I always liked it when I look at something and it says save something crazy like 6400 dollars and then I realized that there was no chance at all that I was even going to spend that amount of money to buy it in the first place. I still like your short stories but Rock on Clozemaster Busuu Duolingo Lingo pie Lirica Low rate lifetime subscription rule! Babadum is also fun
it doesn't sound that hard from czech side! even i actually don't speak polish I do understand a lot and it's not that hard for me to mimic your lovely cute and funny language :) pozdrowienia do polske! :D
@@ondrejlukas4727 actually Czech is not hard for me too! Our languages are so similar and many words in them are similar. I'm learning Czech and I know some phrases. But Polish has many tenses, variations, etc. and for people who are(for example) from UK my language is hard to learn. Sometimes even I make mistakes😭
@@abndlove same here, same here :) only what confuses me is that sometimes your RZ sounds exactly like Ř, but other time its more like ŘŽ RZż :) btw, did you know that probably only other language with such sound is gaelic? :)
I guess i was so lucky to be born in Transylvania,when i was 18 i spoke 6 languages.The first 14 years of my life i study hungarian,romanian,french,russian, then in high school, english and italian.
piri--- Touché Piri!...Sure beats my mere 3 languages! As a Linguistics major, I've looked at the syntax and grammar of many tongues. I know a bit of my grandmother's crazy Magyarul--- just enough to get me in trouble!!!
You must be very talented, though it helps to acquire few languages naturally like in Transylvania, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands where everyone is naturally at least trilingual. If you were born in China you would also naturally learn Chinese. I am Polish but my first language is English so I am naturally bilingual. I also speak French and Russian. Knowing Latin as I can undeerstand Italian and Spanish quite well but I do not speak it. Congratulations to you, you are very lucky
I learned Finnish. I lived in Finland for eight years. It definitely required effort as there were no classes. But I had the advantage of coworkers (other language teachers) who had permission to correct my Finnish with explanations for 7+ years. 40 years later my wife and I still use it as a secret language in public.
Swedish gypsies does the same thing. Most of them are related to Finnish gypsies so they learn to speak Finnish. So bewere if you travel to Sweden at least gypsies and Finns that are living there or traveling there will understand your secrets 😁. I noticed this as i were young and traveled often from Finland to Sweden, mostly to Stockholm, but same thing when you cross the border from Tornio to Haparanda. Of course generally people at the crossing areas speak both laguages in both sides of the border. Also the differences in written language and spoken language might be quite different. And of course there is differences even in spoken language in different areas in Finland. Might be that people in neibourgh city or village have them own style so that propably makes finnish even more difficult to learn. For example: "Now i will go to the sauna" is "Nyt minä menen saunaan". So nobody actually say so. Rather "Mä meen nyt saunaan" or just simply "Meen saunaan". Or stronger accent "Nymmie mään saunaa". There are propapably at least dosen ways to say it. Even some times we have to think a while what the heck someone is speaking and even we don´t always understand the differences. I moved from my home city Kokkola to Tampere. At first everyone noticed for my speach that i had moved there from some other area. Sometimes still after six years of living here some people notice differences if i use some other word for impression as locals does. Locals also have difference as how the younger generation speaks as how the older speaks. I think that social media have the changed the way more similar in whole country. There is good and bad influences at that.
Sadly, even Finnish is not a safe secret language. Once my wife and I stopped at a roadside cafe in Germany. We were speaking English as my wife is British when a German couple from the adjoining table suddenly enquired whether we were from Finland. My accent had given us away. Then they started speaking in Finnish. Turned out they had spent their vacations in Finland for a generation or more...
My mother was born in Finland and we had Finnish relatives nearby. Over the generations, the language evolved into Finglish. It is a badass language. For instance to say "I love you in Finnish it's : "Minä rakastan sinua". The word rakastan is pronounced with a heavy roll on the r. and a vary hard k.
My kids and I speak Finnish when abroad just to minimize eavesdropping in public. In Warsaw recently I made the mistake of speaking Finnish to the staff in a touristy bar. It was quite funny how wide eyed they were when asking what the heck that was. They were native Poles (bloody hard language), lots of Asian tourists chattering away, they probably hear a fair bit of Russian and Hungarian too, but only Finnish provoked a "Good lord, WHAT was that!!!"
@@sebm8511 Partly. In a Polish comedy film, How I Unleashed World War II ("Jak rozpętałem II wojnę światową" in Polish), the hero, Franek Dolas is captured by the German army and is later questioned. To prank them, he purposely uses a fake name to confuse them. Officer: "First and last name?" Franek Dolas: "Brzęczyszczykiewicz, Grzegorz. Brzęczyszczykiewicz." Officer: "Shut up! Hans! Hans." Hans, a typist : "Yes, sir?" Officer (to Dolas): "Please go to the typing machine." Hans: "First and last name?" Dolas: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz" Hans: "How is that possible?” after a while, when poor-poor Hansi finally were able to type the name, he ask Dolas: „Born where?" Dolas: "Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody" Hans: Whaaat? You should have seen the face of poor Hans! And the legendary hero of Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz had born!
@@sebm8511 "These words are fictional ones." Well, The real ones are cool enough. Not sure if you are Polish speaker or not (I am), the following is mostly for benefit of non-Polish speakers: Real words: Więckowski (my buddy from high school), Krzyszkowiak (Polish track-n-field I think), Krzyrzewski (USA collegial coach of Polsih origin), Kasperczak (Polish soccer player), trzcina (reed), sprawdzić (to check), tnąć (to cut) and more. Some of them only appear to be difficult: "rz" and "cz" are diagraphs corresponding to English "zh" (or "sh") and "ch", so Kasperczak would be Kasperchak. Some actually are difficult for speakers of many languages, like trzcina (tshcheena) or sprawdzić: spravjeetch, but requires palatalization of "j" and "tch". The alphabet is (mostly) phonetic (while English is mostly NOT), there were no significant vowels shifts in Polish language and if anything consonants get simpler, listen to Old-Church-Slavonic to appreciate how bad it could be!). But what remains on phonology is difficult enough: dotknąć (to touch), yes, three consonants and the "k" has to be there (because of dotnąć: to cut to).
@@tomasnovotny2740Far from it. Czech phonetics is quite easy in comparison with Polish phonetics; so is Czech grammar. After spending 2 weeks in Prague, I could speak basic Czech (not without making mistakes, of course), but after having spent 2 weeks in Warsaw I could utter several words and some greeting phrases only. And believe me, I'm quite gifted as far as foreign languages are concerned 😃
You are very clever and I wish you good luck with your studies! After a while, when you already understand the Hungarian language, you will see that this language is very expressive! Very subtle, barely noticeable, nuanced differences in words reveal a lot! For example, we have a poem that cannot be translated into other languages! Our word "walk" has about forty forms, and each of them means a different situation, a different person, animal, mood, or emotion. If you are interested, just write and I will gladly send it to you! ;-) Best regards ;-)
@@palilaciHi there! I'm from Argentina and learning Hungarian as well. I'll be moving to Budapest next month. Do you have any recommendations for other cities or towns outside Budapest that you would suggest visiting? And is there any advice you’d give for living in Budapest or Hungary in general? Thanks a lot!
I learned Hungarian from zero when I was 28. I'm 60 now and haven't used it since I was about 33. I really haven't had much opportunity since leaving Budapest after Art Studies. I'm now reviewing it and it isn't totally gone. I guess I loved it and I still do. I think that was the key for me learning it and remembering it. It lives in my soul. But it is damned hard. No question about it.
Once in Portugal me and my wife were talking in a café (we are Hungarians). Then a gentleman from a distant table approached us and asked if we were Finnish. He was fluent in it and said from a fair distance our talking sounded like Finnish.
@@lumi7243 Probably that Hungarian language sounds like Finnish, but unfortunately the two languages are not mutually intelligible, like for example Czech (or Slovak) with Polish.
@@LaszloVondracsek That is right, we dont understand each other at all, like we do understand some estonian. I have once visited Hungary, few years ago. I was in train, and then when I looked around, people looked just like we Finns, it was just like in Finland. I was just thinkink, that we have to be somekind relatives. May be not, may be it is just coincidence.
Currently learning Hungarian as my 5th language. Most days I just focus on a couple of things. If I think about how complex it truly is, I want to cry. What it truly is, is a blast! So much fun!
Actually, Hungarian is extremly easy, but you need to forget the IE language system. The fastest person about learning it is only take about 2 months. Althought, if you don't get its logical system, then maybe your entire life will not be enough to learn it.
I’m from Hong Kong and I gotta say you did amazing in your cover for 海闊天空 - I literally won’t be able to tell that you’re not a native from just your voice! It feels nice too when people learn about our culture and language and I hope you have fun doing so as well.
@@attilaosztopanyi9468 True story! :D XD Még ha picit sarkított is! :D Néhány faluba, kisvárosba én sem szívesen mennék pl. ugye Borsodban, még fényes nappal sem. De Miskolc olyan mind a legtöbb nagyobb város, vannak szép, + kevésbé szép részei. Plusz ugye keleti országrész, így a munkalehetőségek is hát..., na. ^^ Én mivel mindig szerettem nagyon pl. bringázni, Diósgyőr, Komlostető-Tapolca, Lilafüred, + maga a Bükk közelsége miatt mindig szerettem, összességében vannak sokkal rosszabb helyek is felnőni...
I am an American and I live in Finland. I've studied eight languages and Finnish is definitely the toughest to master. It's not just the cases - those are pretty consistent, but the vocabulary and constructs are intense. Then add to it all of the dialects. No one actually uses the standard Finnish in every day life. Each region has their own dialect, so it makes it incredibly difficult for a foreigner to assimilate.
@@RobertoCarlos-tn1iqxhosa is surely hard to learn, but Finnish ain't actually an european language. It's finno-ugric. English is basically more related to Hindi than to Finnish.
@@RobertoCarlos-tn1iq formal finnish (which is not a european (germanic) language), is reasonably doable, it's the dialects that even natives have a hard time understanding each other sometimes. We even have a saying for this "Kun savolainen avaa suunsa, vastuu siirtyy kuulijalle", meaning roughly "When someone from the Savo region opens their mouth, the listener is responsible for mistakes" and it's said imitating the Savo region dialect, basically the gist of it is that even natives struggle to understand it, who have not lived in the Savo region of finland.
I have been learning Hungarian for the pastvren years now. Not an easy language, but often very logic by meanings or hiw they can expess a whoke sentence in one single word. That's what i call efficiency Nagyon szeretem ezt a nyelvet!
For the record about the Finnish language, Tolkien was indeed influenced by it in creating Quenya, but in this particular fragment of The Fellowship of the Ring, Haldir spoke to Legolas in Sindarin, which in turn was influenced by Welsh, not Finnish.
A fellow Tolkien fan! Yes, his languages were different and based on those you said. But I find he also mixed in elements of other Euro languages as well.
