7 Most Confusing Languages for English Speakers
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- Опубликовано: 25 май 2024
- 🫤 Think your native language is difficult? I found 7 confusing languages that are sure to make your head spin. These languages have crazy conjugations, confusing word order, and verbs that will keep you up at night! Do you already know one of these languages? Brag in the comments and share your secret to success.
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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Confusing Languages Ahead . . .
0:21 - Welsh
4:32 - Czech
7:44 - Hungarian
10:32 - Icelandic
14:47 - Basque
17:51 - Georgian
20:35 - Navajo
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
• Americans Pronounce We...
• Defnyddio'r Gymraeg
fb.watch/rvyOzlnL5P/
• Try To Say "Llanfairpw...
• Global News staff try ...
• Welsh lessons: Pronoun...
• Things Only Welsh Spea...
• But WHY does Welsh hav...
• Welsh Lessons (Gwersi ...
• ‘Adleisio’ - Eve Goodm...
• What's Your Favourite ...
• Learn the Basics: Czech
• WHY LEARNING CZECH IS ...
• Welcome to Easy Czech!
• Easy Hungarian 9 - Wha...
• Magyarország egyik leg...
• Australians (try to) s...
• The Hungarian front an...
• Icelandic Language Rea...
• How to ACTUALLY pronou...
• The Icelandic Volcano ...
• How to pronounce Eyjaf...
• What makes Icelandic "...
• How to pronounce Eyjaf...
www.tiktok.com/@sanxyra/video...
• The Basque language, c...
• We Tried to Learn Euro...
• Behind the Scenes: Pro...
• Useful Basque Phrases ...
• We Tried to Learn Euro...
• Trio Mandili - Kakhuri
• Gvprtskvni - how is th...
• The Georgian language,...
reelCpZ8J_...
www.tiktok.com/@shemomestsavl...
• Learn the Basics: Geor...
• Why Star Wars Was Dubb...
• Learn the Cockney acce...
• Navajo Handling Verbs
How about these impossible languages? 👉 ruclips.net/video/2rxA-GBYJb0/видео.htmlsi=MvvwxCzG9n1KJ8x8
How about a hungarian short stories book? If you can do a welsh one I'm sure hungarian won't be much trouble.
How about Malayalam language official language of state of Kerala
9:15 Did you use Google translate? That sentence is incorrect. And _tehénül_ doesn't mean _as a cow._ I have other problems with this video too.
@@gabor6259, If "tehénül" is not translated to "as a cow", how should "tehénül" then be translated?
@@riddick7082 _Tehénül_ means 'in the cow language'.
'As a cow' would be _tehénként._
As a French speaker welsh changing certain sounds just to make things flow better feels quite relatable 😂
hungarian is actually surprisingly logical and hungarian cases are NOT like slavic languages because there's no gender in Hungarian and many hungarian cases correspnd to prepositions in other languages
Yes, their cases are more like postpositions glued to the nouns.
I don't speak Hungarian, but I've learned vowel harmony in Finnish and Turkish, which are logical and very pleasant to hear. Another thing: Those two languages and Hungarian don't have genders. So, they have left out the categorization and sexism that most other European languages demand. Stress: I have a feeling that the stress almost always falls on the first syllable. The stress will change if the vowel is long but in Hungarian the long vowel is always shown. It's totally different from Russian where the stress can fall anywhere and worse, it's NOT shown...
During WWII, the U.S. Marine Corps (with the assistance of 29 Navajo marines) created a code based on the Navajo language. The code is said to have been critical to the victory at Iwo Jima, and the code remained unbroken at the end of the war. The Navajo "Code Talkers" could translate 3 lines of English in 20 seconds ... as opposed to the 30 minutes it took to translate the same material using a code breaking machine to translate from a standard code.
It is a great and true story. It's Iwo Jima, btw.
@@nicholasschroeder3678 Doggone autocorrect!
The idea of using the Navajo language came from an American who grew up with the Navajos when his parents were missionaries. Very few, non-Navajos can speak that language. The code-talking language was derived from Navajo words but even natives couldn't understand it without training. The Japanese tried but they never cracked the code.
ruclips.net/video/mtkFpEB90qI/видео.htmlsi=51STtbrcOnaK19FV - Olly's video about the code talkers is great.
ruclips.net/video/mtkFpEB90qI/видео.htmlsi=51STtbrcOnaK19FVn- Here's the Navajo code talkers full story from Olly.
The Icelandic guy is reading a Moomin book😃That was of course originally written in Swedish by the Finnish author Tove Jansson.
Yes! I noticed that, too! :)
Well la dee da
Yes, of course. Why the need to state the obvious?🤷♂️
I'm still hoping Olly will make a dedicated video about Finnish.
@@nicholasschroeder3678might not be obvious to everyone
As a hungarian, I would rather say that sentence as "tehénként" for "as a cow" instead of "tehénül". From the latter, I associate to their language, so that would mean "in the language of cows".
yeap
Missed opportunity to mention that the word "robot" itself is of Czech origin. Thanks for the interesting video, though! :)
Even more interesting fact about that is, that Karel Čapek originally thought about a word "labor" which basically is the same as English word "labourer" and would sound same mechanic and foreign to Czechs as the word robot (as we ourselves do not get naturally its etymology and relation to the word "robota" meaning a hard slavery work). Had his brother Josef not convince him to use the neologism robot instead, this widely known term might be very different now and Czechs would lose an international word of their own.
From a play by a Czech writer (Capek)
cool!
