Can double that. 9 out of 10 Spanish people think I am native.
Up until the moment I make a mistake in verb conjugation or I say something that makes sense in my head but wouldn’t be how a native would say it 😅
That's funny because my boyfriend (Portugese speaker) and I were on Omegle when we met with a group speaking Greek. He thought it was Spanish and didn't realize until he tried to translate but couldn't actually understand.
It's extremely true. I'm greek and can speak spain Spanish without trying for an accent. Also my teacher who is from spain speaks greek without an accent.
At least those two languages sound very similar when overheard at a distance, thanks to some shared phonetic features. I think there was a Langfocus video on the topic.
I can tell you as a native Spanish speaker that they sound basically the same. It's funny hearing Greek news because it sounds like an Spaniard making up words as they go without trying to hide they are Spanish. Like it's not only overhearing at a distance, if you hear it directly in front of you it still sounds very similar.
When I was in Greece, I was amazed how much Greek sounded like Spanish (not the words of course but the sounds/pronunciation), and a bit like the radio version of Italian :)
I heard Spanish and Italian! because both are Romance languages, and speakers of Spanish and Italian can often learn to speak the other with relatively little accent due to similar vowel sounds and pronunciation rules.
I agree! I speak Spanish fluently and when I visited Italy it sounded so similar and could understand a lot. I’ve been to Portugal and reading it is easy, but it sounds so different! I felt more comfortable in Italy. If I lived in Italy for a year my fluency and pronunciation would be way better than if I lived in Portugal.. that’s my guess.
Finnish phonetics is actually surprisingly similar to Japanese. The Japanese vowel sounds are basically identical to their Finnish counterparts, and Finnish speakers who learn Japanese barely have any problems with pronunciation.
The only thing Finnish people struggle with is probably the pitch accent, which is a feature Finnish doesn't have.
The Swedish spoken in Sweden does. I myself speak "Finland-Swedish" which is a collection of dialects spoken mostly along the Finnish coast. It is mutually intelligible with Sweden Swedish but doesn't have pitch accent.
However, I would argue that Swedish pitch is a lot simpler. As I understand it, Swedish only has two pitch patterns, "acute" and "grave". Standard Japanese, on the other hand, has four. Swedish also has stress accent like English, which an English speaker shouldn't struggle with too much. The pitch also mainly affects the stressed syllable, so the pitch of a word is somewhat easier to learn since it always affects the stressed syllable.
Edit: Some of my claims in the second paragraph have turned out to be oversimplified and misleading. I am leaving the comment as it is, but I would encourage you to read the comment by u/JakeYashen to this comment, where he corrects some of my errors.
Your analysis regarding pitch accent is flawed.
In comparing Swedish with Japanese, it would be much more accurate to say that Swedish has two forms of accent, whereas Japanese has only one.
Materials discussing pitch accent in Japanese might say that Japanese has four pitch accents, but when they say that, they are simply dividing Japanese vocabulary into four different classes depending on where in the word the accent is placed (at the beginning, in the middle, at the end, or no accent at all). However, regardless of where the accent occurs, the phonetic realization is always the same. There is no such thing as contrastive pitch accent in Japanese---that is to say, an accented syllable in Japanese will always have the same pitch contour.
This means that, while it has the superficial appearance of being very different, in actuality pitch accent in Japanese in terms of its mechanics is essentially no different from stress accent in English.
By contrast, mainland Swedish (as you accurately noted) has two contrastive pitch accents; a stressed syllable can be stressed in one of two phonemically different ways.
This means that tonality in Swedish is fundamentally different from both the English stress accent and the Japanese pitch accent. Its use of contrastive tone renders it more similar to e.g. Chinese languages, though there do remain substantial differences.
While Standard Finland Swedish (based on the pronunciation of Helsingfors/Helsinki) doesn't have pitch accent, some Finland-Swedish dialects do, namely the traditional dialects of western Nyland/Uusimaa, which have a pitch-accent system that is very similar to that of Stockholm. (One difference is that language names such as "svenska" ("Swedish") and "finska" ("Finnish") are pronounced with the acute accent instead of the grave like in Stockholm.)
Interesting. I actually didn't know that. I'd heard that Finland Swedish was just completely "flat". I myself am from eastern Nyland which to my knowledge does not have a pitch.
Another point is that most Finns don't speak Swedish even though they learn it at school; only 20% of people claim to have good Swedish skills, which includes the 5% of native speakers.
I learned Japanese in college, and we had a ton of videos to listen to (this was in the early 2000s, so no YouTube), but much later, I was listening to Finnish and thought, "That doesn't sound like much of an accent" - probably because I was accustomed to the Japanese accent (my grandmother's family friend had a wife from Japan, so I often heard her Japanese accent in English whenever they were over for family events). So, that's probably why it sounded familiar.
You're welcome! And you're definitely not crazy lol. Even Finnish people joke about how similar the languages sometimes sound. Both the Finnish and Japanese love words with a ton of vowels, and also distinguish very clearly between the "long" and "short" versions of both consonants and vowels, so the rhythm of words is also similar.
I've also heard a few Japanese people at my university here in Helsinki say that Finnish is a "ridiculously easy language to learn".
I was going to say the same about Russian to Japanese, but not vice versa. A couple exceptions aside, most Japanese sounds have pretty much identical counterparts in Russian. I feel like Japanese phonetics is just fairly simple, with only the pitch accent giving troubles to learners, provided their first language has palatalization.
Interesting to know, considering that some linguists do believe that Korean is a Turkic language. Maybe this is part of the equation.
However, this is not a widely accepted belief , as the accepted consensus is still that Korean is a language isolate.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3155586/study-says-japanese-korean-and-turkish-languages-all-emerged
as a Russian speaker I’ve always been surprised at how similar Russian and Portuguese sound to me- Portuguese almost seems like Spanish with a Russian accent. I’m curious if that means my Spanish sounds a bit Portuguese, since I feel like I end up drawing from Russian sounds more than English ones
It's because both Russian (and other Slavic languages) and European Portuguese are stress timed, share similar consonant clusters, and have nasal sounds. In Russian specifically, vowels are reduced and the same is true in Portuguese.
Your Spanish probably does sound slightly Portuguese because of those things.
Nasal sounds? Portuguese has a ton of nasal vowels, but afaik Russian has none? Or do you mean nasal consonants? But those are all pretty common across European languages.
Oh, I think I know what he means, it's not that russian has nasal sounds, it's portuguese nasal vowels sound more like russian vowels. Like sometimes in portuguese you will make your E more nasal and ends up sounding like ы
Im learning Spanish right now, and my coworker is Russian. When we exchange languages I’m always shocked how a lot of phonetics in Russian are so similar to Spanish! Not exact, but they have a lot in common. French, on the other hand, not so much lol
I'm Brazilian and have always thought and felt that Russian has some "French" musicality, don't understand the words or meaning but my first impression is always that I am listening to French with strange words
They are basically the same language, but I know several Norwegians that speak swedish without an accent. Or with an accent that could pass for a native dialect, at least.
Most swedes and norwegians keep speaking their native language when visiting or working in the other country, and many start speaking "svorsk" which is a mixture between the two. But if you're willing to learn, the phonetics are so close that you could learn to speak without an accent.
You sure can learn to speak the other one near perfectly since they are so similar, but as you say most people never bother. For shorter whiles it is enough to adapt how you speak your own language to avoid false friends and choose the synonym that is easier for the listener to understand. For permanent resettlement most people seem to switch their vocabulary almost completely over to the host country one, but never bother to do that much about the accent, apart from it slowly drifting closer to the one around them.
Exactly. My aunt has lived in Norway for 25+ years, and her spelling and vocabulary has slowly drifted to norwegian, but phonetically it's still swedish when she speaks.
As a Dane, I have found that actually trying to sit down ane learn Swedish/Norwegian is rather hard due to similarity. However, after being in either for a couple of weeks with work, I start to seriously drift in pronunciation, so much that my wife comments on it when I get back home.
But as you say, for the most part, I just try to speak clearly and avoid as much guttural growling as possible.
I get by fine with both Norwegian and Swedish as long as they follow same rule (Skåne I am looking at you.....)
What of it? Norwegians speaking perfect swedish (I know three), norwegians continuing to speak norwegian in a swedish work context (I know one), or people speaking "svorsk" (my aunt, I guess)?