I'm not at all familiar with Quenya or Sindarin ... but I definitely picked up that what I heard there sounded very Welsh and nothing like Finnish (the latter of which I've been trying to learn for a while now). Thanks for confirming 🙂.
As a native speaker of Polish who is an English teacher as well as a learner of Finnish, I must add that English has very complex grammar as well as spelling and pronunciation. English native speakers should remember that what seems natural to them (articles, phrasal verbs, silent letters, intonation patterns, differences between British, American and other Englishes) is by no means easy to others.
I'm English and learn languages as my job but also as a hobby. I have learned, to varying levels, three of these 'impossible' languages: Finnish, Polish and Hungarian. Finnish took the longest to learn but once you have got beyond the beginner phase it goes quite quickly because more advanced vocabulary is easy to work out. Polish was OK because I'd already studied Russian and Czech at university so the hard parts of Polish grammar were not new to me. Hungarian is very different but it is regular compared to for example Russian so it's a case of getting used to the sentence structures and vocabulary but it's not too bad really. No language is impossible to learn. It takes determination, motivation and time. You don't have to be a genius either. Just hard working. P.S. The hardest Slavonic language I ever tried a bit of was Slovene. I only got up to about A2 level but the grammar is hard.
Hello Mister! May I gently ask how you manage not to mix russian, czech and polish grammar? I kinda speak russian and understand much of polish being czech myself. But I will never speak properly russian without livinig with russians since the grammar is so similar at once but also so different other times. Especially russian language full of irregularities. We have also some but not that many. Anyway, I must say that attempting those languages is heroic attempt! :)
Don't complain about Hungarian vowels. They are clearly defined and consistently spelled. Everybody pronounces them the same way, unlike the English vowels which are crowded together in the middle of the vowel quadrangle and are practically undistiguishable from each other. Additionally every English dialects uses a different set of vowels, which makes English speech one of the most difficult languages to understand. And if this weren't enough, many speakers eliminate half of the vowels or replace them with a schwa.
English... awful and irregular spellings and pronunciation. Sometimes it sounds phonetic, other times it doesn't. I'm glad I learned the language as a child so I don't have to go through this mess as an adult learner.
I have a Russian speaking friend who found English to be highly challenging. She realized it could be mastered through tough thorough thought, though. 😂
Gub---You are correct. English has 5 vowels and 15 variations--certainly problematic! Hungarian has pure representative sound but 18 cases. I have a hard time imagining 18 conditions for nouns/adjectives. German has 4 and Latin 7...but 18? Yikes!
I'm from Hong Kong and I appreciate your affort to learn and to promote Cantonese. I am Cantonese native and I speak 5 languages including Mandarin, Japanese, English and French, so I know why Cantonese is exceptionally difficult, especially the pronunciations.
I guess the hardest language is some obscure Native American, Caucasian or East Asian language. For an official language, with quiet large number of speakers my guess that the hardest is Georgian
I would throw the austronesian languages in there too. Papua New Guinea has an absurd number of languages and learning a lot of them would be insanely difficult.
The hardest languages are those that haven’t been written down for hundreds and hundreds of years. The longer a language evolves without writing, the more complex it becomes; that’s my experience with the languages my family speaks (Chiac, Gàidhlig, Finnish, …) and the ones that I have learned so far.
As a native Hungarian, English was hard for me for the beginning. The Hungarians language and thinking is complicated sometimes overcomplicated and had a lot of synonym just for the word "walk" we use minimum 5 different words in the daily life (or more). If you interesting I left here some meaning of walk in hungarian: jár, megy, járkál, mászkál, slattyog, kullog, ballag, mendegél, bandukol, lépeget, lépdegél, lépdel, cammog, sétál, kutyagol, tipeg, baktat, battyog, poroszkál, gyalogol, totyog, kolbászol, andalog, cselleng, kódorog, lépked, caplat, kóvályog, gyüszmékel, sétálgat, csoszog, lépdes, cirkál, kóricál, talpal, császkál, korzózik, botorkál, jár-kel, lézeng, kószál, lődörög, bóklászik, flangál, kóborog, csatangol, lófrál, ténfereg, csavarog, tekereg, tébolyog, tévelyeg, bolyong, őgyeleg, kujtorog, barangol, kóborol, tántorog, csámborog, sétafikál, vándorol, szédeleg, téblábol, csalinkázik, kóringyál, lébecol, karistol, bódorog, ődöng :)
And here is how Google Translate translates your "walk" list: "walks, goes, walks, crawls, slattyog, clucks, balag, mendegel, bandukol, steps, steps, steps, steps, cammog, walks, doggo, tipeg, baktat, battyog, poroskál, walks, totyog, sausages, andalog, cselleng, coddling, step, caplat, wander, gather, walk, shuffle, stride, cruise, corical, tread, clatter, corroze, stumble, walk, loiter, ramble, ramble, wander, flang, wander, chatter, horsefry, squirm, twist, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he staggers"
These were my thoughts, too. if it's possible for all theses nations (or mine) to learn english, then the reverse should be possible. The most difficult part is to allow a different logical process to lead you to the same meaning as our own language.
Walk, amble, stroll, step out, dawdle, wander, pace, march, ambulate, perambulate, strut, ramble, progress, dilly-dally; English is famous for it's synonyms because it ate so many other languages and yes they all mean slightly different things :-D :-) but it sounds like Finnish might have even more nuance of meaning which must be great!
I presume it's the same in other SOV languages. We explain with verbs, rather than relying heavily on adverbs. Thus, we can often abbreviate the subject.
I'm learning Polish at the moment, and yes, it is very hard. But I'm loving it, it's such a beautiful language. I'm not too worried about learning words, but the pronunciation and certainly the grammar will be a challenge. The goal is B1 within a year.
I am a native Cantonese speaker(so proud lol) who is learning Finnish 😊 I don't know Polish but i know Russian. For me Georgian is the hardest language so far. Nice video as always 👍 Kiitos paljon ! 😺
As a Polish person I don't understand Russian at all, I fail to find too many similarities. However I know that the reason is that because Poland has been under occupation for long periods of time, the language was being spoken only within hidden communities, so it wasn't changing too much while Russian was evolving, therefore for Russians Polish sounds quite "old". Similarly with Czech, it's much more intelligible but sounds much more... modern, if you know what I mean. Funny thing is that I once moved to Croatia and attended Croatian language classes and the language felt oddly similar despite the distance between our countries - and then I learned that Croatia also has been occupied for a couple of centuries and they experienced a similar hibernation of their language that made it in the outcome sound and feel closer to Polish. And some Croatian I ran into could speak Polish ❤️ It was also interesting to spot that our language class was very diverse but almost everyone was from other Slavic countries and the classmates who had the biggest struggles with Croatian were - surprise surprise - Russian and Czech. People whose mother tongue was, as I referred to earlier, more "modern". That was my observation
I studied Finnish for around 6 months and moved to Finland. I’ve been here for a year and 8 months and I still find it hard but I am able to hold a conversation, work, and study at university in Finnish already. Still, I have a lot more to improve. Jos joku haluaa opiskella suomea, se on mahdollista. Pitää olla rohkea oppimaan uutta kieltä.
I was in a choir that included many Poles. We also sang Polish songs from time to time. The Poles always told us how to pronounce something and we then wrote it over the lyrics. 😅 For example: "Dziękuję!" ➡️ "Tschinkuje" (I speak German, so I have no idea whether English speakers can do anything with it)
My South African friend, who speaks Sesotho, told me that one of the coolest things in the world is to stand near a group of people speaking Xhosa....all of that clicking is just fantastic! I was once talking with a woman of Polish descent who lived in Chicago and she told me that she loved living in that city because, among other things, everyone there could pronounce her Polish surname! My grandma's first name was a palindrome: Reber!
At university I studied Finnish for two years, I loved it! I'm Hungarian, so here's a correction: heart is "szív", not "sziz" (which has no meaning at all). We do not have genders either and it's also agglutinative.
Would you say that it was easier for you to learn, as compared to other languages? Was there something in their grammar that made you think: oh, it's like Hungarian, it's easy? Or in their vocabulary?
I can confirm for Hungarian. Even the word 'police', which is easily recognizable in most languages, comes from another dimension: 'rendőrség'. Now fasten your seat belts: 'The police of Hungary', in Hungarian, is 'Magyarország Rendőrsége'. Man, I'd feel powerful to master such a fascinating language.
Hm but on the cars, it is written rendórsėg, hey, i am learning Danish for no reason, if it wasnt Danish, could have been learning Hungarian instead. To me the sound of the language reminds me of having had a wonderful time in this country, the sound is so unique, hogy vagy, vagy turista, sorry left out the correct sign
Actually it's even more interesting than that, because if you take the word for policeman ( or woman same word) which is rendőr, that word in on itself is a portmanteau, because you can break it into the hungarian words of rend (meaning order) and őr (meaning guard), so the word for policeman essentially comes from order guard.
@@corneliaoeltze6967 Yeah that is a different form. The way it works in hungarian is that you have a base word ( in this case rendőr, meaning police man/woman) , then you can modify the meaning of this word by adding certain prefixes or suffixes or even a combination of multiple of them to the base word. For example (using _ to separate different parts): Rendőr - policeman Rendőr_ség - police (institution/station) Rendőr_ség_re - to the police (as in like i go to the police station) Just to name a few (there is a lot of them), also you can even combine them with plurals: Rendőr_ség_ek_re - to the police stations (technically the k is the plural, but to fit in with the vowel harmony you need that extra "e" making it "ek") One of the major difficulty in hungarian at least as far as I heard from foreigners is trying to to understand this system. Especially with verbs, because there the subject, the object, and the tense of a verb is expressed by suffixes, so it can get real confusing real quick.
I am Polish, live in Sweden, and teach English. I also speak Russian and Ukrainian. And You are probably right; my mother-tongue is one of the most difficult languages for an English speaker.
Not quite the same. It's like Spanish and Italian. People who have a shared context (like working together) can definitely communicate with no problem. But if one were explaining something comimplicated the other hand no prior knowledge of there'd likely be problems. But in terms of everyday communication, you're totally right.
Agreed. And I'm grateful beyond words that most of older people spoke to me in Polish and not English when I was little kid. I'm third generation born in the U.S. and I'm the only one who can have a reasonably normal conversation in Polish. Funny thing is that grammar and pronunciation stayed in my brain but vocabulary did not. So I'm the king of circumlocution. My best one is for the hood/bonnet of a car: "The metal door that you open when you want to look at the engine" My cousins laughed for hours at that. But I'm so glad my grandparents and great grandparents filled my brain with Polish birth to five years old.