@@pohlpiano In the territory of the Hungarian kingdom, the word robot meant work performed in the form of tax to the landlord.
@@tamaslukacs3173 Thanks for the perspective, great to know! I believe it used to be similar in the Bohemian Kingdom as well, with the noun "robota" and also related verb "robotovat", perhaps after some time turning into the colloquial use I mentioned before (the word robota is still in use nowadays, though fading).
I have a course on Cherokee that i have been trying to learn. So honestly Navajo just seems mind blowing. Thank you for including an American indigenous language in your list.
Sign up for Ed Fields free online Cherokee lessons. They’re the best! If you can’t attend live, you can watch the replay and still get certified. The sign up is at the main website for the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)-check for the “language” tab at the top header.
whats the name of the course
@@schoolingdiana9086 is it the adult immersion classes or the online classes?
Hungarian and Georgian are such beautiful languages
Love from Sweden
It's amazing how the children learn these "difficult languages" just like we learn English.
I like Seth Meyer pronouncing "volcano". He's good at languages 🙂
A meta joke on his part, maybe? :)
That was very funny.
He nailed that hard C for sure. 👍
A travel author was having lunch in a Hungarian cafe when a group of schoolchildren aged about 7 years came in. He was amazed that they spoke Hungarian so well!
@@ktipuss I'm from Texas. Several years ago I was in France on a business trip. At the mall I saw little kids with their parents speaking French! Amazing !
Consonant mutations aren't all that complex. In the various Celtic languages, it's usually because at some point a preceding word ended in a nasal (nasal mutation) or a vowel, but that final sound got lost, but its echo persisted in the word that followed it. This later got grammaticalised.
In a way, you can see something similar happening in French over time via liaison. It hasn't developed into a system of initial mutations yet, but it could do under the right circumstances.
Anyhoo, the really weird thing Welsh has is singulatives, where the singular is marked by an infection and the plural is the root form. A good example would be coed/coeden, where the former mean "group of trees; wood" and the latter means "tree".
Singulatives. That's an interesting one. I wonder if certain things in English count as singulatives. For example cattle/head of cattle; staff/member of staff; team/team member; crew/crew member.
Native American languages are on another level. Many of the Algonquian languages have a similar complexity to Athabascan languages--Ojibwe and Potowatomi are two languages that code various levels of meaning into a word, so much so that a single consonant change can alter the entire meaning or grammatical function of a word (or sometimes both)
Finnish fits in with Hungarian; The same family, and just as confusing. I don't know if I'll ever be completely fluent. 😅 I'm still hoping you'll make a dedicated video about it soon...
Also, a Finnish singer I like posted a picture once of a sign in Welsh while his band was on tour in Wales and asked if that's how Finnish looks to foreigners. One of of the responses was "Finnish is what happened to all the missing vowels in Welsh."
A Finnish author was once asked how similar Finnish is to Hungarian. His response was : "As similar as English is to Russian".
@@ktipuss The vocabulary is not the same, that's true. But the grammar and certain other features like the vowel harmony are extremely similar, and they are still in the same language family, however far they've diverged from each other, just like English and Russian; same family, different branches.
I started learning Hungarian this year. I was NOT surprised by how different it is in structure because I was expecting that. I was also expecting the vocabulary to be very different. I was expecting all this because people always talk about it. What I was not expecting was how regular and predictable it is. Having learned Russian I find the verbs a lot less irregular in Hungarian. I also find the many cases to be more like just adding a preposition to the end of the word. In Russian you have to learn the preposition and then what case it takes. In Hungarian the case plays the role of the prepostion so there is only one thing to learn. Also there are no genders and adjectives only have two possible forms. So is Hungarian impossibly difficult? No. It's different and takes a lot of practice but it's just so logical.
Agglutinative languages are generally really regular because one piece of inflection only ever does one thing, and you just add bits of inflection on the root like building lego. They're pretty much like small helper words in English that just get appended to the root instead. Makes for a lot of cases, but stupidly regular compared to fusional languages like Romance and Slavic ones.
I already knew from the title that Hungarian would be here, yayyy.
Icelandic has some fun features, but it feels a little bit out of place on this list. It has tons of English cognates, phonology that's mostly pretty accessible, mostly phonetic spelling, SVO word order (often, not always), and phrasal verbs that often resemble those in English. It’s entertaining to see native speakers rolling out the long compound words, though. Glæsilegt myndband!
Of course, even being that exotic, Icelandic is still a Germanic language. In this family, English is more exotic without grammatical cases and genders and almost without vowel changes in plural (like foot-feet).
@@watchmakerful Dutch has mostly shed its genders, too, over the course of the 20th Century.
It's amazing how people can grow up and be fluent in these complex languages. Even that seems like a miracle.
Ever tried chinese?
its not a miracle. i know some languages have easier grammar some have harder grammar but we all learn our native language automatically and dont think if its complex. im slovak (the video mentioned czech so i can talk about slovak) and all these different forms, declensions, conjugations are a pattern, you hear all the words since you are a kid and its just natural to speak correctly, but to be honest we make some mistakes, for example people confuse "svojim" with "svojím", "naň" with "naňho", you should say "v maile" not "v maili" etc. but i think natives make mistakes in every language
@@jyrkilehtinen9886 Nah
Hungarian is unbelievably fascinating for someone learning languages btw. I love it, its my favorite language, but I don't have time to dive into it anymore. Strongly recommend.