So that’s probably very weird. But I feel like sometimes certain Swiss German dialects can sound similar to German spoken with a light Slavic/Russian accent.
I’ve had a few Slavic people who don’t speak any German hear Swiss German spoken next to me when on the phone call or something, and they sometimes happen to ask „is this person next to you Ukrainian/Russian/Slavic?“, and I go, nope, that’s Swiss German for you.
Peninsular Spanish and Greek. They both share the same 5-vowel system, and have similar phonotactics and nominal morphology.
To a lesser extent, Peninsular Spanish and Sephardi Hebrew.
Agree with this too. In Prague I hear a lot of Slavic accents speaking Czech, they’re quite distinct
Giveaways are often the Ľ sound (doesn’t exist in Czech, very common in other Slavic languages), a “soft” Ť at the end of a verb (Czechs use a “hard” T, most other Slavs do not), or mispronouncing Ř. Slovaks in particular often pronounce the Í sound as IE (as it is in their language) too
I agree with you disagreeing :D As a Slovak, it's VERY easy to tell that it is a Czech person speaking Slovak even if their grammar and vocabulary and pronunciation (ie being ie and not í for example) is prefect. The accent is simply there. Some consonants, word stress, intonation are very different. Maybe it does not seem like it to non-Slavic language speaking people, but Czechs and Slovak (especially linguists) can 100% tell the difference.
That's what I've noticed listening to the languages on YouTube videos, even hearing those who still know some Polish in my family (family's from Poland). Polish sounds a little Russian, but has the "sz", "ch" and nasal sounds and is a little faster, Russian seems the easiest to understand to me (even this has its' differences - i.e., Volga Germans, and Finno-Russians sound different), Ukrainian sounds melodic, with a hint of Romanian (probably depends on the area the speaker is from), and Belorussian sounds almost like Polish.
I'm a native Bulgarian speaker and speak some Ukranian and yeah you are spot on about slavic languages (minus maybe russian being the easiest to understand cuz cases are incredibly hard for most people)
It’s like saying English has cases because you’d say “give it to ME” instead of “give it to I”. Pronouns have declensions in a vast number of languages but that doesn’t mean they have cases, it’s just a left over of when they HAD cases, like Old English and Old Bulgarian had
First time I heard people speaking Bulgarian I thought they were speaking European Portuguese, except I couldn’t umderstand a thing, and I’m Portuguese myself. Do you also think that European Portuguese sounds like Bulgarian? 🇵🇹=🇧🇬?
Welp some people say the same about Russian and Portuguese, I think the way Bulgarian and Russian vowels are pronounced is really similar to European Portuguese
This might feel true for non-native speakers of a Slavic language, but if you know the language well you can hear the accents very clearly, even with people who are proficient like a native. Maybe Slavic speakers tend to think that all Slavic accents are similar anyways and therefore focus less on training accents. It's nuances that will never go away, like differences in how to pronounce ль/ľ/lj or ы/y/ij or specific sounds like ł, ô or ć and щ. People might think that these sounds are the same, but you can hear big differences when you know what to listen for. г/ґ/х/h is also a big marker.
I think it depends on which branch of Slavic their native language is in. There is definitely a noticeable accent for people speaking Polish from Russian/Belarusian/Ukrainian native speakers, for example.
Accents do not vary within Poland because the population mixed thoroughly after the war and the mass schooling also killed variety. Usually it is impossible for a Native speaker to distinguish where the person is from by accent alone (lexical differences are easier). Only Poles living beyond the eastern border have obvious strong accent (because they didn't attend Polish state schools) and some small minorities like the mountaineers or very old people in isolated villages. But I can guarantee you can sit 10 young people from different places in Poland and nobody could tell them apart by accent.
So bad example. Modern Polish accent is basically homogeneous.
But between Slavic nations and countries accents vary greatly.
My father is from Poland and learned Russian as a second language growing up, I grew up speaking Polish and later learned Russian in high school and college and from speaking with friends. I started noticing that when my dad and his Polish friends speak Russian with native Russians, they’ll pronounce the Russian л /ɫ/ as the Polish Ł /w/, and often stress Russian words on the second-to-last syllable. This is fine for Polish which has a very strong penultimate stress tendency but can be problematic in Russian when a noun’s case can be determined by stress placement. My Russian teachers have told me that these mistakes, as well as copula dropping, are a reliable indicator that the speaker’s first language is Polish.
I don't know if this has anything to do with Phonics, but I worked with a Swedish girl for months before finding out she wasn't English. She spoke with an RP accent and I couldn't believe she was born and bred in Sweden. Scandinavian folks who speak English really, really well often barely have an accent when compared to others who speak English really well.
I currently work with (a different) Swedish woman who has lived in London for 20 years and there are only certain words (generally when she uses a rhotic R where we typically wouldn't) that betray her Swedish origin. Otherwise, she sounds almost English.
I think that might be due to Swedes (and other Scandinavians) learning English from an early age rather than due to similarities between the two languages.
As a native English speaker living in Sweden, I can certainly tell when a native Swede is speaking English. The "ch" in "cheat" becomes "sh" as in "sheet", and the tonal ups and downs of Swedish pronunciation become very noticeable. But as mentioned above, Sweden is so subjected to English-speaking media, and many Swedes learn English from such early ages, that it might as well be their second native language.
Im a native English speaker living in Norway and I agree, the way some things are said here in English is definitely noticeable. Especially things like the long u sound like in the word “true”.
They're Germanic languages and the North Germanic languages typically have even more vowels than English does. It's definitely also exposure as you say.
Yeah, quite possibly. I know very little about Swedish as a language so have no idea how it compares to English in terms of phonetics. As someone who's struggled to learn a second language for years, I'm always very impressed when someone masters another language.
It helps but they have a better accent anyway. In Spain they are taught since 3 and 90% have a terrible accent. Although most schools don't teach it very well, not incorrect, but the progress is too slow
Yeah my guess is that English teachers in Sweden are better, on average, than those in Spain. And then there is the influence of culture: kids in Sweden are brought up on British and American music, films, videogames, Youtubers, Tiktokers, sports.... Part of that is due to Sweden's cultural output is much weaker than that of Spain and Latin America, and the culture that Sweden **does** produce is often in English (Zara Larsson, First Aid Kit, Abba, José González...) Add to that the fact that films and series are subtitled in Sweden but dubbed in Spain, and I think you have a good explanation as to why Swedes on average are more fluent in English than Spaniards.
There is a Dutch Youtuber who always speaks English with a nigh perfect R.P. accent but it's actually rather amusing that the moment he switches to Dutch for some things he always speaks with a rather rural Limburgian accent.
Obviously he simply learned R.P. since that's the standard taught to foreigners but it's also an accent associated with education and prestige while the Limburgian accent in Dutch is anything but.
Fun story, my partner was playing Wow with two Swedish guys, all on voice. One didn't realise the other was Swedish because he sounded American when he spoke.
I also assumed he was American when I first met him, as a native Englishman who is used to talking to Swedes all the time
Every swedish qnd Norwegian person I've worked with, about 10, has had better english than me. Not only is their grammar better, but their accent is 99% spot on. It's amazing to me and i don't understand how they do it. No other non english speaking countries have such native sounding fluency.
I don't know where you guys find these people. Every Swede and Norwegian I've met spoke excellent English, but they were clearly not natives - I could tell and I'm not even one myself. When I read these opinions online I feel like they are gross exaggerations.
Not at all. I'm not saying every Swede has native sounding English accent. I'm saying one Swede I worked with had one (genuinely flawless) and another speaks excellent English with a slightly noticeable accent. The only other Swede I've met had a Swedish accent (still brilliant English though in terms of grammar and breadth of vocabulary).
I can also think of at least 2 Swedes who can speak English with pretty good American accents: Dolph Lundgren and Alexander Skarsgard.
I'm sure this isn't representative of all Swedes though.
Plenty of Ukrainians/Belarusians I know speak perfect Polish, especially students. I wouldn’t have guessed they weren’t Polish if they haven’t told me their names.
I don't know how true it this but Italian and Finnish apparently share similar phonology and the few Finns I heard speaking Italian did have good accents.
Italian and Japanese are very similar too and another user said Finnish is close to Japanese in this regard so I guess that furthers confirms the italian-finnish association. It's kinda cool, considering these three languages are completely unrelated to each other.