@@JustbeHappy1122 not at all. It's just because every Ukrainian knows Russian (and Russians don't know Ukrainian) from the Russian side they have no idea how different Ukrainian language is. Only about 40% of words are common. Now it helps during the war: Ukrainians easily pass for Russians but not vice versa. I'm Russian by the way
I've been learning Finnish from my Finnish-born friend. We started during Covid, speaking online. I've learned several languages in my day, just for fun, but I have to say that after a few years of part-time study, I'm still flummoxed by the grammar. So I bought a book on Finnish grammar. We'll see how that works. Kiitos.
English was the impossible one for me as a Hungarian speaker. Took me 10+ years. Now i have two drastically different way of thinking and i feel blessed!
Ha, I speak Hungarian! But also, English, German and Spanish. My main language is German. Tanultál németül is? Magyaroknak valahogy azt könnyü megtanulni.
I lived in Hong Kong for 12 years, Cantonese is a really expressive language which has a lot of sounds that aren't actually words on their own but which are used for various forms of emphasis. My experience was however that the locals show no mercy when yo I get your tones wrong.😅
I worked there as a police officer for 10 years. I had many colleagues who like me came from the UK with zero Cantonese. We all spoke it, to varying degrees. Some only basic phrases, some fluently and a lot like me who were conversationally very competent and certainly able to work in environments where English was absent. The expat community there, in my experience was quite divided between those of us in law enforcement and the rest.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I am grateful that it was included in the video, as many of my teachers and classmates believe that Mandarin was the hardest. Thank you!
YEAAHH!!😍 Greetings from Polish from Poland🇵🇱🇵🇱🎉 I've just came across this video while studying for an English cometition that I'm writing in 2 days. Wish me luck
Finally! I've been waiting ages for Olly to talk about Finnish. I've been studying Finnish on and off for 49 years, and it is absolutely the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. I'm still only at about a B1 level and I can barely understand a word! I have found Spanish, French, Swedish, and even Vietnamese a cakewalk in comparison.
I've been studying it for 8 years, and I feel the same. My reading and writing are still much better than my conversational skills. I'm slowly getting better but it's so hard!
Finnish is really not that hard, it's just different. I think you need to do the same as I did with Polish: just study vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary and forget about the grammar until you can't :)
Have you tried watching news in Finnish? I've done so since I've started (didn't understand anything for a long time, then the weather report, then more and more), there was only 1 radio station to hear abroad, but nowadays everything is available on the internet. UA-cam doesn't allow links, but the public broadcaster of Finland (Yle) has a website and an app. There's even news in simplified Finnish (uutiset selkosuomeksi), and with subtitles.
Wow that's crazy, you'd think that because most Finns speak excellent English, the languages wouldn't be too different. I mean, I've studied both, but since my native language is Estonian, I naturally find Finnish easy to understand. English is in a different position as it's the global lingua franca, I don't even really remember what it was like learning it as a kid.
I am a week into learning Polish. I have a polish partner and we have a little baby on the way in 3 weeks time. We live in Scotland and want to make sure she is bilingual, hopefully it will be easier if both parents can speak Polish to her, even if mine isn't great to start with. I do wonder who will learn first, me or our child 😄
Congratulations! I think Polish gives an advantage to learn other languages. If your daughter knows Polish it would be easier for her to learn Spanish or German. Because Polish has gramatical genders, cases and declination like them. If you know how these work in Polish you can much easier understand how they work in other languages. Now I'm learning German (A2) and I see it's like simplified Polish - less cases, easier declination and no soft consonants.
Be careful if you ever visit the Czech Republic and think "maybe Polish and Czech are similar"... "I am looking for" in Polish sounds like "I want to fuck" in Czech - you're welcome :)
@@justmynickname There is no declension in Romance languages, and there are no articles in Polish. There are few similarities at all. Although maybe from the point of view of the English language it looks that way.
Can I address a certain attitude that you get among those interested in languages but rarely seen among those who actually do speak several languages? Why it is that of all the skills a person can master, languages are regarded as something really special but in an often patronising 'party trick' fashion? If we meet somebody who has in depth knowledge of a science do we gasp and say 'oh, you must be a genius' and then drop a hint that unless they recite some chemical formulas, perform a physics experiment or solve a maths problem in front of us we will actually doubt they really have these skills? I remember thinking this when I graduated in languages from university. "What did you do at university?'. "Arabic". "Ooh, say something in Arabic for me? Can you actually have a conversation with someone in Arabic then?" I used to wonder if I'd said "maths' would they have said "Ooh, do a big sum for me!!" Whilst I understood their admiration for something they curiously saw as more complex than maths or physics (which it most definitely is NOT) I always felt that they wouldn't believe me until I actually said something. How often is anybody mentioning online that they have a degree in astrophysics routinely accused of lying? So please stop seeing language skills as the domain of geniuses. It's a skill like any other. ALTHOUGH this is not helped by 'polyglots' pushing their skills on UA-cam just for attention and fame. Secondly, native speakers of languages rarely spoken by foreigners I have bad news for you. The fact you rarely hear foreigners speak your language has little to do with the perceived complexity of the language. It has to do with usefulness and necessity. Latin is a complex language but people used to be obliged to learn it because it was the international language of education (Newton published his works in Latin). People learned it because they had to. Russian is a complex language but peoples right across the former USSR learned it and used it as a lingua franca because they had to. So if your language is one of those lesser studied languages maybe recognise it's not because it is somehow impossible. And if a foreigner does speak it, no matter how badly, recognise that it shows a high level of interest in your culture. One which is rarely reflected in learners of English who often just see it as a useful tool rather than due to a love of any anglophone countries. And one last thing, speakers of lesser studied languages are occasionally (no, actually frequently) prone to comment that any foreigner speaking their language doesn't sound like a native, has an accent, makes mistakes. Really? Surprise, surprise! Sorry to break it to you but YOU don't sound like a native speaker in English either. And no native speaker would expect you to!
Para nosotros, hablantes de idiomas derivados del Latín, el inglés nos resulta complicado pero estamos obligados a aprenderlo porque ustedes no aprenden otro idioma.
I have to learn Hungarian, Polish and Russian for my career lol. Thankfully I love all 3 of the languages and have high hopes for myself. (Also my favorite languages are Hungarian and Finnish!) so this video was quite a treat for me to watch haha.
I'd like to make an honourable mention in the Finno-Ugric group - Estonian. Estonian is closely related to Finnish. In fact, Estonians tend to understand quite a lot of Finnish even without any translation. While the language has more Germanic and Slavic loans (due to historic reasons), there are still 14 cases, 9 vowels and the word order is mostly free
Yes, actually, knowing one of the both makes the other quite understandable. When I read an Estonian sentence (knowing Finnish), I mostly see what it's about (not always what it exactly says).
Hungarian has so many easy parts: - no genders at all (he = she, his = her, nouns don't have genders either) - only 2 verb tenses, present and past (future is rarely used and expressed with an auxiliary verb) - almost all verbs are conjugated regularly in all tenses and persons (no need to memorize complicated past tenses like 'take', 'took, 'took'; 'give', 'gave', 'given' etc.) - cases are like prepositions in other languages, except they are added after the word (in X = X-ban/ben, in the house = a házban) - you read it as you write it (you can learn to read hungarian in 15 minutes) - pronunciation is easy (maximum 2 consonants are allowed without a connecting vowel and most of the time there is only 1 consonant) - stress is always on the first syllable - plural not needed when specifying the number: 0 ház, 1 ház, 2 ház, sok ház (many), kevés ház (few) - adjectives are not conjugated before nouns: blue = kék, the blue house = a kék ház, in the blue house = a kék házban
As a nativ Hungarian speaker I realize that your are...right! 👍👍🤣🤣But in this case, I wonder why Hungarian is considered a harder (even the hardest) language here in Europe?
I am a Finn, who over the years in Poland learned to master that language at the C2 level, so feeling doubly honoured.Anyways and most importantly thank You very much for the great video :) :)
I was working in Prague and our Czech assistant called often her Polish friend. She was talking Czech an the Polish girl Polish. And they understood each other!
As teenagers my brother and I used to Hungarianize words by pronouncing them with an accent and agglutinating 'ba' to the ends. "Veer goink to see a movie-ba veet our friends-ock". Not sure how this developed, but it used to mildly annoy/amuse Grandma, which made it fun. We grew up with a set of _those_ parents; although fluent in Hungarian, they found it to be far more convenient as a child-proof eavesdropping tool than as a useful skill to pass along to the next generation. It's a typical mentality of many US-born children of immigrants. The grandparents had already learned English, so why go through the hassle of teaching a foreign language to your newborns. Turns out young children are highly adept at picking up languages and all it takes is for at least one parent to consistently speak the second language directly to the child for the child to become bilingual. My brother and I were almost never spoken to directly in Hungarian as children, but when Dad poked his head into the playroom and said "mit csinálsz", we knew exactly what he was asking and how to answer him (in English, of course).
I've been trying to teach myself Hungarian for over 30 years. I assisted a university history professor who was from Budapest, and he used to give me Hungarian dictation. It became very easy because the language is almost completely phonetic, although sometimes I'd get tripped up on words with _ly_ versus _j_ (say, in _ály_ and _áj_ or _ely_ and _ej._ Since then, I bought a book called _Beszéljünk magyarul!_ and a Hungarian-English dictionary, and I've learned about 2,500 words of vocab, so I can communicate in Magyar better than most other English speakers. The subtleties and nuances of the grammar are still locked to me, though.
Partly out of deep respect for Prof Martin L Kovács, who was like a father to me, but mostly _because_ it was hard. Also, I'm part Hungarian through my father's mother, though she never spoke it, just German.
Hungarian here :) Recently I met a young woman in Poland who is learning Hungarian "only because it's the most beautiful language in the world", she said. Interesting that we are in the same language family with Finnish, but when I visited Finland, I couldn't figure out anything at all from what I could read or hear. Not one single word! Although I am pretty good with picking up languages: in the school I learned Russian and both Russian and French in high school, later English in a language school, then through the years I learned German, Swedish and Czech only by living in those countries but no course, and having spent a month or two in Italy and Denmark was enough so that I can understand very basic written or spoken Italian and Danish. Norwegian too, for it is very close to Swedish. From Czech, I can figure out Slovak and a bit of Polish, but the latter is indeed a different kind with all those vowels. (Above these, I sing in another 10+ languages, but I don't speak those at all). My current challenge is Polish, because I will go back there to perform for the third time (and more).
My wife's family immigrated from Hungary after WW2 and she was born here. I had to learn some Hungarian so I could talk to the cats. The cats would just stare blankly at me. My wife says I speak Hungarian with a French accent. I can handle French and even some Russian but Hungarian is beyond me.
You speak better hungarian than I do then. When I speak hungarian to a hungarian cat it does not even look at me, or my direction, or at least move its ear....
The other thing about Hungarian that's easier than most other languages is pronunciation: a letter is always pronounced the same way. So the pronunciation of a word is the sum of the pronunciation of the letters it contains if that makes sense. No tricks, no exceptions, simple as that.