I also like Hungarian, I love how it is one of that more "purist" languages that rather come up with its own words instead of simply borrowing modern terms from mainstream languages. It has also some nice features like separate conjugation for verbs with indefinite and definite object, vowel harmony similar to that in other Uralic or Turkic languages etc And generally I like its characteristic sound, all these short and long vowels and especially the "é" - sound.
It's also interesting to see how much Hungarian has been influenced by Turkic and Iranic languages when Magyars were still a nomadic group as well as how many Slavic borrowings it has absorbed
@@mareksagrak9527@mareksagrak9527 Elég sok szláv eredetű szó épült be a magyarba az idők közben, és nemcsak szó, de a becezés, mint olyan, a kicsinyítő képző használatával: -ka, -ke (cute kitty=cicusKA). Szeretem az anyanyelvemben, hogy különlegesen hangzik, de úgy érzem, hogy elég harsnak hangozhat másoknak. Kíváncsi lennék, egy külföldinek hogyan hangzik, mire hasonlít. Az pozitívum, hogy elég egyszerű megtanulni olvasni, ha tudod az ábécé-t, mivel fonetikus nyelv. És igen, tényleg ötletes és logikus a főnevek elnevezése, például "számítógép" (computer). Pont amiatt, mert nagyon elszigetelt nyelv, nemcsak angolszász embereknek nehéz megtanulni magyarul, de a magyarok is megszenvednek az angollal. A másik, ami számomra logikus, hogy a magyarban az általánostól megyunk a sajátos felé, például vezetéknév (family name) -> keresztnév (given name): Kovács Lajos (Louis Kovács [Smith]), illetve a dátum írása, év, hónap, nap - 2024 május 5. Örülök, hogy vannak, akiknek tetszik a magyar nyelv és szívesen tanulják. Sok sikert!
Also, a big plus is, that we don't have gender specific nouns etc., we don't even have he or she, just "ő", which can be anyone. 😊
I always wondered, how would a person learning Hungarian learn how to pronounce "gy" correctly? I've always heard foreigners say it as "dzs". There are some weird ways to learn how to pronounce sounds you don't have in your language, for example I'm learning Russian, and I was told that in order to pronounce ы correctly, you have to bite down on a pen so that your mouth is in the shape as if you were trying to say "ee" (as in sleep), and pronounce a Hungarian "ü". Is there some exercise that learners use for gy?
@@nymroadonlaptop3185I could be totally wrong but I feel 'gy' can be similar to 'дь'. We pair gy with g (they сome after each other in the alphabet), but it would work with d, like in Russian д/дь. T/Ty - т/ть. We have dzs only because of the loan words like jacket (dzseki), as our j is like y in 'young'. We have letters for each sound, but English uses the same letter for multiple sounds.
I'm a Welsh learner - it's not that hard and it's a great language
I can't help sensing a degree of prejudice in the video.
Diddorol iawn. Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd. Probably butchered that. Agree. It's a great language and it's phonetic and highly regular. Hwyl
@@lcolinwilson8347Na! It's a video about complex Languages so it may appear prejudiced. It's a compliment to this great language. As andrewwoodgate said it's not that hard once you master the mutations and plurals.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 : Welsh isn't a complex language, though. It has its quirks, like every other, but isn't that hard. "Glyndyfrdwy" isn't difficult to pronounce, although he implies that it is. Really, he should know better.
@@lcolinwilson8347Diawn. It's just the w which if it was an e or an a he wouldn't have bothered putting it there. I wish they would stop implying pronunciation is hard. It's not.
For the Hungarian part at 9:15, I give a correction: it's tehénként, that means "as a cow", and tehénül can either mean: 1) in cow language (compare: angolul=in English) 2) as/like a cow, cowly (compare: rosszul=badly) 3) a not too real-life verb meaning: gets more like a cow (compare lassul=gets slow, hülyül=gets stupid)
8:27 does an animated Italian accent and hand gesture and says 'and now I'm French'....
haha, I laughed out loud at that too.
Probably watched Emily In Paris and has a warped idea of what French are like.
Mamma Mia ima froma Parisa
Welsh: Keyboard smash language
Czech: Strč prst skrz krk language
Hungarian: Easy mode ithkuil
Icelandic: Old norse but remastered
Basque: Unknown alien language
Georgian: Gvprtskvni language
Navajo: Tonal language in North America
The secret is not to study them just absorb them
Nah, Welsh is easy. I'm sure our intelligent neighbours can get their heads around a few rare sounds and slightly strange grammar. Don't put yourselves down, Tolkien was practically fluent in Middle Welsh, Old English, Breton, Finish and so on.
And, belive it or not, Welsh can indeed be spoken about without making tired jokes.
Seven vowel letters: a e i o u w y, consonant mutation (a feature of English, see Knife > Knives, Hoof >Hooves). Easy peasy, stop being scared of it.
It's the consonant mutation at the FRONT of the word that throws people. Knife to knives is recognizable, though people still have to learn it through memorization and kids screw it up all the time. There isn't an example that I can think of in English where the beginning of a word changes and it's still considered the same word.
I think a part the problem is with the way the language is written.
It's simply too phonetic.
For example they can use ċat for instead of gat and ĉat instead of chat so the learners can understand that they are related to "cat".
That's why I've been learning Welsh for 650 days straight. It's a good language to learn, highly regular and phonetic. I love it for it's simplicity which is disguised by so-called difficult mutations which are mostly soft mutations and the plurals you eventually get the gist. Great language to learn first. Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd a mwynhau hi fawr iawn. I probably butchered that sentence but I'll work it out. Hwyl.
I speak Irish, which is related to Welsh, so none of what you said about Welsh sounded that intimidating to me.