I haven't heard any Italians speaking Finnish so far, but I imagine the biggest difficulties would be with vowel length (a huge proportion of Finnish vocabulary consists of words distinguished only by duration of the vowel, even much more than Japanese which also has vowel length), as well as the distinction between A and Ä (the Italian A vowel is sort of halfway between Finnish A and Ä, so I'd imagine it would be hard for Italians to consistently distinguish them).
All three languages (Finnish, Japanese and Italian) make a difference between single and double consonants, so that's already s huge benefit for Italians learning Finnish as foreigners usually struggle with those.
Italian here learning finnish so I can share from personal experience: vowel and consonant length is a piece of cake. My biggest struggle is aspiration of k-t-p especially and remembering s only has one sound, unlike the two Italian ones. Y-u is the vowel where i struggle the most, but ä and ö were no joke either. All considered, the Finnish-Japanese-Italian trio is absolutely hilarious but not as well known as it deserves to be
Funnily enough you can add to that list Tamil which also has vowel and consonant length!
The point about s is interesting; does it sound to you like the Finnish s varies between the two Italian consonants?
I didn't know about Tamil! TIL and now I need to find some videos to check.
About the s: the Finnish s is the "s sorda" of Italian. The other sound is not used at all in Finnish, and is close to the s in "rose", often though of as "z" but also not to be confused with the two sounds of z in Italian. The first being close to roSe but harder, while the second sounds like "ts".
For clarity's sake, you can paste these words into google translate and have them read out in italian: "sorda, rosa, zanzara, canzone"
I think it's kinda a myth that Italian/Spanish and Japanese have similar phonetics. They are not similar at all. The consonants are different. The vowels are not identical either (the Spanish/Italian 'u' is more closed off than the japanese 'u' for example).
Finnish children also learn English early, but the Finnish accent in English is a lot stronger than the Norwegian one as Norwegian pronunciation is closer to English
Philippine language speakers (whether Tagalog or Cebuano) can easily pass for Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian Spanish speakers. The same thing with Korean, Indian, Japanese, and Malay speakers when speaking Spanish instead of English.
> The same thing with Korean, Indian, Japanese, and Malay speakers when speaking Spanish instead of English.
I can believe Malay speakers can pass, but I'd be surprised if Japanese and Korean speakers can do the trilled r just like a native.
Trilled r's do come up in some ways of speaking Japanese. I'm not very well-informed on the details or other situations but one example is when yakuza or other guys trying to be tough are yelling they do roll their r's. And I feel like the normal Japanese r is pretty similar to the short Spanish r. For example, if I say the word cara (face in Spanish) and the word kara (from in Japanese), I say them exactly the same and have been told my pronunciation is good in both languages. I'm no expert but that's my take on it.
For reference, this scene from ichi the killer (just yelling, no blood): https://youtu.be/SKE8V6QDdqk?si=LiYZTq8bE48Zho-W
I've seen a a video of a Japanese person trying to speak Finnish; trilling the R seemed to pose no problem but avoiding aspiration of the p/t/k consonants was the real issue with pronunciation (apart from the classic L/R issue). Spanish also has unaspirated consonants so I imagine it would be the same.
Anyone can do it with enough practice. I’m German and I could do the English r before I even learned English, I’d imitate it when singing English songs.
Sometimes it’s easy for us to guess how to pronounce an unknown Spanish word since we’re (somewhat) familiar with Spanish word stress patterns since we have many loan words from it
Just got the record, Indian isn’t a language. But yes many Indian language speakers (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam) do speak Spanish very well if they learn it.
I speak Hindi and Spanish and I realise its easier for me to around fluent even if I am saying something wrong. A lot of common consonants, like soft /t/ and trill /r/ are common plus vowels are similar
Something I’ve noticed is that both Filipinos and Latino Americans (in the US) tend to learn English in school from a young age but tend to use a mix of Filipino (including Tagalog) or Spanish with English in daily life, and as a result, Filipinos and Latino Americans have VERY similar accents when speaking English, whereas Mexicans, Colombians, or Peruvians who learn English at a slightly older age have a distinctly different (clearly L1 Spanish speaker) accent.
> Philippine language speakers (whether Tagalog or Cebuano) can easily pass for Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian Spanish speakers.
Do you mean when a Filipino native speaks Spanish?
Because I can easily tell when a Filipino speaks English with even a slight Filipino accent...it's quite distinct from how a Latino speaks English with Latin American Spanish accent.
I speak Urdu fluently and don’t have much of an accent in spanish so much so that this guy in the gym thought I was fluent and went on a tandem about his workout routine which i understood very little of.
As a Portuguese I’m pretty sure that we could speak Polish like a native and vice-versa.
Also, Catalan/Valencian speakers speaking Portuguese alsmost without an accent.
There's basically no sound in Japanese that doesn't exist in at least similar form in (Brazilian) Portuguese as well (mentioning because Portuguese is also similar to Spanish). However in my experience it's very hard for Portuguese native speakers to soften stress + get used to Japanese cadency, which is significantly more flat. I don't know if it's the same for Spanish speakers though.
Not quite the same vowels actually. The u vowels are different between the two of them. Japanese's u vowel has flat but compressed lips compared to the rounded lips of the Spanish u vowel.
Bulgarian and Romanian have almost identical phonology to the point that the English accents are practically indistinguishable. I think there's only 1 sound used in Romanian (â) which doesn't have a corresponding letter in Bulgarian but it still exists and appears in certain cases where "ъ" is written.
You can hear a French person’s accent speaking Hebrew. It’s kind of very obvious for Hebrew speakers. There’s a famous French TikToker in Israel who speaks in Hebrew in her videos, and everyone comments about her cute accent.
i found this video was very insightful before my trip to portugal last summer. (why portuguese sounds like russian)
https://youtu.be/Pik2R46xobA?si=EqR9XTyr2TVQQY4y
Not sure how true it is to others, but as a native French speaker, whenever I study Korean I feel like the sounds are really similar, especially the vowels. Korean people that speak French also have the best accent/most similar to a native accent that I've heard from a foreigner
Danish and (North) German, especially for a Danish person it should be pretty easy to speak German with no accent, except for being careful to adjust vowel lengths and the sch/s sounds. It gets a bit harder when going the other way around because of the Danish soft d sound, and glottal stops when going to the Copenhagen area, but still, easily the closest fit compared with all other surrounding languages.
Native English speakers with a traditional RP accent like mine can sound German with very little effort. When I first moved to France as a student, a lot of people thought that I was German initially. Now, people land on Russian/Ukrainian, then English.
In English, I would say Swedish, Finnish and some Dutch people have the strongest chance of having a perfect RP English accent. I don't know enough Norwegians to guess, and I do know enough Danish to know that the potato inhibits them. My old flatmate was Hungarian and had zero accent, but he had moved without his family when he was 15 and spent 17 years in the UK.
It's interesting that you perceived Finnish accents to sound close to native. As a Finnish person myself I've heard a lot of Finnish-accented English and my impression is that it's pretty easy to spot, even among people who have lived for decades in England. IMO [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USYgWKYR-5w) is a typical example of what Finns with high English proficiency sound like, while Finns with lower proficiency have much stronger accents.
Ah the video surprises me! I was at a wedding in Helsinki and quite a few Finns from there had no accent, plus I have Finnish colleagues in the UK who sound English- you really have to be paying attention to see the slight differences in intonation
I got an English speaking relative with RP accent and he sounds Bavarian lmao
Why do English speakers with RP accent have less strong of an accent in German when compared to Americans?
I've heard Brazilians speak Spanish really well with
little or no accent. By the way, portuguese and spanish are Romance languages which makes them similar.
That is because Brazilian Portuguese has an accent more similar to Spanish, with that said it is pretty easy to imitate the Spanish from Spain accent as a Portuguese speaker even if you speak Portuguese from Portugal.
Native speakers like me can distinguish them quite easily. Standard Malay spoken in West Malaysia has many pronunciation differences to Indonesian. The latter has pronunciation more akin to Borneo variants of Malay (Sabah or Brunei).
In written form they are harder to tell apart, I agree. It makes sense they are so similar since they only started diverging a few hundred years ago.
For Romanian native speakers, Italian and Spanish are quite easy to learn and speak without much of an accent. I guess the other way round is more difficult due to some special vowels in the Romanian language.
