The big thread on understanding eachother (language comparisons and stuff)

AiR

Forum Addict
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
Messages
11,985
Location
Suecia
Car(s)
Bulgogi Knedliky 1.6 GDI (Hyundai i30)
Yes I figured this is a good "game" to play since we're an international forum. Basically the recent developments in the random thoughts in the political edition got me thinking about our basic understanding of other languages than our own.

Obviously everyone here knows english, but do the English understand the Irish? I understand my western neighbours who talk danish and norwegian but I have no idea what the finns are saying (except curse words and sauna) so I'm wondering what languages are so similar they're mutually understandable. Who has false friends?

For example;
  • Can the spaniards understand Portugese? :hmm:
  • Japan and korea are neighbours, do they understand eachother? :james:
  • Can the russians understand what the people in the former soviet republics are saying?
  • I think all of south america talks spanish except Brazil. But is it the same spanish? Any funny dialects?

What languages sound funny to you? This is a question our poor monolingual English-speaking members can think about too. Fill in more examples or questions or taunt those who you think talk funny! Or talk about poo in different languages. :lol:

I think french sounds like a deeper and slower version of italian. Am I stupid or correct?
 
Last edited:
I know Korean and Japanese use completely different character sets.
 
To me, Spanish and Italian sound remarkably similar.

Portuguese sounds funny to me.

I took one semester of Russian in high school, and I got better grades in that class than I ever did in English.

I'm currently trying to teach myself French because I love the way it sounds. And my ancestry in partly in France.

There's also Hungary, Ireland and Native American in my ancestry and I'd love to learn the pertinent languages there too, but I'm finding one language-learning endeavor to be plenty for the time being.
 
English vs American English can be amusing. Thread on it somewhere.
I searched on languages before I posted but I found the english vs american thread now but it was mostly about a webtest and scores.
Give me some examples of missunderstood americans on vacation in the old country! :)

Estonian is my second favourite language (after Portugese) after the PANGAR??V-movie which despite containing both shooting and ass in my native tounge is not about shooting people in the ass. Portugese has a nice flow to it. Don't understand a thing they say which is why I listen to brazilian gang music that's so violent it's banned in Brazil.

Dutch is the strangest language. Does anyone else beside themselves understand it? Is it a defence mechanism? I don't think any of their neighbours get it.
 
Last edited:
Copying my post here from Political discussion, since this is propably the right thread:

I think it's the hakkapelitta (it should probably be two P) and eii (one i) and peiit?? (proably only one ?). I think my signature is about almond icecream because I copied it off a box of almond icecream.

Not quite. Kekke=Keke, hakkapeliitta is okay, eii=ei, peiit??=peitt??. :lol: Your signature is correct.
Words are acidity regulator and locust bean gum. :blink:
 
Spanish, French, and Italian are all very similar. I'm decently fluent in French, and grew up in Texas so I know quite a bit of Spanish, and given these two things I can navigate Italian fairly well, or fill in bits of Spanish I don't know. I understand I lot more than I can speak/write.

British vs. American English isn't usually that big a deal. The only really confusing things, on these boards at least, are the pants/trousers thing and the fact that the Brits call a TV season a series. I have no idea what they call a series.
 
The main thing are language groups, for example romance language which are descended from Latin such as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and French. There are many similarities in such groups, of course some languages are more similar to each other (in romance group I think Spanish and Portuguese are closest). So if Polish is slavic language it is similar for example to Russian, Czech and Slovak. I hear that for Polish people most similar is Slovak and it is quite hard to understand Czech. Must check this some time.

For other questions by AiR:

Irish is very different from English.

Japanese and Korean are entirely different. I'm learning Japanese so I can say it isn't part of any group so it isn't similar to any other language. Japanese use 3 character sets one is Chinese and two are syllabic and are used only in Japanese. Korean writing on the other hand looks complicated but in fact it is alphabet but words are written in squares (check on wikipedia, there is good explanation how it works).

And now about "which language sounds funny". I'm interested in that topic, because for Polish people Czech language sound very funny. Like funny versions of words used in Polish with a little different meaning.

Is there similar situation with some other countries, when other language from the same group is like funny version of your own language?
 
Obviously everyone here knows english, but do the English understand the Irish?

Does the UK understand the Irish? When they speak English, yes. When they're speaking Irish (or Irish Gaelic, as it's also known)? No. Except for some 'newer' words - the Gaelic for television is teilif?s, for example - the two don't really have much overlap. I can't eavesdrop on two Irishmen speaking Gaelic and understand it (as my Gaelic is Scots, not Irish, and limited to a handful of essential phrases - "Hello", "Scotland", "Two beers please").

Although, and this is a bit geeky, talking about the UK's minority languages, apparently Irish Gaelic (pronounced gay-lick), Scots Gaelic (pronounced gah-lick), and Welsh can all be understood by each other to some degree. Not fully, just to some extent.

I think french sounds like a deeper and slower version of italian. Am I stupid or correct?

