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Vietnamese and Thai are the most annoying to me. Cantonese, Russian (other similar sounding languages), Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, French, and Tagalog are the ugliest in my opinion. Finnish sounds very odd to me, but it isn't a likeable or unlikeable language.
It's most likely Cantonese. Cantonese is what most westerners have been exposed to as historically, they made up the majority who emigrated from China. This is starting to change though. In western countries you can sort of cheat to figure out which is which. Cantonese are generally working class with many being rather poor. Mandarin speakers tend to be the ones who come to get higher paying jobs frequently in a high tech industry. In California for example, Cantonese is in San Francisco and Oakland. Mandarin predominates in the San Jose area. That area is where the lions share of the high tech jobs are where as SF and Oakland have the working class Chinatowns. Between SF and SJ, the change-over is gradual.
Most of the Chinese speakers where I used to live (in southern California) were Mandarin speakers.
Cantonese and Mandarin sound nothing alike to my ears.
Watch from the 12 minute mark. You can hear Spanish and Japanese being spoken side by side by native Japanese speakers.
*Love the little 'Japanish' going on there with "gambatiando"
However, the biggest difference in Japanese with Spanish is that Spanish does occasionally have words with consonants next to each other (br, ll, and rr being the most common ones), while in Japanese a vowel always comes after one consonant, with only a few exceptions.
Finnish is VERY similar to Japanese. Just ask linguists or people who have exposure to both languages. I'm learning Finnish, and it's amazing how often I learn a phrase or word and exclaim, "Wow, this DOES sound like Japanese." It also has an Asian style of numbers that Spanish doesn't have.
Some have proposed Japanese and Finnish are very distantly related.
Not that distantly really. The supposition is commonly that the first inhabitants in Finland were from modern day Mongolia. If you think of it that way, it makes sense.
Good:
Deep voiced English
German
Austronesian languages are the opposite of harsh-ultra simple syllable structures
Japanese
Very refined Mandarin
Bad:
Vietnamese
Thai....ahh most languages in the tonal Asian sprach-bund
It never ceases to amaze me how "economical" these languages are.
I actually wonder if they are a joke, the way their set up, very context based, almost baby talk.
Why did they evolve that way?
"You ran across the bridges that are belonging to the children".
Same with Vietnamese and everything else there! Entire songs are made up of words just thrown out in a specific order,
just translate a classical chinese text too, it's like a guy shouting randoms words without no melody. Where is the elegance?
Last edited by Mahhammer; 05-03-2014 at 07:19 PM..
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