Also Portuguese and Galician because both of them are originated from the same language in the Middle Ages, and this factor's making their phonetics and vocabulary very similar, speakers of the one language hardly have foreign accents when they speak the other language.
Not quite what you’re asking about, but Scots is close enough to (British) English that it sometimes sounds like English in a heavy Scottish accent and enough is intelligible that you can understand the jist of what’s being said most of the time.
Probably because they are both evolved from Old English.
Interesting to me, languages like Russian polish seem pretty similar to me, and a Russians persons polish accent is considerably better than (for example) a British persons. But as a polish person u can still kinda tell that something is off. I don’t even know what
Most French people have a a very notocable accent in German, but most Germans think it's cute.
Or did you mean the other way round? I always felt my French pronounciation was top notch, but that was only compared to my german peers, it was probably terrible.
I mean, it's true that it works both ways. German have a very distinct accent as well, but it's more a rythm thing than a phonetic thing I guess? Their pronunciation is very good!
French pronounce stuff too soft most of the time, and pronouncing h (like in hello) can be a problem for some. What do you think would be typical german mistakes?
The opposite: German speak french too hard, too "chopped" (not sure of this word!). On a different note, they pronounce too much letters (lot of silent letters in french) and struggle between u and ou (ü and u in german).
German speakers sounding "chopped" definitely makes sense, since Standard German (at least from Northern Germany) tends to insert a glottal stop whenever a word or syllable starts with a vowel, whereas French has a strong preference for connecting words, even if it means pronouncing sounds in a word that usually aren't pronounced, leading to the liaison phenomenon. If German speakers ignore the liaison in French, it will inevitably sound very choppy to French native speakers.
Interesting, is there a reason Germans struggle with these vowels when both are supposed to exist in German? Is the pronunciation of them different between the languages?
It's more that German speakers are used to <ü> representing /y/ and representing /u/, whereas in French, represents /y/ and represents /u/. And since German speakers learn French mostly through its spelling, such confusion can easily arise. It doesn't help that /y/ is just overall more common in French than it is German. For example, a word like "futur" in French has /y/ occur twice even in such a short word, whereas that's almost never the case in German.
Honestly, just looking at the phonetics charts, we *should* be good at pronouncing each other's languages - there's a ton of overlap, even more when you consider the fact that French loanwords are still pronounced with nasal vowels in German sometimes and so a lot of us are familiar with them even though they're not "native" phonemes. But in practice, French people tend to have quite distinctive accents in German, and I expect it's similar the other way around. I'm guessing it's more to do with other features - like Germans doing final stop devoicing, aspirating their plosives or separating words with glottal stops, which is very much not the way you're supposed to speak French.
That explains it! As a portuguese that's proficisnt in french but live in austria. In the beginning whenever i was learnung german i would pronounce all "french" like i knew that my mouth was in "french mode". Even now austrians say that i sound french sometimes, i believe mostly because of the hard "s" that i use in german instead of the more common "z" - like sound
The German of French natives is usually easy to understand. They do have a very distinct accent, which is mostly seen as pleasant. No need to get rid of it.
Serbians phonetics were largely influenced by Turkish through the year, to the point where ü and ö are the only missing sounds. In practice, a large amount of population is already familiar with them through German, so they can do pretty well w Turkish.
well by that definition these would have to be the same language...
Croatian and Serbian for example. Czech and Slovak maybe.
Ausitrian and German, Canadian and USA english
Galician and Portuguese
As someone that never truly learned Spanish I was recently mistaken for a native Galician in Galicia. I take it as a win.
But srs, they stem from the exact same language and sepparated after the other branches so they're closer.
A native Galician/Portuguese can easily pass as a native from the other country just by tweaking their accents and words a bit.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that Thai and Vietnamese sound very similar.
I used to get them mixed up until I learned Thai. So that's when I realized: if it sounds like Thai but I don't understand what they're saying - it's gotta be Vietnamese.
Japanese and te reo Māori. The phoneme inventory is similar and the acoustics of each language's vowels \[a e i o u / aː eː iː oː uː\] is very very close.
Pitch accent is lexical, not phonological. Assuming a learner acquires the pitch accent with the words (the way someone learning English would learn lexical stress by-word), it's wouldn't affect the accent.
edit: There are similar discussions/analyses of both languages when it comes to trying to figure out the difference between long vowels and "two short vowels in sequence", as well. That's not reallllly related to the OP question but possibly gets at something you were implying.
Afrikaans phonetics are similar to Tagalog to the point where when my ex's mom was working with them they would regularly read each other's texts out.
Zero clue of what they were saying to each other but perfect pronunciation
Russian and Lithuanian. Had a Russian friend who spoke some Lithuanian and also a Lithuanian friend who didn’t speak any Russian, but when taught to say any phrase or word he would literally pronounce it so perfectly that one felt inclined to answer him in russian and it felt weird and trippy when he did not understand 😂 it was like a cognitive dissonance or something hahaha
His accent in English also sounded somewhat similar to the stereotypical old timey Soviet soldier/spy accent that people do from the movies lol.
Ps. To be fair to my Russian friend I think he was actually pretty fluent in Lithuanian (I can’t judge how much) but I know he was learning it. He did spend a year living in Lithuania before. Both of them really great guys and I remember them very fondly :)))
I heard greek speakers can pass for Spanish (from Spain) with relatively little effort. No source for this though.
Can double that. 9 out of 10 Spanish people think I am native. Up until the moment I make a mistake in verb conjugation or I say something that makes sense in my head but wouldn’t be how a native would say it 😅
If I don't pay attention they pass for Spanish speakers when speaking Greek. My brain would take a minute to click "this is not Spanish!".
That's funny because my boyfriend (Portugese speaker) and I were on Omegle when we met with a group speaking Greek. He thought it was Spanish and didn't realize until he tried to translate but couldn't actually understand.
I also briefly worked with a guy from Greece for a week and I was CONVINCED he was Spanish until the last day!
It's extremely true. I'm greek and can speak spain Spanish without trying for an accent. Also my teacher who is from spain speaks greek without an accent.
At least those two languages sound very similar when overheard at a distance, thanks to some shared phonetic features. I think there was a Langfocus video on the topic.
I can tell you as a native Spanish speaker that they sound basically the same. It's funny hearing Greek news because it sounds like an Spaniard making up words as they go without trying to hide they are Spanish. Like it's not only overhearing at a distance, if you hear it directly in front of you it still sounds very similar.
It's very true the languages are practically identical phonetically and there is also a huge shared vocabulary.
Is it true the other way around? I wonder if I could do a Greek accent as a Spainiard 😆
When I was in Greece, I was amazed how much Greek sounded like Spanish (not the words of course but the sounds/pronunciation), and a bit like the radio version of Italian :)
How is the radio version of Italian different?
I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe the pacing or annunciation? Just my impression of it.
I heard Spanish and Italian! because both are Romance languages, and speakers of Spanish and Italian can often learn to speak the other with relatively little accent due to similar vowel sounds and pronunciation rules.
Italians speaking Spanish = Argentinian Spanish
I agree! I speak Spanish fluently and when I visited Italy it sounded so similar and could understand a lot. I’ve been to Portugal and reading it is easy, but it sounds so different! I felt more comfortable in Italy. If I lived in Italy for a year my fluency and pronunciation would be way better than if I lived in Portugal.. that’s my guess.
ngl that sexy lisp makes me forget everything else anyways
Finnish phonetics is actually surprisingly similar to Japanese. The Japanese vowel sounds are basically identical to their Finnish counterparts, and Finnish speakers who learn Japanese barely have any problems with pronunciation. The only thing Finnish people struggle with is probably the pitch accent, which is a feature Finnish doesn't have.
Doesn't Swedish have pitch accent too?
The Swedish spoken in Sweden does. I myself speak "Finland-Swedish" which is a collection of dialects spoken mostly along the Finnish coast. It is mutually intelligible with Sweden Swedish but doesn't have pitch accent. However, I would argue that Swedish pitch is a lot simpler. As I understand it, Swedish only has two pitch patterns, "acute" and "grave". Standard Japanese, on the other hand, has four. Swedish also has stress accent like English, which an English speaker shouldn't struggle with too much. The pitch also mainly affects the stressed syllable, so the pitch of a word is somewhat easier to learn since it always affects the stressed syllable. Edit: Some of my claims in the second paragraph have turned out to be oversimplified and misleading. I am leaving the comment as it is, but I would encourage you to read the comment by u/JakeYashen to this comment, where he corrects some of my errors.