Ancient Greek? Verbs? Active Middle, Passive voice? ✓ Infinitives? How about 3 voices and 5 tenses ✓ Ditto for participles. ✓Verbal tense, aspect, and mood? ✓4 moods indicative, subjunctive, optative and imperative ✓ 3 genders ✓ 3 numbers singular, dual and plural ✓Lots of articles and prepositions ✓ Complex grammar. Just saying.
welcome to the small group of languages with dual form.
Well, at least it is Indo-European, in contrast to several of the here listed languages.
As an American who has learned Czech to a pretty good level, I can say that it's not as terrible as people claim.
Learning the case endings can be tricky, but they are generally pretty logical and follow consistent patterns. I managed to memorize the whole table of model words in just under a month.
The only part that really still gives me occasional trouble is identyfing the gender of words that I've not encountered before. But even then, you can usually use context clues to make an educated guess about the gender (adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, verbs that agree with the noun, etc).
What's also amazing about the lanaguge is that the words are constructed in a modular way. I can look at a word that I've never seen before and still usually figure out what it means by putting the pieces together.
TBH, from what i've seen, there are things that make other Slavic languages such as Russian worse. At least Czech has consistent stress, for instance.
I learned some Polish a few years back and I saw a number of similarities between what he was saying about Czech and what I remember about Polish.
@@akl2k7 i think what makes Czech seem so hard is the accessibility. There simply aren't that many people that want to learn it. I think Czechia is big enough that people know it, but the demand to learn the language isn't so high. For some other smaller states like Slovakia, any of the Balkan countries etc it would be even more challenging
@@benseac learning Polish now and yes they're fairly similar. Its a lot if it's your first language but nothing you can't get a hold on
Can i ask you about your pronounciation level? Do you struggle with ch, ž, š, ř, c,..?
The Navajo sentence "The man, the wolf chased him" is very similar to the general order of American Sign Language. ASL's basic word order is SVO too.
Isn’t this sentence OSV?
@@rosiebowers1671 you're right... it looks like I miswrote myself.....
I am Czech and I enjoyed the information about my native language. 😂 It's true, Czech is difficult. 😅
a to ani neřekl to nejhorší .. Že si upravujeme všechny možné koncovky na hubu...
a lot of sounds she mentioned in czech are also present in Indian languages. except for word order, grammatical structure is also similar especially with Sanskrit like cases, being said that there are differences.
CZECH MENTIONED! 🥳 The way you talk about my language is hilarious, Olly (And true! We do have all these crazy hard things and MORE 😂)
Polish is harder
@@anires1195 I speak both Polish and Czech and its the same difficulty in terms of grammar:
extra letters/sounds, 7x2 noun cases, 3 genders, small size noun form, 3 verb tenses + imperatives + participles + conditionals + imperfectives + reflexives, prefix changes to verbs, formal form, stress is different
I would argue that Slovak is a bit harder to pronounce because they have more soft sounds and long sounds:
extra PL sounds: cz, ć, sz, ś, rz, ż, ź, ł, ń, ą, ę, ó
extra CZ sounds: č, š, ž, ř, ď, ť, ň, ch, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ě, ů
extra SVK sounds: č, š, ž, ď, ť, ň, ľ, ĺ, ŕ, ch, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ä, ô
@@janchi_stephanchi im slovak and id say slovak spelling is harder than czech because for example the "t" in "ten" is hard but in "teplo" it's soft, "ä" is pronounced "e" or "a" depending on dialect and words, "káv" is actually pronounced more like "káu", western slovaks dont pronounce the soft "ľ" at all
@@anires1195 As Czech who knows polish I would disagree
@@janchi_stephanchi Czech changed its orthography (actual letters) around the 19th century but Polish did not. So Polish has "CZ" instead of "č" for example.
so the hungarian cases aren't always "cases" in the classic sense
As Georgian, I felt strange satisfaction watching this 😀😃❤️
საქართველოს გაუმარჯოს! Actually Georgian sounds P-ფ T-თ K- ქ are similar to english aspirated P,T,K(C). Without aspiration Georgian have letters P-პ,T-ტ, K-კ.
Welsh sounds beautiful
19:03 You can find that sound and other ejective consonants in Amharic.
Navajo verbs are actually fairly regular. But the rules that demonstrate their regularity are quite complex. Probably every phoneme has a meaning. And Navajo speakers, like the speakers of other languages, tend to alter the way a word is spoken. So some of those sememes disappear over time, hiding the verb's regularity, effectively making it irregular to all but the initiated.
I enjoy your videos! For some decades now, I've been 'learning' Hungarian on and off. Much of it does stick in my mind. Love it, but I know I'd never truly 'get' it.
Welsh isn't that difficult once you get over the fear of mutations (notice I said the fear of and not the mutations themselves). In fact, you won't be misunderstood at all if you don't mutate something correctly.
Mutations also don’t get used a huge amount in the spoken language. They really aren’t worth worrying about
@@Stoggler exactly! Most of the information in this video applies to written Welsh and not spoken Welsh
That Rhod Gilbert clip had me dying hahahaha
Interestingly, Irish has a sound a lot like the Czech ř, which is the slender "r", such as in the verb "abair", meaning "speak". It's notoriously the most difficult sound for people to get, but you can get pretty close with a "zh" [ʒ] sound with some r-colouring, and even mispronouncing it as a [ʒ] is better than using the English "r".
Polish historically had ř as well (written rz). But three centuries ago they simplified it to ż (a zh-like sound), still writing it as rz.