Basically yes, there are only a few exceptions in pronunciation. For example, many Hungarians can't even pronounce the word "bocsájtsd" correctly! A few glasses of good Hungarian wine can help a lot with this! :D
I am Hungarian, and felt very honored that you mention it on the top of the list...still, it shouldn't discourage anyone! It is "just" an isolated language family, requires some playfulness and endurance from anyone who's about to start it. To escape this "isolatedness", after learning English and French I started to crack the code of other alphabets - in 5 years mastered Bulgarian, for a year I'm learning Arabic and just started to learn Mandarin. Gonna stuck to your channel for tips!🎉
My foreign friends are amazed by how Finns can produce words while inhaling. My mom often uses sigh-like phrases "joo-o" or "vai niin" (oh well/is that so), inhaling kind of underlines it :)
@@simonspethmann8086 My Swedish speaking Finnish friends do the same, didn't know there are "inhalers" in Sweden too 😁 Swedish is the 2nd official language in Finland, somewhat influenced by Finnish language.
I am from Poland, I was so surprised when I saw 'Impossible language nr 3'. But I confirm, it's extremely difficult to learn, grammar is extremely complex. I respect people who are trying to learn this language and I always wonder why people do that. It is only used in one country ( which is not attractive from tourism or business perspective). Very interesting video, thanks Olly :)
I think Poland is attractive from both a touristic and a business point of view, you have nice cities and the mountain part is great as well, also your economy is the largest in the eastern half of the EU and certainly the one with the modt potential for growth
I got a bit sad during COVID times, and decided to learn Polish. As it turned out, it was super easy for a Ukrainian to do it. So many commonalities and similar sounds! But you are right - I still don't know why exactly I decided to - just thought it should be cool. It was my language number 7 I tried to learn.
After English and Spanish, Polish is the most common language in Illinois. Chicago has more Polish people than any other city in the world except Warsaw! That includes all the other cities and towns in Poland!
Hi, I am French and I learn finnish. It's hard because it's very different (vocabulary, noun cases...) but not impossible. I really like that it is written as it sounds, for example.
Yay, Finnish!! (I'm going to ask again for a full video on it, please!) I've been learning it for eight years, and it is such a rich, beautiful language. The grammar is definitely a big challenge, but once you start to understand the rules and see the patterns, it becomes much easier to anticipate when or how to change a certain word / to use a particular case. (Also, one other point is that the adjectives take the case of the noun they're referring to.)
In Polish "dź" and "dzi" is complicated, because while "dź" is just a consonant, "dzi" spells the same consonant before a vowel, except when the vowel is "i", in which case "i" is not repeated: dźwig (crane, machine not bird) - dź denotes a single sound chodź! (come!) - dź denotes a single sound, devoiced word-finally dzień (day) - when followed by a vowel, the dź sound is written as dzi dzik (boar) - when followed by i, you don't repeat the i chodzi (walks) - as above
Hungarian here, the word for heart is “szív” not “sziz”, but I guess that just serves as proof of how difficult my language is. Finnish is one of my favourite languages and I plan to learn it to fluency one day, including it’s distant neighbour Estonian! Polish is another intriguing language I have thought of learning although it’s pronunciation is markedly more difficult that the former 2 mentioned languages.
Finnish and Estonian are more closely related to Hungarian than any of the three are to the majority of languages in Europe. So I imagine you would have an easier time with them than Polish, at least?
Well, for Polish, you could just go down the border and learn Croatian, it's complicated enough, grammar is basically same as Polish. And then the regional sub-languages with German, Italian and Turkish words.
@@isaacbruner65 "Finnish and Estonian are more closely related' Really? They say so, but it is just false. Not a single word is even close. heart, tree, head, eye, hand, man, horse, sun, grass finnish: sydän, puu, pää, silmä, käsi, mies, hevonen, aurinko, ruoho estonian: süda, puu, pea, silm, käsi, mees, hobune, päike, rohi Now here comes hungary: szív, fa, fej, szem, kéz, ember, ló, nap, fű :D:D:D
This was a fun video. I have heard Hungarian a lot, as I had acquaintances from Hungary and even visited some of their family in Hungary. But I never managed to learn more than a few words. The Xhosa is the most fascinating language with all the different clicks and rasping sounds, I did hear it a lot when I visited South Africa.
I had been learning Fiinish in my school. It is a very beautiful language, and I find it extremely musical! And now... now I learn Arabic. Why do I keep torturing myself?
I spent a summer with an international group that also had some people from Hungary. What I found strange was that I couldn’t hear when a sentence ended because the voice doesn’t get down.
That is just because - as in every language - speakers tend to be careless. You just got the wrong groupof speakers. Intonation is regarded by many as something unimportant, but if spoken correctly, the end of a sentence should go down in Hungarian. What you heard is a kind of "brain thing", when the speaker can't make up their mind to end the sentence and start a new one. Sorry to say, in my opinion this has to do with intelligence and education.
Polish has very few vowels because Finland stole most of them in the Great Vowel War of 889 AD. Umlauts have been unearthed at archeological sites all throughout Poland, and at one point the Polish government even considered re-incorporating them into the vernacular. However, due to the small number of umlauts recovered, it was felt that there were simply not enough to go around. Therefore this idea, along with the centuries-old umlauts, has been shelved somewhere in a closet in Warsaw.
Limiting ourselves to languages with decent enough learning material available (no native American, no native Australian, no native Amazonian, no Borneo), the languages I'm seriously afraid of are Georgian, Thai, Javanese, Vietnamese, Cantonese (yep) and possibly Mongolian. I'm fairly sure there are more difficult ones, but as already said, I'm limiting myself to language for which learning material is readily available.
With Javanese I assume you’re concerned with the part where you need 3 entire dictionaries of politeness levels to “fully” learn it, but these days many Javanese (like me) can barely speak mid let alone high Javanese. If you were to learn just low Javanese, which is very simple in my opinion, you’d already be able to communicate and “impress locals” really well, honestly!
I'm a native polish speaker and it was super funny hearing people who try to speak my language. Thank you for including polish on the list and best of luck to everyone who is trying to learn it. 😊
Hey, Olly. Since the Tibetan diaspora of the 20th century, lots of Westerners have been attempting by to learn Tibetan-mostly while studying Tibetan Buddhism. Many people have talked about how it’s one of the worlds hardest (least phonetic) writing systems, but few UA-camrs have covered how hard it is to learn because of its verbs. They just work so differently than most European or East Asian languages. You should make a video about it!
One good thing about Finnish, it's is almost completely phonetic; every letter is pronounced, and pronounced the exact same way regardless of surrounding letters (bar a few rare exceptions). There's no such thing as a Finnish spelling bee; as soon as you hear a word, you know how it's spelled, exactly as it sounds.
How will you explain the fact that hundreds of thousands of immigrants have learned to speak it fluently? My 'hood' has e.g. lots of Africans who pick up the language in months. Danish is a rhytmic-metric language where stress and intonation mean everything, partly due to the absense of grammatical inclination.
I immediately thought of Danish, but it wasn't in the video. But then I guess many languages have something difficult to master. I'm Dutch and our ui- and sch-sounds are also challenging for non-native speakers.
As a migrant I learned Danish in 2 years. It is the easiest language I learned, 100 % more logical than english, but pronounciation is very problematic.
@@Kyosuke-han If you belong to.the Fenno - Ugrian language tree, then you would probably have an easier time learning Korean, Japanese, or the Turkic languages. I am Swedish, and Korean sentence structure is a real challenge to me.
I am proud to say I learned Georgian. ქსრთულუ ენა Counting is based on 20s. So 95 is 4 x 30 + 5 + 10 There is a different verb “to have” for animate and inanimate objects. Also adjectives like “old” is different for animate and inanimate objects. It also has a lot of consonant clusters and of course a unique alphabet!
Why in the name of everything that is holy would you wanna learn this fecking language? It's both difficult and utterly useless to a foreigner. თუ გიჟი და მაზოხისტი ხარ თქვი ეხლავე, არ განგსჯი.
Please don't scare people with the terrible Polish spelling 😅 It's different than English, but it's got its rules and we learn them at school. Some sounds are expressed by two letters instead of one, but it's at least pretty accurate, unlike English, where you have to memorize every single word, lol Fun fact - we don't have spelling lessons at school and we hardly ever use spelling letter by letter to tell someone else how an English word is written. I worked at a big office where we used English a lot, and our British colleague was a sort of shocked hearing that the girls, instead of spelling a word, just read it carefully according to the Polish rules, and it perfectly worked 😁
Naaaa,it doesn't scare me....i'm romanian,so i bet if i would live in Poland for a couple of months,i would speak polish fluently. I say this because for every polis word it must be a close word in romanian,as it have a LOT of synonyms from latin ,dacian ,getic,tracian and proto slavic. For example in romanian air can be :aer,cer,vazduh,suflu,vant. Pick your polish or slavic word from the list😄
@@draculakickyourass vazduh sounds like Russian vozduh воздух, and I think we've got related words for breathing. Our "air" is "powietrze", coming from "wiatr" (wind). What are Romanian words for wind?
I'd say it's an overstatement, there are some words and sounds that are pretty similar, there are some words with uncommon sound groups and sometimes one might need to spell their surname out if it's uncommon. I definitely do! I also clearly recall learning to spell in kindergarten and having to go to a logopedist because I had problems saying voiceless and voiced consonants properly.
@@SirithPL But there is no such thing like "spelling bee". We have dyktanda but this is because "u" and "ó", "h" and "ch", "rz" and "ż" sound the same. All the rest is easy to spell and write.
Even though Finnish is not Indo-European, it shares in many ways the same logic of thinking with the Germanic languages. Once you memorize the Finnish words for stuff (which is a next-to-impossible task) and get the hang of the declension system (which is also difficult), the rest will be easy, both pronunciation and the logic. The more remote languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, don't function with the same European logic, making them even harder for a native English speaker.
The Hungarian language is interesting. Not Impassible , but difficult. There is no gender problem in it. 25 years ago, I read a short story (25 pages) featuring two people, Gabi and Viki (nicknames). According to the story, it shows their 3 months of living together. You couldn't guess whether Viki is Viktoria or Viktor. Also, does Gabi use the name Gábor (Gabriel) or Gabriella? There is no She or He, only Ő . (Of course, there is no Her/His either)
Cantonese speaker here - a learning hack I grew up with when learning Cantonese as an overseas born kiddo - Cantopop (or nursery rhymes if it tickles your fancy), and TVB dramas and variety shows. 80's-90's Hong Kong cinema like Stephen Chow and the Young and Dangerous series usually comes with written Cantonese and English subtitles. Aforementioned kiddo now teaches Cantonese on weekends to the next generation of overseas born Cantonese kiddos.