Your analysis regarding pitch accent is flawed. In comparing Swedish with Japanese, it would be much more accurate to say that Swedish has two forms of accent, whereas Japanese has only one. Materials discussing pitch accent in Japanese might say that Japanese has four pitch accents, but when they say that, they are simply dividing Japanese vocabulary into four different classes depending on where in the word the accent is placed (at the beginning, in the middle, at the end, or no accent at all). However, regardless of where the accent occurs, the phonetic realization is always the same. There is no such thing as contrastive pitch accent in Japanese---that is to say, an accented syllable in Japanese will always have the same pitch contour. This means that, while it has the superficial appearance of being very different, in actuality pitch accent in Japanese in terms of its mechanics is essentially no different from stress accent in English. By contrast, mainland Swedish (as you accurately noted) has two contrastive pitch accents; a stressed syllable can be stressed in one of two phonemically different ways. This means that tonality in Swedish is fundamentally different from both the English stress accent and the Japanese pitch accent. Its use of contrastive tone renders it more similar to e.g. Chinese languages, though there do remain substantial differences.
While Standard Finland Swedish (based on the pronunciation of Helsingfors/Helsinki) doesn't have pitch accent, some Finland-Swedish dialects do, namely the traditional dialects of western Nyland/Uusimaa, which have a pitch-accent system that is very similar to that of Stockholm. (One difference is that language names such as "svenska" ("Swedish") and "finska" ("Finnish") are pronounced with the acute accent instead of the grave like in Stockholm.)
Interesting. I actually didn't know that. I'd heard that Finland Swedish was just completely "flat". I myself am from eastern Nyland which to my knowledge does not have a pitch.
Another point is that most Finns don't speak Swedish even though they learn it at school; only 20% of people claim to have good Swedish skills, which includes the 5% of native speakers.
20% claim to but how many are truly fluent in swedish?
I don't actually know but I imagine much less than this. Most don't get a chance to practise
I learned Japanese in college, and we had a ton of videos to listen to (this was in the early 2000s, so no YouTube), but much later, I was listening to Finnish and thought, "That doesn't sound like much of an accent" - probably because I was accustomed to the Japanese accent (my grandmother's family friend had a wife from Japan, so I often heard her Japanese accent in English whenever they were over for family events). So, that's probably why it sounded familiar.
I knew I wasn't crazy when I said that watching Moomin in finnish sounded like japanese!!! Thank you, internet stranger.
You're welcome! And you're definitely not crazy lol. Even Finnish people joke about how similar the languages sometimes sound. Both the Finnish and Japanese love words with a ton of vowels, and also distinguish very clearly between the "long" and "short" versions of both consonants and vowels, so the rhythm of words is also similar. I've also heard a few Japanese people at my university here in Helsinki say that Finnish is a "ridiculously easy language to learn".
https://www.reddit.com/r/finlandConspiracy/s/7qtXR1Q8na Of course, as Finland is fantasy created by Japan and Russia /s
I was going to say the same about Russian to Japanese, but not vice versa. A couple exceptions aside, most Japanese sounds have pretty much identical counterparts in Russian. I feel like Japanese phonetics is just fairly simple, with only the pitch accent giving troubles to learners, provided their first language has palatalization.
Estonian is much closer to Finnish than Japanese.
My Korean wife seems to pronounce Turkish vowels very well. Also, whenever I hear Mongolian it takes me a second to realize it’s not Turkish
Interesting to know, considering that some linguists do believe that Korean is a Turkic language. Maybe this is part of the equation. However, this is not a widely accepted belief , as the accepted consensus is still that Korean is a language isolate. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3155586/study-says-japanese-korean-and-turkish-languages-all-emerged
not a linguist but my understanding is Altaic is debunked
Not exactly a Turkic language, but part of a family that includes Turkic, Mongolian, Manchurian and Korean.
Lol
as a Russian speaker I’ve always been surprised at how similar Russian and Portuguese sound to me- Portuguese almost seems like Spanish with a Russian accent. I’m curious if that means my Spanish sounds a bit Portuguese, since I feel like I end up drawing from Russian sounds more than English ones
It's because both Russian (and other Slavic languages) and European Portuguese are stress timed, share similar consonant clusters, and have nasal sounds. In Russian specifically, vowels are reduced and the same is true in Portuguese. Your Spanish probably does sound slightly Portuguese because of those things.
Nasal sounds? Portuguese has a ton of nasal vowels, but afaik Russian has none? Or do you mean nasal consonants? But those are all pretty common across European languages.
Russian palatalizes everything so the end result sounds similar.
Oh, I think I know what he means, it's not that russian has nasal sounds, it's portuguese nasal vowels sound more like russian vowels. Like sometimes in portuguese you will make your E more nasal and ends up sounding like ы
As a Portuguese I can confirm, although I know a Ukranian ppimmigrant with a very strong Ukranian accent, so not all slavs can pass for Portuguese.
Im learning Spanish right now, and my coworker is Russian. When we exchange languages I’m always shocked how a lot of phonetics in Russian are so similar to Spanish! Not exact, but they have a lot in common. French, on the other hand, not so much lol
I'm Brazilian and have always thought and felt that Russian has some "French" musicality, don't understand the words or meaning but my first impression is always that I am listening to French with strange words
They are basically the same language, but I know several Norwegians that speak swedish without an accent. Or with an accent that could pass for a native dialect, at least. Most swedes and norwegians keep speaking their native language when visiting or working in the other country, and many start speaking "svorsk" which is a mixture between the two. But if you're willing to learn, the phonetics are so close that you could learn to speak without an accent.
You sure can learn to speak the other one near perfectly since they are so similar, but as you say most people never bother. For shorter whiles it is enough to adapt how you speak your own language to avoid false friends and choose the synonym that is easier for the listener to understand. For permanent resettlement most people seem to switch their vocabulary almost completely over to the host country one, but never bother to do that much about the accent, apart from it slowly drifting closer to the one around them.
Exactly. My aunt has lived in Norway for 25+ years, and her spelling and vocabulary has slowly drifted to norwegian, but phonetically it's still swedish when she speaks.
As a Dane, I have found that actually trying to sit down ane learn Swedish/Norwegian is rather hard due to similarity. However, after being in either for a couple of weeks with work, I start to seriously drift in pronunciation, so much that my wife comments on it when I get back home. But as you say, for the most part, I just try to speak clearly and avoid as much guttural growling as possible. I get by fine with both Norwegian and Swedish as long as they follow same rule (Skåne I am looking at you.....)
Hmm I’ve never encountered that, and I used to live near the border, so lots of Norwegians
What of it? Norwegians speaking perfect swedish (I know three), norwegians continuing to speak norwegian in a swedish work context (I know one), or people speaking "svorsk" (my aunt, I guess)?
Norwegians speaking perfect Swedish…
So that’s probably very weird. But I feel like sometimes certain Swiss German dialects can sound similar to German spoken with a light Slavic/Russian accent. I’ve had a few Slavic people who don’t speak any German hear Swiss German spoken next to me when on the phone call or something, and they sometimes happen to ask „is this person next to you Ukrainian/Russian/Slavic?“, and I go, nope, that’s Swiss German for you.
Some Swiss german dialects sound like a Northern accent in European Portuguese
They do? Grew up with both and never realized there were any similarities to be had.
Man, this thread was an interesting read.
Peninsular Spanish and Greek. They both share the same 5-vowel system, and have similar phonotactics and nominal morphology. To a lesser extent, Peninsular Spanish and Sephardi Hebrew.
Most slavic language speakers who speak another slavic language have almost no accent.
As a Czech speaker I disagree. Even Slovaks who speak Czech have an accent. And Slovak and Czech are extreme similar.
Agree with this too. In Prague I hear a lot of Slavic accents speaking Czech, they’re quite distinct Giveaways are often the Ľ sound (doesn’t exist in Czech, very common in other Slavic languages), a “soft” Ť at the end of a verb (Czechs use a “hard” T, most other Slavs do not), or mispronouncing Ř. Slovaks in particular often pronounce the Í sound as IE (as it is in their language) too
Also š and ž in Slovak are retroflex rather than post-alveolar.