I'm not sure about the slower - since the French and Italians both seem to speak and argue pretty darn passionately they both get pretty fast. The French, Parisian especially, have a horrible habit of million-mile-an-hour French that makes my head spin.


Interesting sidefact - in my head German and Russian sound very similar, to the extent that when I learnt Russian, my head kept giving me all the German words I knew instead. It was a nightmare trying not to confuse the two.

I suspect if I tried to learn Spanish or Italian I'd end up fishing around and using French words all the time.

So if Polish is slavic language it is similar for example to Russian, Czech and Slovak. I hear that for Polish people most similar is Slovak and it is quite hard to understand Czech. Must check this some time.

Yeah, when I learnt Russian we had a general lecture in "Slavonic grammar", covering Russian, Czech and Polish all at once. Some of the basics were the same but there was a fair amount of "each language is subtly different", too...
 
Last edited:
Spanish, French, and Italian are all very similar.

As they should, they all fall under the Romantic language.

And it bugs and annoys me to no end of how the definition of the word "romance" has been warped in the past 150 years. I think I made a thread of it some time ago.
 
Last edited:
And it bugs and annoys me to no end of how the definition of the word "romance" has been warped in the past 150 years. I think I made a thread of it some time ago.

Eh, I think it depends on who you are and what sort of circles you're in. I'm so ass-bitingly academic, when I hear "romantic" I immediately think of the ancient seat of civilization.

But, of course, I am a nyerd.
 
The Portuguese x Spanish question has a big "depends" about it.
Brazil is a Portuguese-speaking country surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries. Add in the fact that inhabitants from the south (like me) have a hard time understanding inhabitants from the north and chaos ensues.
Since people from the south are used to hearing and dealing with people from neighboring countries, we find it much easier to understand Spanish. Italian and German is easily comprehended because we had A LOT of immigrants from those countries.
 
Let's see here, my native language is English. I studied Spanish in high school. I can ask for the bathroom proficiently in Hebrew, but I can't understand the directions to get there (please point for the stupid American). I picked up some colorful metaphors in Yiddish, and I can translate assembly directions from German Kinder eggs so long as I'm provided with illustrations and a Berlitz paper dictionary since we all know Google translator is worthless with German.

Right. I got myself in a spot of raised eyebrow with my German adviser with the Yiddish once. Whoops. When my Spanish was more fresh, I could read Italian (mostly), but not understand it spoken at all. Portuguese was still complete gibberish even though everyone told me it was "extremely similar." I once understood some words from a guy who talked to me in Aramaic. That one was the most weird.

If I were to sit down in front of a language I have no education in (so not Spanish or let's include Italian), I have the easiest time working my way through simple German, but in no way could I understand another language based on the one I acquired as a small person. English only.
 
Last edited:
for me as french is my native language, i could understand a bit spanish and italian even if i never spoke it cause of the ressemblance of the three, also, greek is pretty easy when you are in science since you get to know all the greek symbol that are used in chemistry and physic, so when you go to greece, you can easily translate their greek alphabet and then with a bit of greek kowledge understand what is written on menu, store front and stuff like that. As for chinese, korean and japanese, i have heard somewhere that chinese and japanese share the kanji alphabets but they use different word for the same thing.
 
Dutch is the strangest language. Does anyone else beside themselves understand it? Is it a defence mechanism? I don't think any of their neighbours get it.

Eh..... Belgians understand it too, well at least half of them :p

Seriously tho, it's not that much different from German, but there's been huge Yiddish influences in our language thanks to the huge Jewish community in Amsterdam (well, at least until 1940), and lots of French in there too.
 
Eh..... Belgians understand it too, well at least half of them :p

Seriously tho, it's not that much different from German, but there's been huge Yiddish influences in our language thanks to the huge Jewish community in Amsterdam (well, at least until 1940), and lots of French in there too.

I didn't realize Dutch had picked up a lot of Yiddish. It makes sense of course, and the similarities with German make it all the more likely. I learned something.
 
Dutch is the strangest language. Does anyone else beside themselves understand it? Is it a defence mechanism? I don't think any of their neighbours get it.

It's funny, some dutch words I can read just fine (dunno if I understand them spoken, not around that many dutch people) but other words are complete and utterly wierd.

And as said I also understand swedish and norwegian to some extend, I find that norwegian is easier to read and swedish easier to hear, dunno if it's just me though.
 
Well, Spanish and French are very close together IMO... even though pronunciation is very different. Same goes for German/Dutch

I thought that Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese Portuguese are written the same but pronounced very differently... as in Brazilians pronounce their words like they should and Portuguese try to open their mouth as little as possible

I can sorta read Portuguese fine, but I cannot understand it when spoken to me... I always have the urge to tell the people to stop eating and talking at the same time...

Dutch is wierd because there are more exceptions than rules, so the whole grammer is a mystery.

Finnish is the most hilarious language because it has lotsa vowels.
 
Latvian is a funny language. They put an s to the end of every word so it sounds very funny.

Finnish and Estonian are quite similar.
 
Top