@@letsgowalk it is a matter of cultural pride, which in the context of the diaspora is linked to fluency and usually a lightbulb moment. My lightbulb moment was when I realised countless people automatically assumed "knee how" was a socially appropriate way to respond to "well technically, I'm ethnic Chinese, but-". I don't want our kids to grow up thinking "what I speak is just a dialect" like I did for so long. No. We absolutely have the words to write Cantonese as spoken. Our vocabulary is found in 唐詩宋詞. Cantonese is dying in its native 廣州 and not too good in Hong Kong and Macau, we are our last chance. So I persist.
Most of the things people say are hard about Polish you pick up in like a week, like the weird alphabet, etc. What truly makes it so hard for me is just the pure speed, I can understand everything in writing but when it comes to listening to Poles speak it’s impossible to catch up. English-speaking folk speak fast sometimes, sure, but we have more vowels and they’re of different lengths. Polish grammar, for me, is also pretty easy after a couple months. It’s just that damn speed.
True and unfortunately - the laziness of people that blur the letters together although they shouldn't. Bad pronunciation is also not so uncommon and it even frustrates me, the native. :/ Also, speed is something every learner struggles with. I remember when I couldn't understand a single English sentence, because for me it was so fast. Now, with every language, I just listen, a lot, not being bothered whether I understand or not. The brain will slow it down naturally with time. You can listen to audiobooks, as they are usually read much slower than our normal speech. And thank you for admitting, that Polish grammar and reading is doable. Polish people tend to boast off how difficult Polish language is. I'd say it's not even close to some other languages. Not the easiest, but not the hardest.
Think about a thick Glaswegian accent. Even many English have problems understanding it. An American understands almost nothing, and I guess people not fluent in English would not understand a word.
Wow, Olly! This video is an incredible journey into the world of languages considered impossible. His ability to detail the unique characteristics of each language, from clicks and tones to cases and vowels, is not only educational, but also highlights his linguistic expertise. Keep up the great work, I can't wait to see your future language adventures! 👏🌐✨
The Hungarian alphabet has 14 letters for vowels, but the language uses 15 vowels. The letter 'E' represents the open E and closed E vowels too. For example: the word 'ember' = human has two different vowels, the first E is open, the second is closed. The frequency distribution of vowels in Hungarian speech: 1. a: 21.6 %; 2. e: 17.1 %; 3. o: 10.2 %; 4. i: 10 %; 5. ë: 8.9 %; it is not in the alphabet 6. á: 8.8 %; 7. é: 8.8 %; 8. ö: 3.4 %; 9. u: 2.4 %; 10. ó: 2.1 %; 11. ő: 2.1 %; 12. ü: 1.6 %; 13. í: 1.3 %; 14. ú: 1.2 %; 15. ű: 0.6 %.
As a native speaker I also think that Cantonese “Ng hai hou naan ze” (It's not that difficult). But one feature that was not mentioned is the abundant usage of modal particles. Just using different particles will determine your sentence is a statement, a question, a request... and the emotion you express.
Depends on the definition of "fluent" though. I've seen a lot of 北佬 like me speak what should be intelligible Cantonese but Canto speakers still won't stop laughing, and vice versa. If your standard is low, then it's not that hard, but if your standard is "native level" then Asian languages in general are difficult.
@@LibeliumDragonfly You mean 鬼佬？ If people are laughing, rest assured that they are not hostile (which could have been completely different if you look Chinese and speak with a Mandarin accent). It is never easy to speak like a native in any language, same for English to me.
I hired a teacher to learn Xhosa in my fifties. What a rich and fascinating experience. The clicks have to be regularly practiced if you're used to European consonants, so it's not easy, and I've never got fluent, but a deep dive into the alliterative grammar and Xhosa metaphorical expressions grew my respect for it as a complex and even humorous language.
I lived in central Australia and tried to learn Luritja-Pintubi. What I learnt helped get peoples attention but damn was it hard to get anywhere . I did know a non indigenous dude that was fluent and it was so impressive to witness him interact with the community.he really helped bridge the cultural gap out there
I'm doing battle with Cantonese right now, but I feel Vietnamese deserves a mention ... I've been speaking/studying for 15 years and still feel like I'm at pre-school level, it sounds like it comes from another planet (and is quite closely related to Cantonese)
Only superficially - Cantonese is Sino-Tibetan, whereas Vietnamese is Austro-Asiatic. Vietnamese acquired tone from surrounding Sinitic languages quite early during its development, but in terms of its basic vocabulary, it's still Austro-Asiatic, so it's related to Khmer (even though the two groups have historically been, ahem, less than cordial to each other).
In your experience, does Cantonese seems easier to learn compared to Vietnamese (I am a Vietnamese learner, hoping to study Cantonese in the future - yeah I like to suffer lol)
@@SiKedekI did not realize this fact about Viet language being Austro Asiatic. I heard my first really good rock music in Viet just a few hours ago, the band UnlimiteD. Viet is one of the very few major languages I know Nothing about... Just today I learned that the Dong is the world's smallest currency too!
@@SiKedek I'd say it's more than superficial at this stage in the development. Certainly they originate from two different language families, but belonging to the sinosphere for so long meant Vietnamese developed very strong Chinese traits (i.e. acquiring the tones about 2000 years ago), and quite a lot of common vocab - just to throw out a couple of terms - the words for university and student are almost exactly the same. But perhaps that's why Viet is so tricky, it's picked up the Chinese tones, and some pronunciations, but retained a grammar that I've never seen anything like anywhere.
@@davidl.2243 Hi David, for me Cantonese is a little easier ... but I have studied/spoken Mandarin for more than 20 years, so that is probably part of it. But I do recommend studying Cantonese, it's a lovely language, very sonorous, and of course, Hong Kong, where everyone speaks it, is a fantastic city.
As a Finn, I just love seeing people learning Finnish, the little töksähdykset (=blunders, try to pronounce that monster) that people often get during sentences when they forget a tense are adorable
I am currently learning Finnish. I started when I was studying for a year in Finland. For me spelling was easy. The pronunciation not too hard once I got the ä/a, the r, and the h in coda (like in "nähdä" or "hiihto"). (Some Finns even told me that I didn't sound foreign, and I can't say the same for my English) For the grammar, once you understand that you replace for example "in" with "-ssa/-ssä" or "from" with "-sta/-stä", it's not that hard except for some irregular words. The lexicon however, is really different. For that I really feel how it has nothing to do with French (my native language) or English. The hardest is probably to not speak English with the Finns. Because, when they feel that you are uncertain, some of them immediately switch to English😅 Also, I wonder why Estonian didn't figure in this list with the õ vowel or the fact that it distinguish between short, long and overlong vowels. And it also has a case system similar to the one in Finnish, and that lexicon too. However it doesn't have the vowel harmony (but that can make some words harder to pronounce). I didn't start to learn Estonian (yet). But for me, Estonian looks harder than Finnish.
Fellow Finnish learner here. 😊 I have an Estonian friend who speaks and teaches both, and she thinks Estonian is harder because the grammar isn't as logical as Finnish grammar, but to me, it seems like a lot of it is the same as/ similar to Finnish puhekieli. I haven't looked much into it Estonian, yet, though. I'm waiting until I feel very comfortable with my Finnish before I tackle it.
I’d include Siksikaitsipowahsin (Blackfoot) in the sequel to this. It’s one of the Indigenous languages where I live and it seems outrageously difficult! Or Anishnaabemowin (Ojibwe) or Neheyawewin (Cree).
a great course to use for Anishinaabemowin is Pimsleur! the dialect is ever so slightly different than what we speak in my area, but it's pretty spot on and most of the dialects ARE able to be understood by each other, with a few exceptions of course
Agreed! here in Mexico we have 64 indigenous languages with Nahuatl and Mayan influencing heavily on Spanish in Central and South Mexico, even people form Northern Mexico have trouble with common names and places let alone English people
Sorry, I'm late to the conversation but I just discovered the video and can't resist joining in. The topic brings back wonderful memories of my time being stationed at the Defense Language Institute or DLI for short. This is the military's immersive language school which expects you to be fluent to graduate. Now as a brand-new soldier fresh out of basic training I had no choice as to which language I would learn. We did not know until we arrived at DLI what that language would be. A handful of my fellow soldiers were separated from the man group but most of us were asked what KP is. To which we of course we replied kitchen patrol. Only to be corrected that this was DLI's shorthand for Korean. And thus, I was entered into one of the three languages with the highest failure rate at the school. Russian was another but that was dismissed as the Russian did things purposefully to make your life difficult. Chinese and Korean were the other two. I can safely say that Korean was worse than Chinese due to the fact that not only did we have to learn Korean but also Chinese since so much of the Korean language is Chinese. Korean has all the tonal issues you mentioned. You also had to understand the honor system since you talked completely differently depending on how your status compared to who you were talking to. Most languages you either read left to right (English) or right to Left (Japanese as Manga fans will know) but with Korean you alternate directions (each line you switch the direction you're reading. There is no punctuation or capitals and the words all run together. Yes, Korean has an alphabet, but the Chinese non-alphabet kept popping up. At our orientation we had a class size of about a hundred students (we would be broken into smaller groups of ten for actual learning). We were told to look left and right. Of the three of us only one would graduate. I was not one of the three. I could read, write and comprehend with no difficulty. The listening did me in. Still, I lasted for close to 5 months which amounted to 2 Years of intense college Korean. over thirty years later I can still impress those who don't speak the language and embarrass myself around those who do. It has been handy for telephone scammers as the last thing they are prepared for is their target to be speaking nothing but Korean.
Hi Olly! I'm a Hungarian musician of the older generations. As your video above contains a few details about Hungarian language I admit, yes, that is from the harder ones. But there are elements of which make easier to study Hungarian. We have only 3 or 4 words in the whole area of the language with mute letters. In Hungarian there are much more vowels than in English, but they must be pronounced in the same way in all of the words that contain them, all the time. And as we have no mute letters, if you know the sounds of letters, you can pronounce everything what you read. The grammar is more complicated - but if you have someone to speak with - you can speak the language sooner or later.. 😊 The emphasis is always on the first syllable of the word. We don't have genders in the language. Válasz
I am on a mission to learn czech, which is very similar to polish in its structure and vocabulary. Every time I learn something new I get all sweaty from how complicated it is, but its very rewarding once you learn. I feel that I have conquered a new level of language mastery, which makes other languages seem quite simple. It also shows that nothing is impossible, you just need to give it time and patience.
@@frufruJ hahah yes! Or as an old retired substitute teacher we had in my czech class when I lived in Prague 10 years ago. He came into the classroom and the first thing he said was: "It is better to commit suicide than trying to learn Czech"
As a native hungarian, i am a fluent czech speaker but i have to say its a hard language to master. For me, its easy to understand but hard to pronounce correctly. Its a long journey to master any language, but as i speak english quite well, for me, learning spanish is definitely easyer than learning czech. But as i became fluent in czech (albeit far from perfect), i realized that i understand slovak, and some of polish, serbian, croatian, even russian languages.