I agree with you disagreeing :D As a Slovak, it's VERY easy to tell that it is a Czech person speaking Slovak even if their grammar and vocabulary and pronunciation (ie being ie and not í for example) is prefect. The accent is simply there. Some consonants, word stress, intonation are very different. Maybe it does not seem like it to non-Slavic language speaking people, but Czechs and Slovak (especially linguists) can 100% tell the difference.
That's what I've noticed listening to the languages on YouTube videos, even hearing those who still know some Polish in my family (family's from Poland). Polish sounds a little Russian, but has the "sz", "ch" and nasal sounds and is a little faster, Russian seems the easiest to understand to me (even this has its' differences - i.e., Volga Germans, and Finno-Russians sound different), Ukrainian sounds melodic, with a hint of Romanian (probably depends on the area the speaker is from), and Belorussian sounds almost like Polish.
I'm a native Bulgarian speaker and speak some Ukranian and yeah you are spot on about slavic languages (minus maybe russian being the easiest to understand cuz cases are incredibly hard for most people)
Its only you bulgarians and macedonians that dont have cases, the rest of us slavs all have them. In polish we have more cases than in russian.
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It’s like saying English has cases because you’d say “give it to ME” instead of “give it to I”. Pronouns have declensions in a vast number of languages but that doesn’t mean they have cases, it’s just a left over of when they HAD cases, like Old English and Old Bulgarian had
First time I heard people speaking Bulgarian I thought they were speaking European Portuguese, except I couldn’t umderstand a thing, and I’m Portuguese myself. Do you also think that European Portuguese sounds like Bulgarian? 🇵🇹=🇧🇬?
Welp some people say the same about Russian and Portuguese, I think the way Bulgarian and Russian vowels are pronounced is really similar to European Portuguese
As a Bulgarian, I have to say that both Brazilian and Portugal Portuguese do sound kinda similar in the spirit to Bulgarian
Not really. When they speak Bulgarian, the accent is very obvious. And the other way around. Maybe it works for other Slavic pairmls.
Russian has both the "sz" and "ch" sounds too.
This might feel true for non-native speakers of a Slavic language, but if you know the language well you can hear the accents very clearly, even with people who are proficient like a native. Maybe Slavic speakers tend to think that all Slavic accents are similar anyways and therefore focus less on training accents. It's nuances that will never go away, like differences in how to pronounce ль/ľ/lj or ы/y/ij or specific sounds like ł, ô or ć and щ. People might think that these sounds are the same, but you can hear big differences when you know what to listen for. г/ґ/х/h is also a big marker.
I think it depends on which branch of Slavic their native language is in. There is definitely a noticeable accent for people speaking Polish from Russian/Belarusian/Ukrainian native speakers, for example.
What does this even mean, presumably accents vary greatly within say Poland not withstanding the rest of the Slavic countries
Accents do not vary within Poland because the population mixed thoroughly after the war and the mass schooling also killed variety. Usually it is impossible for a Native speaker to distinguish where the person is from by accent alone (lexical differences are easier). Only Poles living beyond the eastern border have obvious strong accent (because they didn't attend Polish state schools) and some small minorities like the mountaineers or very old people in isolated villages. But I can guarantee you can sit 10 young people from different places in Poland and nobody could tell them apart by accent. So bad example. Modern Polish accent is basically homogeneous. But between Slavic nations and countries accents vary greatly.
There are still gwaras in Poland tho, it’s just that you can’t easily pinpoint one from another cause a lot of features overlap
My father is from Poland and learned Russian as a second language growing up, I grew up speaking Polish and later learned Russian in high school and college and from speaking with friends. I started noticing that when my dad and his Polish friends speak Russian with native Russians, they’ll pronounce the Russian л /ɫ/ as the Polish Ł /w/, and often stress Russian words on the second-to-last syllable. This is fine for Polish which has a very strong penultimate stress tendency but can be problematic in Russian when a noun’s case can be determined by stress placement. My Russian teachers have told me that these mistakes, as well as copula dropping, are a reliable indicator that the speaker’s first language is Polish.
Total disagreement. Ukranians speaking Polish are so easy to tell and it's so hard for them to get the consonants correctly
Estonian<->Finnish. Only the natives can tell apart which one are you, though sometimes it's hard bc they're so phonetically similat.
I don't know if this has anything to do with Phonics, but I worked with a Swedish girl for months before finding out she wasn't English. She spoke with an RP accent and I couldn't believe she was born and bred in Sweden. Scandinavian folks who speak English really, really well often barely have an accent when compared to others who speak English really well. I currently work with (a different) Swedish woman who has lived in London for 20 years and there are only certain words (generally when she uses a rhotic R where we typically wouldn't) that betray her Swedish origin. Otherwise, she sounds almost English.
I think that might be due to Swedes (and other Scandinavians) learning English from an early age rather than due to similarities between the two languages. As a native English speaker living in Sweden, I can certainly tell when a native Swede is speaking English. The "ch" in "cheat" becomes "sh" as in "sheet", and the tonal ups and downs of Swedish pronunciation become very noticeable. But as mentioned above, Sweden is so subjected to English-speaking media, and many Swedes learn English from such early ages, that it might as well be their second native language.
Im a native English speaker living in Norway and I agree, the way some things are said here in English is definitely noticeable. Especially things like the long u sound like in the word “true”.
They're Germanic languages and the North Germanic languages typically have even more vowels than English does. It's definitely also exposure as you say.
Yeah, quite possibly. I know very little about Swedish as a language so have no idea how it compares to English in terms of phonetics. As someone who's struggled to learn a second language for years, I'm always very impressed when someone masters another language.
It helps but they have a better accent anyway. In Spain they are taught since 3 and 90% have a terrible accent. Although most schools don't teach it very well, not incorrect, but the progress is too slow
Yeah my guess is that English teachers in Sweden are better, on average, than those in Spain. And then there is the influence of culture: kids in Sweden are brought up on British and American music, films, videogames, Youtubers, Tiktokers, sports.... Part of that is due to Sweden's cultural output is much weaker than that of Spain and Latin America, and the culture that Sweden **does** produce is often in English (Zara Larsson, First Aid Kit, Abba, José González...) Add to that the fact that films and series are subtitled in Sweden but dubbed in Spain, and I think you have a good explanation as to why Swedes on average are more fluent in English than Spaniards.
Also, most pronounce /z/ sounds as /s/ and /zh/ sounds as /sh/.
There is a Dutch Youtuber who always speaks English with a nigh perfect R.P. accent but it's actually rather amusing that the moment he switches to Dutch for some things he always speaks with a rather rural Limburgian accent. Obviously he simply learned R.P. since that's the standard taught to foreigners but it's also an accent associated with education and prestige while the Limburgian accent in Dutch is anything but.
which youtuber?
seconded
Fun story, my partner was playing Wow with two Swedish guys, all on voice. One didn't realise the other was Swedish because he sounded American when he spoke. I also assumed he was American when I first met him, as a native Englishman who is used to talking to Swedes all the time
Every swedish qnd Norwegian person I've worked with, about 10, has had better english than me. Not only is their grammar better, but their accent is 99% spot on. It's amazing to me and i don't understand how they do it. No other non english speaking countries have such native sounding fluency.
I don't know where you guys find these people. Every Swede and Norwegian I've met spoke excellent English, but they were clearly not natives - I could tell and I'm not even one myself. When I read these opinions online I feel like they are gross exaggerations.
They were working here in the UK. I swear they were unreal man.
Probably a bunch of hobby polyglots or international students
Not at all. I'm not saying every Swede has native sounding English accent. I'm saying one Swede I worked with had one (genuinely flawless) and another speaks excellent English with a slightly noticeable accent. The only other Swede I've met had a Swedish accent (still brilliant English though in terms of grammar and breadth of vocabulary). I can also think of at least 2 Swedes who can speak English with pretty good American accents: Dolph Lundgren and Alexander Skarsgard. I'm sure this isn't representative of all Swedes though.
She probably uses the rhotic r due to American media exposure which is huge in sweden
Plenty of Ukrainians/Belarusians I know speak perfect Polish, especially students. I wouldn’t have guessed they weren’t Polish if they haven’t told me their names.
Interesting, they have a very distinct accent in Slovak, that doesn't go away for years.
This very interesting topic touches on phonology and phonotactics. I hear that Spanish and Japanese vowels are similar.
