Green text: "Weirdest language according to citizens of each country"

by wigglepizza

29 comments
  1. No.

    Why would it be the weirdest it’s the closest language to ours.

  2. It can be a bit of an uncanny valley for Finns. Like listening to another Finn while having a stroke.

  3. so the thing about estonian, at least for me, is that no other language fucks with my brain as a native finnish-speaker quite like it. the rhythm and flow are pretty much the same, the vocab parallels finnish quite a bit, pronunciation makes perfect sense, and yet i understand nothing when i hear it. it’s the uncanny valley of languages, obviously familiar yet nothing like what i know.

  4. Its weird as its almost correct compared to the gibberish rest of the world speaks.

  5. Confused as to why Basque is so prominent on this list, that’s rarely encountered.

  6. No.

    This said, it is sometimes funny. Like a sentence “ma lĂ€hen linna pappi raiskama”, meaning “I’m going to the city to spend some money”, sounds to a Finn like “I’m going to a castle to r?pe a priest”.

    EDIT: as pointed out in comments, that’s somewhat outdated.

  7. I love the language, I even took some courses at the open university đŸ˜…đŸ€— I find it funny and fascinating

  8. Perhaps it’s weird because it’s so close yet not quite understandable.

  9. No. 

    Estonian tends to sound inherently funny to the Finnish native speaker, due to being not quite Finnish, but close enough that it doesn’t quite instantly register as a foreign language either.

  10. Its like listening to your friend after he has taken 40 shots and then taken line of coce to get some energy back to his body. You dont understand anything but it kinda sounds like normal speech

  11. Estonian sounds like “funny finnish”, as in many times a Finn might think when hearing an Estonian speak “well that sounds funny, a weird energy in that one”

    but as far as the picture goes maybe Latin alphabet doesn’t do justice to Polish (I assume?) it could be pretty standard language in some other aspects. But yeah probably your native tongue affects what you find weird

  12. i mean it sounds kinda uncanny to me like someone speaking Finnish but they are drunk or from a different time i understand some words but a lot them sound kinda like a mix of words but wrong.

  13. I’m Estonian and moved to Finland when I was 7, I’m 21 now, and yes, even I can honestly say that Estonian sounds rather strange to my ears compared to Finnish. I can’t explain why, though.

  14. As a Norjalainen, Finnish is a completely foreign language, but I’ve managed successfully the last twenty years with:

    yksi, kaski, kolme

    kiitos

    Kippis!

    Moi!

    Olet seksikas

    Taimen? (point at a lake on a paper map or digital map)

  15. I am Polish and I think it’s the same for me with Czech language.
    I understand fuck all most of the time while it sounds really similar to Polish language. It’s like I’m having a stroke.

    People from Czechia must speak very slow and then there’s a chance I’ll understand them. But I must be aware of false friends, i.e.: “szukam dzieci w sklepie”.

    In Polish it means: “I’m looking for children in a shop”
    I Czech it means: “I’m fucking children in a basement”

    On the other hand there is a Slovak language which is much, much easier for me to understand. I can hold a conersation with a decent flow with people from Slovakia.

  16. Yes, it’s because it often sounds like you should understand, but in reality you don’t understand a word. That screws with the brain quite a lot.

    Then again, other times you can quite easily tell it’s another language due to the different intonation

  17. Well it is really weird bc it sounds like finnish but I don’t understand any of it 😅 so for me it may be the weirdest language.

  18. It’s weird because to a Finn it sounds like we should be able to understand it, but we don’t.

  19. Someone once said that finnish sounds like drunken estonian and estonian sounds like drunken finnish

  20. In the nineties my Father traveled to Finland and back often. One day he’s finnish friends came to visit but Father was in town so we said “Isa on linnas” which means that “father is in prison” in Finnish.

  21. I can have a bar night with estonians with no one understanding what the other says but actually understanding everything. The language goes farther than just the words.

    It is a little sad though that just 500 years ago we would have easily understood each other, but then the Russian and German influence (read: glad you even survive after it) on the estonians went so unhinged, while and We and Sweden were just rampaging.

  22. When I hear Estonian I immediately think that it’s funny Finnish – in a good way. Like many words have been chopped a bit but are still recognizable.

    Then there are many words that have funny associations because they resemble Finnish words; couple examples from the back of my head:
    Eng. Bat (the animal) is “lepakko” in Finnish, but Estonian (I think is) “nahkhiir”. This is super close to Finnish “nahkahiiri”, which is “leather mouse”. Kinda funny association.
    Then there’s Eng. Milk, which in Finnish is “maito”. But in Estonian it’s “piim”, which is close to “piimĂ€” in Finnish – and that means “sour milk” instead of regular milk.

    Small stuff like that. There’s absolutely no malice involved, it’s more of “funny sounding in a cute way” really. Weird sounds way too negative, “odd but strangely familiar” is more accurate.

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