If pronounciation of "abair" i've found online was correct then that "r" is closer to czech "š", not "ř"
Could you make a video about getting back to learn a language after a break?
Was enjoying that first bit, as a Welsh resident learning Welsh is mandatory and even after like 14-15 years of learning English and Welsh (since I spoke not a word of English when I moved here, I supposedly only just learned the Polish alphabet) and I still have no idea what's going on
Mutations are a nightmare, 'it makes the sentence flow better' no it doesn't, it sounds the same! It's just annoying
I would not be able to have a conversation with a native or even just a fluent speaker unless it was written or it was something very simple like introducing ourselves
Edit 1: My least favourite mutations are these two where one letter (I can't remember which one since I literally never spoke Welsh outside of lessons and I've graduated high school now) becomes a g and another where the g disappears, so unless you understand the context, you have no idea which mutation it is
Edit 2: Czech sounds kinda similar to Polish, it's probably cuz they're both slavic languages but still, I wonder if Czech people feel the same about Polish
Edit 3: Three in Czech sounds identical to the Polish word XD
Edit 4: Polish has about 15 words for the same thing English has 3 of (i.e. run, ran, running). And that's cuz Polish has not only the tenses in the word but also masculine, feminine, neutral, and singular and plural versions of every verb.
Biegał/Biegł - He ran
Biegała/Biegła - She ran
I forgot Polish even had 2 almost identical words for the exact same thing whoops.
Also the negatives bit, Polish has that too.
Using the same example as in the video we get
I'll never tell anyone - English
Nikdy nikomu nic nereknu - Czech (almost)
Nigdy nikomu nic nie powiem - Polish
Nie = no/not
Powiem = tell
Translated literally: Never no-one nothing no tell
Edit 5: I had no more noted about the languages. I enjoyed the video, it was interesting
I have been editing this as I watched which is why theres so many edits
All of a sudden the Hebrew I am learning seems simple..I'll have to stop "kvetching"!
Icelandic is pretty cool. I recently watched a film called "Fusi" in Icelandic and I was able to understand parts of the dialogue thanks to learning Norwegian, which IMHO is the best the starting point with Scandinavian languages and possibly all the Germanic languages.
I would definitely put Arabic there. They can, but don't have to write down vowels, have dual form (as opposed to singular and plural), multiple strange t/d/h/g sounds, they use suffixes and prefixes so much that you can say a complex sentence using one short word. Also they write from right to left.
Then there are the "dialects", which are as different from the standard language as Spanish is from Latin while being as different from each other as the Romance languages..
I studied Arabic for 3 months and got miserably defeated. When I went back to study English, it felt soooo easy, even though it hadn’t been my strength at all. I’m still learning English and I’m still attracted by the beauty of Arabic language but I don’t think I’m going back to study Arabic again. Deep respect to the people who have mastered it and who’s learning it now. Good luck
Wow, so cool to include my native language (Czech) over there! I like your videos, keep going on! And there is a Briton living in Czechia speaking a wonderful Czech, heard him on radio. Yeah, certain things can be both animate and unanimate, but these can be in practice used as one wish (natives are just deciding for themselves). The same goes with animals, for example you could refer to dog both in male (the specie) and female (its actual sex). The idea of double triple etc. negative is actually quite simple, if negative, so then be it negative, even milliontuple would be still negative (synthetic approach). For Czechs, mixing negative and positive feels illogical, too.
this video really brings back intense memories i had trying to learn czech lol. I struggled so hard even with the basics
Was it your first foreign language?
Same. The flashbacks of just trying to rattle off 1~10 was...unpleasant. I mean one (jedna) and two (dva) is fine. Then you get to three with the ř and it all starts going downhill from there. 😅😭
@@gabor6259 no. czech ř is like r and ž combined
@@craftah Even after T and P?
@@gabor6259 after T and P its like r and š. it's never š or ž, you have to pronounce that r too
Olly, I am German and many, many years ago I spent two terms as a foreign student at Aberdeen university and - not really knowing what I was doing - I registered for Scottish Gaelic (besides English Literature and English Language). Never before and never after had I learned anything so weird as this language. Our teacher took us from zero knowledge to O-Level-standard in just about six months, which was crazy. This was more than 35 years ago and apart from asking "How are you? and answering "Thank you, fine" I have forgotten everything. But what you are saying about the structure of Welsh is what I also remember from Scottish Gaelic. I really got twists in my brain when learning this language - and it was really interesting to learn it "via English". Shortly after returning home I could never translate Gaelic to German directly - I always had to go via English.
A form of middle voice exists in English, as in the sentence 'The word translates badly into French'. Obviously the word itself hasn't done the translation, nor does the sentence mean that someone has translated the word badly.
In Mvskoke, the word order is subject-object-verb-verb. The first verb refers to the subject, the second to the object. Many sentences are one word only in practice, though. You apply a prefix and a suffix to the verb, like in Latin, that shows the direction the action of the verb is taking. Cherokee is a bit easier because it has less Latin style verbs, but it’s a syllabary (no Latin letters) and it took me a year to learn that. I’m syllabary deficient and need to see if it’s a /d/ or a /t/.
I can't learn some of these languages because I'm Agglutinative intolerant.
🤣🤣🤣
When I was in San Sebastian, a local guide told me that there are no "swear words" in Euskara. Everyone swears in Spanish and French. 🤭❤️
Czech is so complicated that even it's own video of all it's confusing, hard and interesting rules and querks would be extremly long. But Czech is an extremly beautiful language
As a Silesian speaker, I'm so glad I finally see that Euskara is mentioned on this channel. Really beautiful and hard language. Some say it is even impossible to master it if you're non-native. I still hope it is!
