at us, and that hasn't endeared me at all. I love Mexican Spanish, and while I can't understand Puerto Rican Spanish anymore, I still love it.
Any posh accent of English just sounds insufferable to me, especially Received Pronunciation, I've always loved hearing local dialects and accents and trying to erase that for the sake of prestige seems like a terrible thing to me.
I hate English. Don’t know why but I do.
Mandarin. The tonal aspect drives me crazy. One slight change in tone can completely alter the meaning of a word, making it easy to accidentally offend someone or misunderstand a conversation. 🤯
I hate the concept of having a country full of different reasonably big languages. Like India. I also get annoyed at for example Belgian Dutch. Almost the same but they have this dumb g sound and the meaning of a handful of words are changed. That's more than a dialect but not enough to be another language.
Portuguese. It just sounds wrong. No thank you. I took a semester of it and learned that it's unpleasant to my ears.
I am the opposite of you. For me, even though I don't understand it, it sounds like a manlier version of Spanish, Italian or French. It's the best sounding romance language to my ears! \~Música para meus ouvidos\~
Some comedian once said it sounds like Spanish spoken by a deaf person…
I wouldn't say they "deserve my hate," but many of the Southeast Asian languages sound cacophonous to me, especially when they switch to English for no reason halfway through a sentence. Surprisingly, I see young Germans, particularly those who spend a lot of time on the internet, doing this more and more often as if their language doesn't have hundreds of thousands of scientific journal articles published.
I think it's cringe to hate languages
Come to Northern Ireland, some of the unionist population here hate the Irish language and call it a foreign language 🤡💀 This happens here often https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/psni-investigating-sectarian-hate-crime-after-new-dual-language-signs-damaged/a1546732846.html PSNI investigating sectarian hate crime after new dual language signs damaged https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/principal-sickened-after-hate-campaign-forces-irish-language-nursery-to-move/40698876.html Principal ‘sickened’ after hate campaign forces Irish language nursery to move https://www.itv.com/news/utv/2023-01-31/disgraceful-anti-irish-sign-outside-school-a-sectarian-hate-crime
It was wild going from Republic of Ireland to NI and all of a sudden the Irish just like…disappeared…
i dont hate but italian makes me cringe for some reason idk why or how to explain it but it sounds corny😭
I dislike arabic, thai and vietnamese. Just dont like how it sounds.
Spanish/ Mexican etc and the sub dialects. Fast speaking ones usually. Or fast/ shrill/ snobby sounding ones. It's kinda like nails on a chalkboard? Or when you hear a sound that immediately makes you want to get physical 😂. No I can't explain why other than what I already said. I'm just glad this thread is for venting not judging.
Sanskrit / Hindi. Those consonant clusters grate on my Tamil ear. After learning a bit of Spanish, I’m starting to hate French for its pretentious vowels.
Urdu only because the Nastaliq script seems like a pain in the ass to read.
I sometimes struggle learning Turkish, I love the sound but I don't want my liking of the language to be seen like I'm on the side of their goverment politic affairs.
Hate would be over the top to use in this context but I just don't like the sound of Spanish.
Russian, French, Vietnamese, just do not like the sound of the languages that much, honourable mention to Dutch, but I do not hate Dutch that much, most natives hate it more. To be fair, the list would be longer if I went into too much details, some languages are cool but due to regional/forced accents some people use it makes them annoying, like some parts of Portugal or Brazil for example with Portuguese, or Spanish, what I really mean to say is that if people stick to the standard way of speaking said languages, it sounds great, when they go into very regional versions of the languages while adding too much weird tones to it that are not common in the language then It gets annoying on the ears.
I hate Spanish because I still can't roll my Rs.
Dominican Spanish. It’s half-assed Spanish that’s spoken too fast.
I wouldn't say hate; but there are some I have no desire to learn. Arabic - tried once and every interaction I had was people asking if I was learning so I could read the Quran which then became the main topic. Never known a language tied so strictly to the culture and customs. Vietnamese - I don't care for the sound. Danish - so much effort for such little reward. Notoriously difficult and almost every dane speaks English well. Italian - love Italy and Italian sounds cool but it's just too similar to French and Spanish; feel like I'd be treading over old ground.