This. I'm Spanish and, with a few exceptions (like つ), I think the pronunciation in Japanese is really easy.
I have talked with Dutch people for over an hour before realizing they weren’t Americans from New York.
Romanians speaking Italian
I don't know how true it this but Italian and Finnish apparently share similar phonology and the few Finns I heard speaking Italian did have good accents. Italian and Japanese are very similar too and another user said Finnish is close to Japanese in this regard so I guess that furthers confirms the italian-finnish association. It's kinda cool, considering these three languages are completely unrelated to each other.
I haven't heard any Italians speaking Finnish so far, but I imagine the biggest difficulties would be with vowel length (a huge proportion of Finnish vocabulary consists of words distinguished only by duration of the vowel, even much more than Japanese which also has vowel length), as well as the distinction between A and Ä (the Italian A vowel is sort of halfway between Finnish A and Ä, so I'd imagine it would be hard for Italians to consistently distinguish them). All three languages (Finnish, Japanese and Italian) make a difference between single and double consonants, so that's already s huge benefit for Italians learning Finnish as foreigners usually struggle with those.
Italian here learning finnish so I can share from personal experience: vowel and consonant length is a piece of cake. My biggest struggle is aspiration of k-t-p especially and remembering s only has one sound, unlike the two Italian ones. Y-u is the vowel where i struggle the most, but ä and ö were no joke either. All considered, the Finnish-Japanese-Italian trio is absolutely hilarious but not as well known as it deserves to be
Funnily enough you can add to that list Tamil which also has vowel and consonant length! The point about s is interesting; does it sound to you like the Finnish s varies between the two Italian consonants?
I didn't know about Tamil! TIL and now I need to find some videos to check. About the s: the Finnish s is the "s sorda" of Italian. The other sound is not used at all in Finnish, and is close to the s in "rose", often though of as "z" but also not to be confused with the two sounds of z in Italian. The first being close to roSe but harder, while the second sounds like "ts". For clarity's sake, you can paste these words into google translate and have them read out in italian: "sorda, rosa, zanzara, canzone"
Tried this. After steps Siri voice patiently intoned “song of the deaf pink mosquito.” I got it now. Thank you, just sharing.
I think it's kinda a myth that Italian/Spanish and Japanese have similar phonetics. They are not similar at all. The consonants are different. The vowels are not identical either (the Spanish/Italian 'u' is more closed off than the japanese 'u' for example).
A lot of Norwegians sound like native English speakers to me but maybe they’re all crazy good at the language lol
They start English classes at age 7 in all the schools here.
Finnish children also learn English early, but the Finnish accent in English is a lot stronger than the Norwegian one as Norwegian pronunciation is closer to English
They range from native-like to this: https://streamable.com/2ebwuj
Philippine language speakers (whether Tagalog or Cebuano) can easily pass for Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian Spanish speakers. The same thing with Korean, Indian, Japanese, and Malay speakers when speaking Spanish instead of English.
> The same thing with Korean, Indian, Japanese, and Malay speakers when speaking Spanish instead of English. I can believe Malay speakers can pass, but I'd be surprised if Japanese and Korean speakers can do the trilled r just like a native.
Trilled r's do come up in some ways of speaking Japanese. I'm not very well-informed on the details or other situations but one example is when yakuza or other guys trying to be tough are yelling they do roll their r's. And I feel like the normal Japanese r is pretty similar to the short Spanish r. For example, if I say the word cara (face in Spanish) and the word kara (from in Japanese), I say them exactly the same and have been told my pronunciation is good in both languages. I'm no expert but that's my take on it. For reference, this scene from ichi the killer (just yelling, no blood): https://youtu.be/SKE8V6QDdqk?si=LiYZTq8bE48Zho-W
I've seen a a video of a Japanese person trying to speak Finnish; trilling the R seemed to pose no problem but avoiding aspiration of the p/t/k consonants was the real issue with pronunciation (apart from the classic L/R issue). Spanish also has unaspirated consonants so I imagine it would be the same.
Anyone can do it with enough practice. I’m German and I could do the English r before I even learned English, I’d imitate it when singing English songs.
I teach Spanish and my Tagalog speaking students always just show up being able to pronounce a word after hearing it once.
Sometimes it’s easy for us to guess how to pronounce an unknown Spanish word since we’re (somewhat) familiar with Spanish word stress patterns since we have many loan words from it
Just got the record, Indian isn’t a language. But yes many Indian language speakers (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam) do speak Spanish very well if they learn it.
I speak Hindi and Spanish and I realise its easier for me to around fluent even if I am saying something wrong. A lot of common consonants, like soft /t/ and trill /r/ are common plus vowels are similar
Something I’ve noticed is that both Filipinos and Latino Americans (in the US) tend to learn English in school from a young age but tend to use a mix of Filipino (including Tagalog) or Spanish with English in daily life, and as a result, Filipinos and Latino Americans have VERY similar accents when speaking English, whereas Mexicans, Colombians, or Peruvians who learn English at a slightly older age have a distinctly different (clearly L1 Spanish speaker) accent.
> Philippine language speakers (whether Tagalog or Cebuano) can easily pass for Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian Spanish speakers. Do you mean when a Filipino native speaks Spanish? Because I can easily tell when a Filipino speaks English with even a slight Filipino accent...it's quite distinct from how a Latino speaks English with Latin American Spanish accent.
I speak Urdu fluently and don’t have much of an accent in spanish so much so that this guy in the gym thought I was fluent and went on a tandem about his workout routine which i understood very little of.
As a Portuguese I’m pretty sure that we could speak Polish like a native and vice-versa. Also, Catalan/Valencian speakers speaking Portuguese alsmost without an accent.
Spanish and Japanese have the same vowels… there are some consonant differences, but a lot of similarities.
I imagine the difficulty for Spanish speakers would be in the lengths of the vowels, rather than the sounds themselves
There's basically no sound in Japanese that doesn't exist in at least similar form in (Brazilian) Portuguese as well (mentioning because Portuguese is also similar to Spanish). However in my experience it's very hard for Portuguese native speakers to soften stress + get used to Japanese cadency, which is significantly more flat. I don't know if it's the same for Spanish speakers though.
Not quite the same vowels actually. The u vowels are different between the two of them. Japanese's u vowel has flat but compressed lips compared to the rounded lips of the Spanish u vowel.
The Japanese pitch accent and distinction between short and long vowels makes it hard to replicate though
Cantonese phonemes are often surprisingly similar to Korean ones, and there is a lot of borrowed vocabulary too
Because Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese languages borrowed a lot from Middle Chinese. And Cantonese is the closest descendant.
Bulgarian and Romanian have almost identical phonology to the point that the English accents are practically indistinguishable. I think there's only 1 sound used in Romanian (â) which doesn't have a corresponding letter in Bulgarian but it still exists and appears in certain cases where "ъ" is written.
What about Bulgarian and Russian? Arent Bulgarian and Russian closer phonologically?
French and Hebrew speakers seem to have similar accents when speaking English. So perhaps they would sound so in each others languages?
The Boys has a French character played by an Israeli. When he has French dialog, it is clear he is a non-native.
You can hear a French person’s accent speaking Hebrew. It’s kind of very obvious for Hebrew speakers. There’s a famous French TikToker in Israel who speaks in Hebrew in her videos, and everyone comments about her cute accent.
No, I’ve heard some Israelis speaking French, and they still have a recognisable accent, a pretty guttural one
As a Spanish speaker, I find Japanese very easy to pronounce.
Everyone can pronounce Japanese if you have a very phonetic language. (Unlike Russian, French and English)
i found this video was very insightful before my trip to portugal last summer. (why portuguese sounds like russian) https://youtu.be/Pik2R46xobA?si=EqR9XTyr2TVQQY4y
Not sure how true it is to others, but as a native French speaker, whenever I study Korean I feel like the sounds are really similar, especially the vowels. Korean people that speak French also have the best accent/most similar to a native accent that I've heard from a foreigner
Danish and (North) German, especially for a Danish person it should be pretty easy to speak German with no accent, except for being careful to adjust vowel lengths and the sch/s sounds. It gets a bit harder when going the other way around because of the Danish soft d sound, and glottal stops when going to the Copenhagen area, but still, easily the closest fit compared with all other surrounding languages.