@@zsoltpapp3363 I know, I find it the same. But the big switch for me was shifting focus from acheiving mastery to enjoying the learning process. Every time I learn someting new I know that I get a little more proficient, even though I'm far from mastery. The famous 80/20 rule says that 20% of the words make up 80% of the content, so you don't need to know everything for it to be useful.
@hugoingelhammar6163: Hi, I'm Czech born in Prague. For me is Czech the easiest language on the world. I learned it to fluent level between 1st and 3rd year of my life. 😀 😀 I learned German, English, Norwegian and Finnish too. And like was writen: If you learn one language of the same group, you begin understand others too. So I found, that Finnish is so different from other european languages, that I can better understand the bilingual signs in southern Finland in Swedish (only from my Norwegian and German). I mean, Finnish grammar is not so difficult for me, because czech grammar is sooooo complicated, that almost nothing surprises me anymore, but Finnish vocabulary is like anything from the other universe, not from Earth. If you want gratis to chat with a native Czech, just write. 🙂
In the mid-1990s I was an English teacher in Romania. The town I lived in, though, was more than 90% ethnic Hungarians. I tried learning Hungarian, and very quickly I gave up!
As a Hungarian it was nice to be mentioned in a video like this. And yes our language is an interesting one. Don't worry about messing things up (word ending, grammar rules and such), sometimes even us native speakers get tangled up in the different rules and such.😂
Want some easier languages instead? 👉🏼 ua-cam.com/video/jXfj5BKdZCA/v-deo.html
I always liked it when I look at something and it says save something crazy like 6400 dollars and then I realized that there was no chance at all that I was even going to spend that amount of money to buy it in the first place.
I still like your short stories but
Rock on Clozemaster
Busuu
Duolingo
Lingo pie
Lirica
Low rate lifetime subscription rule!
Babadum is also fun
Is there some kind of test to find out which level to buy?
Does Storylearning include traditional Chinese or only simplified Chinese?
At 20:39 you happened to misspell "Szív" (heart) as "Sziz".
Is your Norwegian course launching soon? I presume it won't be until after the sale but I'm still excited to see it!
As a Pole, I feel honored that my language is included in this film. And I wish good luck to people who are trying to learn Polish!
it doesn't sound that hard from czech side! even i actually don't speak polish I do understand a lot and it's not that hard for me to mimic your lovely cute and funny language :) pozdrowienia do polske! :D
@@ondrejlukas4727 actually Czech is not hard for me too! Our languages are so similar and many words in them are similar. I'm learning Czech and I know some phrases. But Polish has many tenses, variations, etc. and for people who are(for example) from UK my language is hard to learn. Sometimes even I make mistakes😭
@@abndlove same here, same here :) only what confuses me is that sometimes your RZ sounds exactly like Ř, but other time its more like ŘŽ RZż :) btw, did you know that probably only other language with such sound is gaelic? :)
I tried, then I switched to Mandarin 7 yrs ago and now I’m quite fluent. Way easier…. 😛
@@losmosquitos1108 No way! :D
As a Hungarian the most impossible language for me is any other language.
This is a language used by aliens.
@@natural76 I feel alienated.
Good answer!
@@natural76maybe YOU are an alien??? Or just lack all language abilities?
@@thombaz Channel you inner Kató Lomb
I guess i was so lucky to be born in Transylvania,when i was 18 i spoke 6 languages.The first 14 years of my life i study hungarian,romanian,french,russian, then in high school, english and italian.
piri--- Touché Piri!...Sure beats my mere 3 languages! As a Linguistics major, I've looked at the syntax and grammar of many tongues. I know a bit of my grandmother's crazy Magyarul--- just enough to get me in trouble!!!
You must be very talented, though it helps to acquire few languages naturally like in Transylvania, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands where everyone is naturally at least trilingual. If you were born in China you would also naturally learn Chinese. I am Polish but my first language is English so I am naturally bilingual. I also speak French and Russian. Knowing Latin as I can undeerstand Italian and Spanish quite well but I do not speak it. Congratulations to you, you are very lucky
Why not Turkish?😂
@@elwiraludwikowska9576 Not really. If you know 2 languages it’s easy to learn 3rd or forth.
@@greekwarrior5373geia gyro megalo pe~ baba
I learned Finnish. I lived in Finland for eight years. It definitely required effort as there were no classes. But I had the advantage of coworkers (other language teachers) who had permission to correct my Finnish with explanations for 7+ years. 40 years later my wife and I still use it as a secret language in public.
Sounds like you learned in openess and humility, a benefit to any language learner! 👍
Swedish gypsies does the same thing. Most of them are related to Finnish gypsies so they learn to speak Finnish. So bewere if you travel to Sweden at least gypsies and Finns that are living there or traveling there will understand your secrets 😁. I noticed this as i were young and traveled often from Finland to Sweden, mostly to Stockholm, but same thing when you cross the border from Tornio to Haparanda. Of course generally people at the crossing areas speak both laguages in both sides of the border.
Also the differences in written language and spoken language might be quite different. And of course there is differences even in spoken language in different areas in Finland. Might be that people in neibourgh city or village have them own style so that propably makes finnish even more difficult to learn.
For example: "Now i will go to the sauna" is "Nyt minä menen saunaan". So nobody actually say so. Rather "Mä meen nyt saunaan" or just simply "Meen saunaan". Or stronger accent "Nymmie mään saunaa". There are propapably at least dosen ways to say it. Even some times we have to think a while what the heck someone is speaking and even we don´t always understand the differences.
I moved from my home city Kokkola to Tampere. At first everyone noticed for my speach that i had moved there from some other area. Sometimes still after six years of living here some people notice differences if i use some other word for impression as locals does. Locals also have difference as how the younger generation speaks as how the older speaks. I think that social media have the changed the way more similar in whole country. There is good and bad influences at that.
Sadly, even Finnish is not a safe secret language. Once my wife and I stopped at a roadside cafe in Germany. We were speaking English as my wife is British when a German couple from the adjoining table suddenly enquired whether we were from Finland. My accent had given us away. Then they started speaking in Finnish. Turned out they had spent their vacations in Finland for a generation or more...
My mother was born in Finland and we had Finnish relatives nearby. Over the generations, the language evolved into Finglish. It is a badass language. For instance to say "I love you in Finnish it's : "Minä rakastan sinua". The word rakastan is pronounced with a heavy roll on the r. and a vary hard k.
My kids and I speak Finnish when abroad just to minimize eavesdropping in public. In Warsaw recently I made the mistake of speaking Finnish to the staff in a touristy bar. It was quite funny how wide eyed they were when asking what the heck that was. They were native Poles (bloody hard language), lots of Asian tourists chattering away, they probably hear a fair bit of Russian and Hungarian too, but only Finnish provoked a "Good lord, WHAT was that!!!"
There is the legend of Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz, Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody. Greetings from Hungary!
The most fun part is that for basically any Polish native speaker this is a very easy to speak.
@@sebm8511
Partly.
In a Polish comedy film, How I Unleashed World War II ("Jak rozpętałem II wojnę światową" in Polish), the hero, Franek Dolas is captured by the German army and is later questioned. To prank them, he purposely uses a fake name to confuse them.
Officer: "First and last name?"
Franek Dolas: "Brzęczyszczykiewicz, Grzegorz. Brzęczyszczykiewicz."
Officer: "Shut up! Hans! Hans."
Hans, a typist : "Yes, sir?"
Officer (to Dolas): "Please go to the typing machine."
Hans: "First and last name?"
Dolas: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz"
Hans: "How is that possible?”
after a while, when poor-poor Hansi finally were able to type the name, he ask Dolas:
„Born where?"
Dolas: "Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody"
Hans: Whaaat?
You should have seen the face of poor Hans!
And the legendary hero of Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz had born!
@@sebm8511 "These words are fictional ones." Well, The real ones are cool enough. Not sure if you are Polish speaker or not (I am), the following is mostly for benefit of non-Polish speakers:
Real words: Więckowski (my buddy from high school), Krzyszkowiak (Polish track-n-field I think), Krzyrzewski (USA collegial coach of Polsih origin), Kasperczak (Polish soccer player), trzcina (reed), sprawdzić (to check), tnąć (to cut) and more.
Some of them only appear to be difficult: "rz" and "cz" are diagraphs corresponding to English "zh" (or "sh") and "ch", so Kasperczak would be Kasperchak.
Some actually are difficult for speakers of many languages, like trzcina (tshcheena) or sprawdzić: spravjeetch, but requires palatalization of "j" and "tch".
The alphabet is (mostly) phonetic (while English is mostly NOT), there were no significant vowels shifts in Polish language and if anything consonants get simpler, listen to Old-Church-Slavonic to appreciate how bad it could be!).
But what remains on phonology is difficult enough: dotknąć (to touch), yes, three consonants and the "k" has to be there (because of dotnąć: to cut to).
Gřegoř Břentěštikevič in czech (rz=ř, cz=č, sz=š easy). Nechci tady machrovat ,ale myslím si, že čeština je ještě těžší než polština.
@@tomasnovotny2740Far from it. Czech phonetics is quite easy in comparison with Polish phonetics; so is Czech grammar. After spending 2 weeks in Prague, I could speak basic Czech (not without making mistakes, of course), but after having spent 2 weeks in Warsaw I could utter several words and some greeting phrases only. And believe me, I'm quite gifted as far as foreign languages are concerned 😃
I'm a bilingual English-Spanish speaker who's learning Hungarian, and I am not giving up.
You are very clever and I wish you good luck with your studies! After a while, when you already understand the Hungarian language, you will see that this language is very expressive! Very subtle, barely noticeable, nuanced differences in words reveal a lot! For example, we have a poem that cannot be translated into other languages! Our word "walk" has about forty forms, and each of them means a different situation, a different person, animal, mood, or emotion.
If you are interested, just write and I will gladly send it to you! ;-)
Best regards ;-)
@@palilaciHi there! I'm from Argentina and learning Hungarian as well. I'll be moving to Budapest next month. Do you have any recommendations for other cities or towns outside Budapest that you would suggest visiting? And is there any advice you’d give for living in Budapest or Hungary in general? Thanks a lot!
Remélem szép sikereket sikerül elérned a gyönyörű nyelvünkkel!
Sok sikert!
YOO SAME!!! Azt tökéletes, hogy úgy vagyok(angol-spanyol beszélők vagyunk)
I learned Hungarian from zero when I was 28. I'm 60 now and haven't used it since I was about 33. I really haven't had much opportunity since leaving Budapest after Art Studies. I'm now reviewing it and it isn't totally gone. I guess I loved it and I still do. I think that was the key for me learning it and remembering it. It lives in my soul. But it is damned hard. No question about it.
Minden tudás érték. Remélem lessz alkalmad hasznosítani.
If you speak 50% Hungarian, you already a genius.
Hogy vagy muki?
Használja csak bátran minden felületen!