I’m learning Hungarian. I think if you take an approach of ALL grammar and understanding the intricacies, yes, it’ll be very difficult, but if you learn the simple basic stuff, then get right to reading, you’ll learn them in context and it won’t seem bad overall
And if native Germans can mess up genders on occasion, I can only assume native Hungarians mess things up too, at times, so as a learner, I’m allowed more leeway ;) .
I'm Polish, we have only 7 cases and I sometimes cannot decide on conjugation of a certain word. Today, I was unable to pronounce: najpoczytniejszy. And it's my native language... XD Compared to Hungarian, though - it's easy.
@@marikothecheetah9342 but your language has 3 genders and hungarian doesn t have grammatical genders it add complexity to the language
@@banana53358 just a tad bit, really :) But Hungarian with its pronunciation, helluva long words and no relation to any of theEuropean languages? Boah, a lot to take in.
@@marikothecheetah9342Hungarian is easier than Polish, because most of the cases mean in, on, near etc. But for me Polish is much easier, I speak Russian and Belarusian
@@pwzone3132 Maybe, I never went that far into Hungarian myself. And if you know Russian and Belarussian then yes - Polish will be easy for you. :)
Hungarian is so fascinating and also puzzling, so is Welsh
Begging the question means circular reasoning. In the context of your explanation, the phrase would be "raising the question."
Characterizing agglutinative languages as having case is archaic. It used to be - in the nineteenth century and earlier - that educated people all studied Latin. It was convenient to explain agglutinative languages in terms of Latin, which many people already knew. But they aren't really cases, and learning what they're called is unnecessary. All one has to do is learn "house-in," "house-outside," "house-going-toward," "house-going-away-from," etc. Why psych students out with lists of obsolete scholarly words before they've even started to learn? An author on the subject of Turkish, which is agglutinative, characterized the structure of Turkish as "schematic." It's true, and learning patterns is far more effective for learning than memorizing Latin (archaic Indo-European, actually) case-endings. In fact, the only reason for requiring students to pick up this stuff is to have material for a teacher to put on a test - which has nothing to do with learning a language.
I live in the basque country and I am learning the language, despite their never ending number of auxiliar verbs the language is quite logical and in same cases almost mathematical, still having an extreme hard time with it
I tried learning that long Welsh town's name during Covid lockdown...I had more success memorising and learning the Cyrillic alphabet along with some basic Russian phrases. 😓😓 Also, when I was learning Czech, that damn ř was just heinous. I only marginally felt better when my teacher told me that even Czech kids need the help of a speech specialist to sound it right. Whhhy, Czech? Why??? 😭
Don´t worry, I still can´t prononce that sound after nearly 22 years of my life...
“Full of archaic words” (re: Icelandic). I’m not sure what this means (in this context). If a word is used in the modern language, in what way is it archaic?
It means words that are no longer in general use, but are still heard in Icelandic. Which is pretty wonderful. 'Archaic' doesn't only mean obsolete; it can also mean old-fashioned, and I imagine this is what Olly is going for. Icelanders like to express themselves using poetic or archaic vocabulary, and there's a strong drive to keep loanwords out of the language and preserve the beautiful old language. They go so far as to try to resuscitate terms from Old Icelandic. Isn't that lovely?
Being a native speaker of Swahili 🇰🇪, it is also agglutinative especially the verbs with the conjugations and agreement with the verb tense and noun cases, a bit like Hungarian
0:53
there is no such thing as "one of the oldest languages", neither in Europe nor anywhere else.
What can happen is for a language to retain the same name along the centuries (like Greek) or to be especially conservative in its traits (take written - but not spoken - Icelandic).
Welsh, as a language, goes back to the early middle ages - linguists don't agree to a single dating -.
11.24
Icelandic, is grammatically conservative, but its pronunciation has greatly evolved and has little to do with Old Norse. Hearing a modern Icelander reading is not close to what we would have heard 900 years ago.
Exacto, ningún idioma es más antiguo que otro.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 y ¿en qué estaba equivocado exactamente? yo creo que has dicho más o menos lo mismo que idraote
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 every language descends from and older version of itself. That's how language change happens. All Celtic languages derive from a proto Celtic spoken many ceturies before. And proto Celtic descends from proto Italo-Celtic that descends from Indoeuropean... 4.000 b.C. more or less.
This doesn't mean that Welsh is 6.000 year old.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 let's just say you have a peculiar way to express your ideas? Must be the Semitic origins of the Welsh...
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 Lo sé, por eso menciono a idraote. Pero es que la Alta Edad Media va desde el siglo V (aprox 476) al X (aprox 1000), o sea que creo que idraote no se merecía tu corrección.
9:16 That would be "Tehénként" actually (🤓👆). The "ül" part at the end could mean "speaks X language", so "Speaks in German" would be "Németül beszél", or it could also mean "In the process of transforming to something else", so "it's becoming prettier" would be "Szépül" (that's without a subject in this case). And I'm pretty sure there are other ways you could use it, I swear Hungarian is so difficult that not even we fully understand it....
Yeah,definitely starting to learn Navajo !!!
I'm learning Hungarian and some of the things aren't terrible once you get your head round them, like vowel harmony. There's quite a lot of patterns in the conjugations and suffixes for verbs so although it's a headache it's OK once you've sussed those out. Plus only 9 irregular verbs which isn't bad. For me one of the hardest parts is remembering how all the bloody vowels are sounded and the fact dzs sounds like J....