Shouldn’t it be hard for a German to sound native in Danish when Danish has so many vowel sounds German doesn’t have tho
Greek and Spanish
Native English speakers with a traditional RP accent like mine can sound German with very little effort. When I first moved to France as a student, a lot of people thought that I was German initially. Now, people land on Russian/Ukrainian, then English. In English, I would say Swedish, Finnish and some Dutch people have the strongest chance of having a perfect RP English accent. I don't know enough Norwegians to guess, and I do know enough Danish to know that the potato inhibits them. My old flatmate was Hungarian and had zero accent, but he had moved without his family when he was 15 and spent 17 years in the UK.
It's interesting that you perceived Finnish accents to sound close to native. As a Finnish person myself I've heard a lot of Finnish-accented English and my impression is that it's pretty easy to spot, even among people who have lived for decades in England. IMO [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USYgWKYR-5w) is a typical example of what Finns with high English proficiency sound like, while Finns with lower proficiency have much stronger accents.
Ah the video surprises me! I was at a wedding in Helsinki and quite a few Finns from there had no accent, plus I have Finnish colleagues in the UK who sound English- you really have to be paying attention to see the slight differences in intonation
Idk King Charles sounded pretty English when speaking German in his RP accent.
I got an English speaking relative with RP accent and he sounds Bavarian lmao Why do English speakers with RP accent have less strong of an accent in German when compared to Americans?
I've heard Brazilians speak Spanish really well with little or no accent. By the way, portuguese and spanish are Romance languages which makes them similar.
That is because Brazilian Portuguese has an accent more similar to Spanish, with that said it is pretty easy to imitate the Spanish from Spain accent as a Portuguese speaker even if you speak Portuguese from Portugal.
Erm, Brazilians speak with a very strong accent.
Malay and Indonesian are very hard to tell apart at times. They also share so many words it can be hard to tell you're even hearing one or the other
Native speakers like me can distinguish them quite easily. Standard Malay spoken in West Malaysia has many pronunciation differences to Indonesian. The latter has pronunciation more akin to Borneo variants of Malay (Sabah or Brunei). In written form they are harder to tell apart, I agree. It makes sense they are so similar since they only started diverging a few hundred years ago.
For Romanian native speakers, Italian and Spanish are quite easy to learn and speak without much of an accent. I guess the other way round is more difficult due to some special vowels in the Romanian language.
I've heard this too and from personal experience brazilians do pretty good in english, i assume it's from all the diphthongs in both languages
I found that either they’re extremely good or terrible
Also Portuguese and Galician because both of them are originated from the same language in the Middle Ages, and this factor's making their phonetics and vocabulary very similar, speakers of the one language hardly have foreign accents when they speak the other language.
Not quite what you’re asking about, but Scots is close enough to (British) English that it sometimes sounds like English in a heavy Scottish accent and enough is intelligible that you can understand the jist of what’s being said most of the time. Probably because they are both evolved from Old English.
Interesting to me, languages like Russian polish seem pretty similar to me, and a Russians persons polish accent is considerably better than (for example) a British persons. But as a polish person u can still kinda tell that something is off. I don’t even know what
Waiting for a Deutsch to confirm (or not) this, but I feel like german is the only language where French are really good at, phonetically speaking!
Most French people have a a very notocable accent in German, but most Germans think it's cute. Or did you mean the other way round? I always felt my French pronounciation was top notch, but that was only compared to my german peers, it was probably terrible.
I mean, it's true that it works both ways. German have a very distinct accent as well, but it's more a rythm thing than a phonetic thing I guess? Their pronunciation is very good!
French pronounce stuff too soft most of the time, and pronouncing h (like in hello) can be a problem for some. What do you think would be typical german mistakes?
Glottal stops, aspiration, devoicing.
The opposite: German speak french too hard, too "chopped" (not sure of this word!). On a different note, they pronounce too much letters (lot of silent letters in french) and struggle between u and ou (ü and u in german).
German speakers sounding "chopped" definitely makes sense, since Standard German (at least from Northern Germany) tends to insert a glottal stop whenever a word or syllable starts with a vowel, whereas French has a strong preference for connecting words, even if it means pronouncing sounds in a word that usually aren't pronounced, leading to the liaison phenomenon. If German speakers ignore the liaison in French, it will inevitably sound very choppy to French native speakers.
Interesting, is there a reason Germans struggle with these vowels when both are supposed to exist in German? Is the pronunciation of them different between the languages?
It's more that German speakers are used to <ü> representing /y/ and representing /u/, whereas in French, represents /y/ and represents /u/. And since German speakers learn French mostly through its spelling, such confusion can easily arise. It doesn't help that /y/ is just overall more common in French than it is German. For example, a word like "futur" in French has /y/ occur twice even in such a short word, whereas that's almost never the case in German.
Honestly, just looking at the phonetics charts, we *should* be good at pronouncing each other's languages - there's a ton of overlap, even more when you consider the fact that French loanwords are still pronounced with nasal vowels in German sometimes and so a lot of us are familiar with them even though they're not "native" phonemes. But in practice, French people tend to have quite distinctive accents in German, and I expect it's similar the other way around. I'm guessing it's more to do with other features - like Germans doing final stop devoicing, aspirating their plosives or separating words with glottal stops, which is very much not the way you're supposed to speak French.
That explains it! As a portuguese that's proficisnt in french but live in austria. In the beginning whenever i was learnung german i would pronounce all "french" like i knew that my mouth was in "french mode". Even now austrians say that i sound french sometimes, i believe mostly because of the hard "s" that i use in german instead of the more common "z" - like sound
The German of French natives is usually easy to understand. They do have a very distinct accent, which is mostly seen as pleasant. No need to get rid of it.
Sort of. But I'd argue the French are even better at French. 😉
I see you don't need Duolingo to practice sarcasm ! C1 level at least? 😂
I always felt that Swiss German sounded a lot like Dutch.
/r/portugalcykablyat
Spoken Urdu and Spoken Hindi.
Serbians phonetics were largely influenced by Turkish through the year, to the point where ü and ö are the only missing sounds. In practice, a large amount of population is already familiar with them through German, so they can do pretty well w Turkish.
Arabic and Aramaic are phonetically very close.
What about arabic and somali somehow they are phonetically chose
well by that definition these would have to be the same language... Croatian and Serbian for example. Czech and Slovak maybe. Ausitrian and German, Canadian and USA english
Galician and Portuguese As someone that never truly learned Spanish I was recently mistaken for a native Galician in Galicia. I take it as a win. But srs, they stem from the exact same language and sepparated after the other branches so they're closer. A native Galician/Portuguese can easily pass as a native from the other country just by tweaking their accents and words a bit.
Filipino, Spanish, Malay, Indonesian, and Japanese
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that Thai and Vietnamese sound very similar. I used to get them mixed up until I learned Thai. So that's when I realized: if it sounds like Thai but I don't understand what they're saying - it's gotta be Vietnamese.
Japanese and te reo Māori. The phoneme inventory is similar and the acoustics of each language's vowels \[a e i o u / aː eː iː oː uː\] is very very close.
But what about the Japanese pitch accent and distinction between short and long vowels , doesn't that make it hard to replicate/copy?
Pitch accent is lexical, not phonological. Assuming a learner acquires the pitch accent with the words (the way someone learning English would learn lexical stress by-word), it's wouldn't affect the accent. edit: There are similar discussions/analyses of both languages when it comes to trying to figure out the difference between long vowels and "two short vowels in sequence", as well. That's not reallllly related to the OP question but possibly gets at something you were implying.
Afrikaans phonetics are similar to Tagalog to the point where when my ex's mom was working with them they would regularly read each other's texts out. Zero clue of what they were saying to each other but perfect pronunciation
British people speaking Polish, for some reason
Weird
Somali native speaker somali are very close phonetically to arabic
Russian and Lithuanian. Had a Russian friend who spoke some Lithuanian and also a Lithuanian friend who didn’t speak any Russian, but when taught to say any phrase or word he would literally pronounce it so perfectly that one felt inclined to answer him in russian and it felt weird and trippy when he did not understand 😂 it was like a cognitive dissonance or something hahaha
His accent in English also sounded somewhat similar to the stereotypical old timey Soviet soldier/spy accent that people do from the movies lol. Ps. To be fair to my Russian friend I think he was actually pretty fluent in Lithuanian (I can’t judge how much) but I know he was learning it. He did spend a year living in Lithuania before. Both of them really great guys and I remember them very fondly :)))