Once in Portugal me and my wife were talking in a café (we are Hungarians). Then a gentleman from a distant table approached us and asked if we were Finnish. He was fluent in it and said from a fair distance our talking sounded like Finnish.
I am a Finn, and even I have couple of times thought that I heard finnish, and then by closer hearing it was hungarian language.
Hungarian is in the same family tree as finnish.
@@LuciaSims745 Yes, finno-ugric.
@@lumi7243 Probably that Hungarian language sounds like Finnish, but unfortunately the two languages are not mutually intelligible, like for example Czech (or Slovak) with Polish.
@@LaszloVondracsek That is right, we dont understand each other at all, like we do understand some estonian. I have once visited Hungary, few years ago. I was in train, and then when I looked around, people looked just like we Finns, it was just like in Finland. I was just thinkink, that we have to be somekind relatives. May be not, may be it is just coincidence.
Currently learning Hungarian as my 5th language. Most days I just focus on a couple of things. If I think about how complex it truly is, I want to cry. What it truly is, is a blast! So much fun!
what are first four?
@@macbird-lt8de English, French, German, Italian.
@@Sopranistineberhard lol too easy
As a Hungarian, I have to say, minden tiszteletem a tiéd!!! ♥️
Actually, Hungarian is extremly easy, but you need to forget the IE language system. The fastest person about learning it is only take about 2 months. Althought, if you don't get its logical system, then maybe your entire life will not be enough to learn it.
I’m from Hong Kong and I gotta say you did amazing in your cover for 海闊天空 - I literally won’t be able to tell that you’re not a native from just your voice! It feels nice too when people learn about our culture and language and I hope you have fun doing so as well.
Could you tell me the song name in English, please? I really liked it, but if you can't, that's fine.
@@raabix_the_pineapple it's "海闊天空" which he already mentioned. You can just copy and paste for searching.
@@raabix_the_pineappleit is 'Alive sea and sky' probably [dont know what the 活 in 门 is supposed to be but the 1st means live]
For me I do speak Cantense but it sounds different from the one featured in the video
@@iceefaery574 Why didn't you just search for the title for this person, then let them know what it is? You seem to have a better grasp on things.
I survived being a high school exchange student to Miskolc, Hungary. 🇭🇺 I'm not fluent, but it will forever have a special place in my heart.
What is impressive to survive is not the hungarian language, but Miskolc.
@@attilaosztopanyi9468Truee😂
@@attilaosztopanyi9468 True story! :D XD Még ha picit sarkított is! :D Néhány faluba, kisvárosba én sem szívesen mennék pl. ugye Borsodban, még fényes nappal sem. De Miskolc olyan mind a legtöbb nagyobb város, vannak szép, + kevésbé szép részei. Plusz ugye keleti országrész, így a munkalehetőségek is hát..., na. ^^ Én mivel mindig szerettem nagyon pl. bringázni, Diósgyőr, Komlostető-Tapolca, Lilafüred, + maga a Bükk közelsége miatt mindig szerettem, összességében vannak sokkal rosszabb helyek is felnőni...
Szuper, örömmel olvastam! :)
@@HeyJoeHUN81-PCRPGCommunityamúgy szerintem Magyarország kevésbé tagolható kelet-nyugatra mindsem észak-délre.
Észak: Székesfehérvár, Budapest Debrecen, Miskolc, Sopron, Győr, Veszprém (hegyek, folyók, tavak) Északi khg, dunántúlikhg, soproni hegyvidék.
Dél :Szeged, Pécs, Mohács Nagykanizsa (síkság, erdők, patakok) Alföld+Zala, Somogy, Baranya
I am an American and I live in Finland. I've studied eight languages and Finnish is definitely the toughest to master. It's not just the cases - those are pretty consistent, but the vocabulary and constructs are intense. Then add to it all of the dialects. No one actually uses the standard Finnish in every day life. Each region has their own dialect, so it makes it incredibly difficult for a foreigner to assimilate.
guess you didn't study xhosa. it's definitely the hardest. european languages are much easier.
@@RobertoCarlos-tn1iqxhosa is surely hard to learn, but Finnish ain't actually an european language. It's finno-ugric. English is basically more related to Hindi than to Finnish.
Norwegian is as bad. Reading it is easy but understanding the spoken word is terrible ; so many dialects
You don't have to learn dialects. But they can be hard to understand
@@RobertoCarlos-tn1iq formal finnish (which is not a european (germanic) language), is reasonably doable, it's the dialects that even natives have a hard time understanding each other sometimes. We even have a saying for this "Kun savolainen avaa suunsa, vastuu siirtyy kuulijalle", meaning roughly "When someone from the Savo region opens their mouth, the listener is responsible for mistakes" and it's said imitating the Savo region dialect, basically the gist of it is that even natives struggle to understand it, who have not lived in the Savo region of finland.
I have been learning Hungarian for the pastvren years now. Not an easy language, but often very logic by meanings or hiw they can expess a whoke sentence in one single word. That's what i call efficiency
Nagyon szeretem ezt a nyelvet!
Nagyon szépen köszönjük! Örülök, hogy találtál benne logikát (mert tényleg van benne) és igen kompakt nyelv. Szabadságot ad a gondolkodáshoz.
yeah, 'cause hungarians words are as long as an entire sentence, agglutinative languages can go crazy at times. (half joking)
@@zspe6465 Igen, jol mondta, a magyar nyelv szabadsagot ad a gondolkodashoz!👍👍
For the record about the Finnish language, Tolkien was indeed influenced by it in creating Quenya, but in this particular fragment of The Fellowship of the Ring, Haldir spoke to Legolas in Sindarin, which in turn was influenced by Welsh, not Finnish.
A fellow Tolkien fan! Yes, his languages were different and based on those you said. But I find he also mixed in elements of other Euro languages as well.
Oh good, someone commented that for me 😄
Came here to say that! In the movie, you can hear Quenya when Saruman is casting a spell to cause an avalanche on the pass of Caradhras.
of the 200 official languages in 192 countries of the world, Indonesian is the easiest language #( change my mind)
I'm not at all familiar with Quenya or Sindarin ... but I definitely picked up that what I heard there sounded very Welsh and nothing like Finnish (the latter of which I've been trying to learn for a while now). Thanks for confirming 🙂.
As a native speaker of Polish who is an English teacher as well as a learner of Finnish, I must add that English has very complex grammar as well as spelling and pronunciation. English native speakers should remember that what seems natural to them (articles, phrasal verbs, silent letters, intonation patterns, differences between British, American and other Englishes) is by no means easy to others.
So true. English is a really difficult language on a higher level.
I'm English and learn languages as my job but also as a hobby. I have learned, to varying levels, three of these 'impossible' languages: Finnish, Polish and Hungarian. Finnish took the longest to learn but once you have got beyond the beginner phase it goes quite quickly because more advanced vocabulary is easy to work out.
Polish was OK because I'd already studied Russian and Czech at university so the hard parts of Polish grammar were not new to me.
Hungarian is very different but it is regular compared to for example Russian so it's a case of getting used to the sentence structures and vocabulary but it's not too bad really.
No language is impossible to learn. It takes determination, motivation and time. You don't have to be a genius either. Just hard working.
P.S. The hardest Slavonic language I ever tried a bit of was Slovene. I only got up to about A2 level but the grammar is hard.
Wow, is that even possible? That's really impressive. Congratulations
@@AJ-fo2pl It depends how much he speaks these languages. These are very difficult ones each takes ages to learn it.
Arvostan
^NATO needs this person^
Hello Mister! May I gently ask how you manage not to mix russian, czech and polish grammar? I kinda speak russian and understand much of polish being czech myself. But I will never speak properly russian without livinig with russians since the grammar is so similar at once but also so different other times. Especially russian language full of irregularities. We have also some but not that many.
Anyway, I must say that attempting those languages is heroic attempt! :)
Don't complain about Hungarian vowels. They are clearly defined and consistently spelled. Everybody pronounces them the same way, unlike the English vowels which are crowded together in the middle of the vowel quadrangle and are practically undistiguishable from each other. Additionally every English dialects uses a different set of vowels, which makes English speech one of the most difficult languages to understand. And if this weren't enough, many speakers eliminate half of the vowels or replace them with a schwa.
@@jmwild22 of course I speak about sounds. Vowels are sounds, vowel letters er signs. It should be clear from the context.
English... awful and irregular spellings and pronunciation. Sometimes it sounds phonetic, other times it doesn't. I'm glad I learned the language as a child so I don't have to go through this mess as an adult learner.
I have a Russian speaking friend who found English to be highly challenging. She realized it could be mastered through tough thorough thought, though. 😂
@@exemplary_vegetable ahah love it.
Gub---You are correct. English has 5 vowels and 15 variations--certainly problematic! Hungarian has pure representative sound but 18 cases. I have a hard time imagining 18 conditions for nouns/adjectives. German has 4 and Latin 7...but 18? Yikes!
I'm from Hong Kong and I appreciate your affort to learn and to promote Cantonese. I am Cantonese native and I speak 5 languages including Mandarin, Japanese, English and French, so I know why Cantonese is exceptionally difficult, especially the pronunciations.
I guess the hardest language is some obscure Native American, Caucasian or East Asian language. For an official language, with quiet large number of speakers my guess that the hardest is Georgian
I would throw the austronesian languages in there too. Papua New Guinea has an absurd number of languages and learning a lot of them would be insanely difficult.
Plus some sign languages when they are supressed in the local deaf communities.
The hardest languages are those that haven’t been written down for hundreds and hundreds of years. The longer a language evolves without writing, the more complex it becomes; that’s my experience with the languages my family speaks (Chiac, Gàidhlig, Finnish, …) and the ones that I have learned so far.
I’ve looked into Georgian and omg just looking at the alphabet stresses me out
The alphabet is the easiest part of this language. Once you remember 33 letters you can read easily@@isaac_owens9110
As a native Hungarian, English was hard for me for the beginning. The Hungarians language and thinking is complicated sometimes overcomplicated and had a lot of synonym just for the word "walk" we use minimum 5 different words in the daily life (or more). If you interesting I left here some meaning of walk in hungarian: jár, megy, járkál, mászkál, slattyog, kullog, ballag, mendegél, bandukol, lépeget, lépdegél, lépdel, cammog, sétál, kutyagol, tipeg, baktat, battyog, poroszkál, gyalogol, totyog, kolbászol, andalog, cselleng, kódorog, lépked, caplat, kóvályog, gyüszmékel, sétálgat, csoszog, lépdes, cirkál, kóricál, talpal, császkál, korzózik, botorkál, jár-kel, lézeng, kószál, lődörög, bóklászik, flangál, kóborog, csatangol, lófrál, ténfereg, csavarog, tekereg, tébolyog, tévelyeg, bolyong, őgyeleg, kujtorog, barangol, kóborol, tántorog, csámborog, sétafikál, vándorol, szédeleg, téblábol, csalinkázik, kóringyál, lébecol, karistol, bódorog, ődöng :)
Ez igy igaz 69 féle variáció!😂
And here is how Google Translate translates your "walk" list: "walks, goes, walks, crawls, slattyog, clucks, balag, mendegel, bandukol, steps, steps, steps, steps, cammog, walks, doggo, tipeg, baktat, battyog, poroskál, walks, totyog, sausages, andalog, cselleng, coddling, step, caplat, wander, gather, walk, shuffle, stride, cruise, corical, tread, clatter, corroze, stumble, walk, loiter, ramble, ramble, wander, flang, wander, chatter, horsefry, squirm, twist, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he wanders, he staggers"
These were my thoughts, too. if it's possible for all theses nations (or mine) to learn english, then the reverse should be possible. The most difficult part is to allow a different logical process to lead you to the same meaning as our own language.