@@LangXplorerSzeretem az anyanyelvemben, hogy különlegesen hangzik, de úgy érzem, hogy elég harsnak hangozhat másoknak. Kíváncsi lennék, egy külföldinek hogyan hangzik, mire hasonlít. Az pozitívum, hogy elég egyszerű megtanulni olvasni, ha tudod az ábécé-t, mivel fonetikus nyelv. Szavakat sem lehet tul nehez tanulni, mivel a főnevek elnevezése tobbnyire otletes es logikus, például "számítógép" (computer). A másik, ami számomra logikus, hogy a magyarban az általánostól megyunk a sajátos felé, például vezetéknév (family name) -> keresztnév (given name): Kovács Lajos (Louis Kovács [Smith]), illetve a dátum írása, év, hónap, nap - 2024 május 5. Örülök, hogy vannak, akiknek tetszik a magyar nyelv és szívesen tanulják.
Plus we don't use gendered nouns, not even he/she 😊
I'm curious (I know I could just google, but this way other people might learn too!), is Navajo one of the Indigenous languages that doesn't technically have a written form? As in, there is a way to write it, for things like learning in contemporary classroom settings and whatnot, but it's really only a spoken language? I believe Ojibwe is one like that and wasn't sure if Navajo was too.
Fun fact: Welsh is probably the closest to what folks spoke in now-England before Old English. Torchwood actually made me want to learn Welsh. Just seeing it written on signage and stuff made me curious. I gave it a solid effort and I'd like to try it again, but it's tough when there are like 4 people within 100 miles that speak it reasonably well enough to help out! It's interesting for me, though, because I do describe it as "like a little kid playing with a computer" but as soon as I started learning it, even if I didn't know what the words said, I could instantly see them as words instead of a jumble of letters. Also, the "sometimes w" part of English vowels comes from the two Welsh words that have been incorporated (though no one really ever uses them). Icelandic is also quite a lot like Old English. Obviously it is closest to Old Norse, but there's a lot of crossover since they have the same root.
When I saw the title, I knew there would be my native language in it 😀 Czech. And yeah - tykání and vykání is nothing! But let's talk about the spoken and the written form 😀
Kannada is an amazing language. Anyone living in Karnataka who hasn't started learning Kannada is missing out!
Thank you for using Trio Mandili to demonstrate the sound of Georgian! ❤
Any plans on some Greek storybooks? Popular holiday destination and many brits retire there so could be a good addition. Also as a Greek learner, I can attest that it is pretty hard to get any decent readers.
I could handle these. I speak Scottish Gaelic a bit. A lot of these sounds feel more common to me when it comes to pronunciation.
Thank you for making videos about our beloved Georgian ! But there are some mistakes in the video .
1 18:37 there is written გვპირწყნი and should be გვითხარი tell us and next word ვეფხისტყაოსანი.
Also მყავს( I have) we use to animated nouns such as humans and animals and მაქვს(I have) to inanimated nouns such as book,money,time, feelings and etc .
Whenever you will decide to make again about Georgian please let me know and I'll help you in whatever you need 💪💚 btw I am one of your fans
Haha, as a Hungarian, I feel embarrassed as I saw that, in Icelandic language, somehow a T sound gets into the word while we read wrote LL. WHY gif placeholder here. 😁 How that T came to there? Why not just writing TL? Why not just emphasizing an L when there's an LL? It's similar to the logic of Imperial Measurement System.
Fun (or rather useful) to know that Hungarian writing is phonetical which means we write what we say and say what is written (excepting some simplifier assimilation, the opposite of saying TL when LL is written), so our writing is an actual visual encoding of the spoken language.
A lot of the things talked about in the section about Czech can be found in all Slavic languages in some form or another
I just realised that Polish word izba comes from Hungarian Hazba. I never thought about it, but we probably have a lot of Hungarian words, just not realise it. I am much better in identifying Latin, Russian French and Italian words, though :P
Actually, it’s the other way around: Hungarian has quite a big number of Slavic loanwords.
He used an example from NativLang!!!!...love that channel
Czech shares in common with Slovakian and Polish, the sounds and vocabulary are similar, the cases are a bit complex
Trio Mandill are so cool 😍
Hæ vinir minir! Ég er frá Québec-fylki og er að læra íslensku. Þetta tungumál er alveg frábært!
Takk fyrir þetta myndband og bless bless! 🇮🇸
Gott hjá þér! Alls ekki auðvelt tungumál
Once again, I’m so happy I learned Spanish as my second language. Ha de ser el idioma mas util del mundo. Y el mas facil de aprender.
Actually all the stuff you said about in regards to Hungarian is quite easy. Cases are super easy to wrap your head around and they work in a much less complex way than the slavic ones. Normal verb conjugations are also pretty regular, to make sth like a "phrasal" verb you just add a prefix, which again tends to be much more regular than in the case of slavic languages. What makes the Hungarian language difficult imo is the vocabulary
English is not my first language, Italian is. By chance I'm learning Welsh at the moment as my family is half Welsh and I find it has more in common with Italian at times
Da iawn
Hey Olly! Can you do a video about shrimps or krill next?
Well, besides Czech which has ř, there is Slovak which doesnt have ř, but it has ô, ä, ŕ, ĺ (and other grammatical fun stuff in common with Czech language), so Slovak could be at least honourable mention. 🤔
The same can also be said about Polish. It has most of the fun stuff in common with Czech. But in addition it has even more crazy sounds and a terrible orthography (sz, rz, cz, ch, dz, ą, ć, ę, ó, ś, ź...).