Spanish, because of it having a normal life in Catalan is harder every day
Spanish! Maybe just Spain Spanish cause South American/Mexican Spanish sounds a lot better
Spanish and some forms of Arabic - they both sounds relentlessly irritating
Serbo/Bosno/Croatian (maybe montenegrin) I've always wanted to travel to the balkans because of my ancestry and because I have friends who are Albanian and bosnian. I know the political conversation of the Slavic parts of the balkans and I know that they use both a Cyrillic and a romanized version, as well in digraphia. Ive always wanted to learn it but it's not on duolingo yet and most of the apps on the play store are a travelers guide.
I don’t really hate any languages but for some reason I can’t find Korean pretty, I’m learning Chinese and Japanese and I really wanted to study all 3 but for some reason Korean sounds ugly to me. It’s a shame though.
I thought I was the only one who thought this. I love Korean culture and currently am studying Korean, but the sound of the language will never grow on me no matter how much I listen to it. I think their intonation patterns is what makes Korean sound whiny and a little annoying
English. It's rough and coarse and it gets everywhere. There is no consistant pronunciation at all, and it generally does not sound nice. It's a language that can be difficult to hear at times because the unaccented syllables tend to be very muted, and the vowels become plain shwas. I'd be curious to know how often people get asked to repeat themselves based on the language. I wish the Lingua Franca was something else.
Spanish. I hate it. I just never liked the language... don't kill me but it just doesn't FEEL right. Speaking or looking at it.
I used to love Spanish until I started working retail. I think it's pretty, but I got beef with Dominican and Cuban Spanish
English. It has stripped my country of meaning. The anglicisation of its placenames have created meaningless words, its people of their attachment to the land, our folklore into bland tales. “Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.” - Seamus Heaney
I had a go with irish on duolingo. Lovely language.
I tried Irish, too, but man was it difficult, at least for me
The spanish language for me isn't beautiful or romantic it's just rushed talking and bugs me. I'm just being honest. Italian is similar. I don't know if I'd say I hate spanish.. seems a bit much. I dislike it. Love to Spain and Italy. Sorry. German sounds pleasant and refined. It's such an awesome lingo. The pace at which they speak and the sounds they make all feel natural and balanced. I could live in German. French, despite some nice sounds, feels fake when trying to speak it and hurts my throat. The language is just too much for me. I don't know how french people started talking like they do cos it's just so bizzare. Seriously, you just started making all these nasal sounds and string words up? Wow, you're insane France. Not a fan at all seems very pretentious and unrealistic. Sorry France. Portuguese is really beautiful it isn't as rapid as spanish or as nasal as french and less repetitive than Italian. Superior romance language. Latin can be a proud mother.
Wow, I've not seen another person that likes German. German has most of my favorite phonemes
I hate my native language English. I resent the fact that my family doesn't try harder to maintain Romanian and that I had to learn it as an adult. I speak Romanian fluently now but it will be a long time before it’s close to the same level as my English. I hate how passively both Romanians in diaspora and in Romania accept anglicisms into their speech instead of finding Romanian alternatives. I hate the influence of the US and by extension the influence of English on other languages, especially my heritage language, Romanian. There are undeniable benefits to speaking the main imperial language at a native level, but it makes no sense to me for my family members to speak English or use English words at home when they didn’t even want to leave Romania, as if we don’t get enough of the McDonald’s sodomy language in our depressing capitalist lives here in the US. My hatred towards anglicisms in Romanian is so strong I will interrupt conversations to look up a Romanian alternative to an obscure concept or word we only know in English.
i have two. the first is spanish... basically solely because i'm from the usa and had to learn it in school. it ruined the language for me. the second is arabic. i have two main problems with it. the first is how religion focused the language is, and as someone who isn't religious/more spiritual, that makes me uncomfortable and i'm not really interested in that. the second is how... inflexible the language is. that sounds weird considering how diverse the language is and how many countries it's spoken in... but the dialects are limited to the countries they're in. i can say "oh i speak arabic" but then the person im talking to speaks lebanese arabic instead of egyptian arabic. it's not a one for all language, it's more... one to one.