@Reachout_Storylearning ❤️❤️❤️
Ollie, based on Videos I see posted by UK residents, I would say that ENGLISH is the most difficult Language to pronounce correctly. I may be juxt an American, but I can correctly pronounce "Third". And, FYI it is NOT "Furd"
And "ask" is A-S-K, not A-X-E. Even native English speakers often say "axe" instead of "ask".
Hi Olly, I always thought that the Polish language is one of the hardest for English speakers, any thoughts on that? :)
And some of the points he made about Czech applies to Polish as well
Practically everything that was said about Czech - special rhythm, animacy/inanimacy and formal/informal distinctions, 3 genders, 7 cases, many ways to say the same thing - also definitely applies to Ukrainian and probably to most other Slavic languages as well, except for the sound r with haček which is specific only to Czech and Polish.
Czech is totally logical and super easy… (said a Ukrainian man 😁😁)
I wish to learn Welsh, Navajo and of course - Icelandic.
Would I learn any of them? Well, the first one is my dad’s co-native language, but I still have not learned it. I’ll give it a go someday…
მე ვწავლობ ქართული ენა და კი ეს ენა არის ძააააალიან რთულია, ზმნების წესები არიან... უბრალოდ ძალიან-რთული, და კი გამოთქმაც ცოტა გამაღიზიანებელია, ხანდახან თუ ადგილი ზნებს ვისწავლო, მჭირდება მინიმუმ ორი მიმოლხივა რათა კარგად გავიმახსოვრო!! მაგრამ მავე დროს, ეს ენა რეალურად საოცარია, და პერსონალურად ვფიქრობ რომ ქართული არის ეუროპის ყველაზე საინტერესო ენაა.
Each of these languages belongs to a family, of which the sibling languages are equally as difficult, as they mostly contain the same number of declensions and conjugations. So, Czech is related to Polish, which has the same 7 cases and phonologies. Hungarian is a distant relative of Finnish, which I've spent the last six years studying and battling the same multiplicity of declensions. Welsh is a Celtic language, which still has a few surviving derivatives, such as Breton and Gaelic. So, my point is, you can't narrow down the number of most confusing languages to just six. It's probably more like sixty. And of course, this is only from the point of view of a native English speaker.
At the store, I overheard a couple speaking and I could not make it out. I asked - they were Basque :D (also, overheard a French Arcadian speaker from Canada = wth)
ironicly robot comes from Czech.... but it's animacy is up for grabs
I´m pretty sure he new, that´s why he said it.
But yes the word can be tricky, but i think I know the way to get it right.
You have 2 types of robots - androids and kitchen helpers. Androids like C-3PO or R2-D2 are living, therefore sentence "Those robots (R2D2 and C3PO) looked like new." is written as "Ti roboti vypadali jako noví". (conjugated by word pán). And the kitchen helper is inanimate, because it does´t even look like human and is designet to do one easy job.
Welsh: “We have complex mutations”
Cornish: “Hold my horev”🍺
I've studied Irish, and I've come across a non-zero amount of Welsh, so I wasn't too mystified by that, but holy hell the language (I forget which) that had 12 or so cases. I'm familiar with some extra cases from Greek and German, but 12, I'm wondering what they're even for. I've also studied Swahili, which has 10 noun classes (equivalent to grammatical gender somewhat), and also read a little on the history of grammatical gender, so not too surprised by the ones with extra genders, or the Navajo scale of aliveness (which historically is kind of where grammatical gender started). Also interesting that Navajo has the four vowel tones, much like Mandarin (which maybe has five?), particularly as Native Americans are considered mostly to be descended from a small ancient tribe in Mongolia.
It depends on the language, but in agglutinative languages they have lots of declensions wihich are in effect just helper words that get glued to the word root. eg. in Japanese _-tai_ means to want to.
*Ixhéi'sertet'a îpàlak Návaho t'ökiwa *ixhaţertá'mm elartkhi.
If you find Navajo difficult, wait till you discover Ithkuil.
Czech is extremely regular. These words don't mean "woman", they mean "woman", "the woman" (object), "the woman's", "to the woman" etc. It's easy to learn these cases.
Ugh! After all this I have to say as a native English speaker, que viva el !español Logical, concise, easy to read and write!
5:14 All the times, no? At least in the video "Na zdraví" is literally phonetic and consistent.
(I just understood that we have rules on when to write the light "i" or the hard "y", which both make the same sound, and many other rules, so you're probably right about that one, lol)
But as a Slovak myself, whenever they mention our Czech siblings, which we are mutually intelligible with, I feel so pwoud :') Good for you Czechia, good for you (although nobody ever mentions us Slovak - I guess because Czechs are bigger and more successful - however, we are one of the most closest languages, if not the closest, so when you're talking about Czech you're also mostly talking about Slovak - dialect continuum mutual intelligibility).
I'd like to hear your take on Swahili. It's agglutinative, and the numbers have multiple versions depending on the nouns
It is quite agglunative, the verbs have conjugations depending on the action, the tense and the noun case
Basque Country is not in the north of the Spanish state, it is in the south of the French too. And it is "abeslariak gitarra hartu du" or "abeslariak gitarrak hartu ditu", not "abeslariak gitarrak hartu du"
Also, it'd be "Mikelek", and those chosen words starting with X are not accepted in Basque standard (except for Xumea) and I've never heard them (but maybe in some dialect they do exist...)
🙄
hori da