Walk, amble, stroll, step out, dawdle, wander, pace, march, ambulate, perambulate, strut, ramble, progress, dilly-dally; English is famous for it's synonyms because it ate so many other languages and yes they all mean slightly different things :-D :-) but it sounds like Finnish might have even more nuance of meaning which must be great!
I presume it's the same in other SOV languages. We explain with verbs, rather than relying heavily on adverbs. Thus, we can often abbreviate the subject.
The way you talk about Cantonese makes me feel so proud. Your singing 海闊天空 is so beautiful. 差啲就流下男兒淚
I'm learning Polish at the moment, and yes, it is very hard. But I'm loving it, it's such a beautiful language. I'm not too worried about learning words, but the pronunciation and certainly the grammar will be a challenge. The goal is B1 within a year.
Życzę sukcesów.
Trzymam za Ciebie!
Powodzenia!
Powodzenia!
🇵🇱🤍❤️🦅
Serdecznie pozdrawiam! 🙂
I am a native Cantonese speaker(so proud lol) who is learning Finnish 😊 I don't know Polish but i know Russian. For me Georgian is the hardest language so far.
Nice video as always 👍 Kiitos paljon ! 😺
As a Polish person I don't understand Russian at all, I fail to find too many similarities. However I know that the reason is that because Poland has been under occupation for long periods of time, the language was being spoken only within hidden communities, so it wasn't changing too much while Russian was evolving, therefore for Russians Polish sounds quite "old". Similarly with Czech, it's much more intelligible but sounds much more... modern, if you know what I mean. Funny thing is that I once moved to Croatia and attended Croatian language classes and the language felt oddly similar despite the distance between our countries - and then I learned that Croatia also has been occupied for a couple of centuries and they experienced a similar hibernation of their language that made it in the outcome sound and feel closer to Polish. And some Croatian I ran into could speak Polish ❤️ It was also interesting to spot that our language class was very diverse but almost everyone was from other Slavic countries and the classmates who had the biggest struggles with Croatian were - surprise surprise - Russian and Czech. People whose mother tongue was, as I referred to earlier, more "modern". That was my observation
Wow you learned finnish? Thats so cool.
Говорят, поляки перевели Камасутру на польский. Получилось забавно, но опять про оккупацию.
@@MrEstranged 😂 это точно)
I studied Finnish for around 6 months and moved to Finland. I’ve been here for a year and 8 months and I still find it hard but I am able to hold a conversation, work, and study at university in Finnish already. Still, I have a lot more to improve.
Jos joku haluaa opiskella suomea, se on mahdollista. Pitää olla rohkea oppimaan uutta kieltä.
I was in a choir that included many Poles. We also sang Polish songs from time to time. The Poles always told us how to pronounce something and we then wrote it over the lyrics. 😅 For example: "Dziękuję!" ➡️ "Tschinkuje" (I speak German, so I have no idea whether English speakers can do anything with it)
I'm Hungarian and I know how difficult my mother tongue is but, believe me, it's really worth the effort to learn it because it's beautiful. 😊
"Mother language" Pozdrawiam z Polski 😉
Polish is easy. I could speak it by the time I was three and to tell you the truth I wasn't applying myself the first year.
🤣
I think you did
My South African friend, who speaks Sesotho, told me that one of the coolest things in the world is to stand near a group of people speaking Xhosa....all of that clicking is just fantastic!
I was once talking with a woman of Polish descent who lived in Chicago and she told me that she loved living in that city because, among other things, everyone there could pronounce her Polish surname!
My grandma's first name was a palindrome: Reber!
At university I studied Finnish for two years, I loved it! I'm Hungarian, so here's a correction: heart is "szív", not "sziz" (which has no meaning at all). We do not have genders either and it's also agglutinative.
Would you say that it was easier for you to learn, as compared to other languages? Was there something in their grammar that made you think: oh, it's like Hungarian, it's easy? Or in their vocabulary?
I’m Estonian and we don’t have any genders as well.
Do not try to learn finnish, it is impossible for humans. I have lived in Finland all my life. 😊
@@Kyosuke-han Yes, thank you. I live in Finland.
I can confirm for Hungarian.
Even the word 'police', which is easily recognizable in most languages, comes from another dimension: 'rendőrség'.
Now fasten your seat belts: 'The police of Hungary', in Hungarian, is 'Magyarország Rendőrsége'.
Man, I'd feel powerful to master such a fascinating language.
I enjoy learning Hungarian. Other languages seem boring to me.
Hm but on the cars, it is written rendórsėg, hey, i am learning Danish for no reason, if it wasnt Danish, could have been learning Hungarian instead. To me the sound of the language reminds me of having had a wonderful time in this country, the sound is so unique, hogy vagy, vagy turista, sorry left out the correct sign
Actually it's even more interesting than that, because if you take the word for policeman ( or woman same word) which is rendőr, that word in on itself is a portmanteau, because you can break it into the hungarian words of rend (meaning order) and őr (meaning guard), so the word for policeman essentially comes from order guard.
@@corneliaoeltze6967 Yeah that is a different form. The way it works in hungarian is that you have a base word ( in this case rendőr, meaning police man/woman) , then you can modify the meaning of this word by adding certain prefixes or suffixes or even a combination of multiple of them to the base word. For example (using _ to separate different parts):
Rendőr - policeman
Rendőr_ség - police (institution/station)
Rendőr_ség_re - to the police (as in like i go to the police station)
Just to name a few (there is a lot of them), also you can even combine them with plurals:
Rendőr_ség_ek_re - to the police stations (technically the k is the plural, but to fit in with the vowel harmony you need that extra "e" making it "ek")
One of the major difficulty in hungarian at least as far as I heard from foreigners is trying to to understand this system. Especially with verbs, because there the subject, the object, and the tense of a verb is expressed by suffixes, so it can get real confusing real quick.
I am Polish, live in Sweden, and teach English. I also speak Russian and Ukrainian. And You are probably right; my mother-tongue is one of the most difficult languages for an English speaker.
But russian and ukranien is the same...I heard in work they can speak with each other...😂
Not quite the same. It's like Spanish and Italian. People who have a shared context (like working together) can definitely communicate with no problem. But if one were explaining something comimplicated the other hand no prior knowledge of there'd likely be problems. But in terms of everyday communication, you're totally right.
Agreed. And I'm grateful beyond words that most of older people spoke to me in Polish and not English when I was little kid. I'm third generation born in the U.S. and I'm the only one who can have a reasonably normal conversation in Polish.
Funny thing is that grammar and pronunciation stayed in my brain but vocabulary did not. So I'm the king of circumlocution. My best one is for the hood/bonnet of a car:
"The metal door that you open when you want to look at the engine"
My cousins laughed for hours at that. But I'm so glad my grandparents and great grandparents filled my brain with Polish birth to five years old.
@@JustbeHappy1122 not at all. It's just because every Ukrainian knows Russian (and Russians don't know Ukrainian) from the Russian side they have no idea how different Ukrainian language is. Only about 40% of words are common. Now it helps during the war: Ukrainians easily pass for Russians but not vice versa. I'm Russian by the way
I've been learning Finnish from my Finnish-born friend. We started during Covid, speaking online. I've learned several languages in my day, just for fun, but I have to say that after a few years of part-time study, I'm still flummoxed by the grammar. So I bought a book on Finnish grammar. We'll see how that works. Kiitos.
English was the impossible one for me as a Hungarian speaker. Took me 10+ years. Now i have two drastically different way of thinking and i feel blessed!
Ha, I speak Hungarian! But also, English, German and Spanish. My main language is German.
Tanultál németül is? Magyaroknak valahogy azt könnyü megtanulni.
I lived in Hong Kong for 12 years, Cantonese is a really expressive language which has a lot of sounds that aren't actually words on their own but which are used for various forms of emphasis. My experience was however that the locals show no mercy when yo I get your tones wrong.😅
I worked there as a police officer for 10 years. I had many colleagues who like me came from the UK with zero Cantonese. We all spoke it, to varying degrees. Some only basic phrases, some fluently and a lot like me who were conversationally very competent and certainly able to work in environments where English was absent. The expat community there, in my experience was quite divided between those of us in law enforcement and the rest.
come to me, Cantonese native speaker in Hong Kong
ai ya!
An expression that can convey so many things. Anger, delight, amazement, disbelief and many more 🙂@@skipperson4077
Diu lei Lo Mo hum Ka chan
As a native Cantonese speaker, I am grateful that it was included in the video, as many of my teachers and classmates believe that Mandarin was the hardest. Thank you!
YEAAHH!!😍 Greetings from Polish from Poland🇵🇱🇵🇱🎉
I've just came across this video while studying for an English cometition that I'm writing in 2 days. Wish me luck
Finally! I've been waiting ages for Olly to talk about Finnish. I've been studying Finnish on and off for 49 years, and it is absolutely the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. I'm still only at about a B1 level and I can barely understand a word! I have found Spanish, French, Swedish, and even Vietnamese a cakewalk in comparison.
I've been studying it for 8 years, and I feel the same. My reading and writing are still much better than my conversational skills. I'm slowly getting better but it's so hard!
Finnish is really not that hard, it's just different. I think you need to do the same as I did with Polish: just study vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary and forget about the grammar until you can't :)
Have you tried watching news in Finnish? I've done so since I've started (didn't understand anything for a long time, then the weather report, then more and more), there was only 1 radio station to hear abroad, but nowadays everything is available on the internet. UA-cam doesn't allow links, but the public broadcaster of Finland (Yle) has a website and an app. There's even news in simplified Finnish (uutiset selkosuomeksi), and with subtitles.
Wow that's crazy, you'd think that because most Finns speak excellent English, the languages wouldn't be too different. I mean, I've studied both, but since my native language is Estonian, I naturally find Finnish easy to understand. English is in a different position as it's the global lingua franca, I don't even really remember what it was like learning it as a kid.
It isnt hard ive been speaking it 17 years already
I am a week into learning Polish. I have a polish partner and we have a little baby on the way in 3 weeks time. We live in Scotland and want to make sure she is bilingual, hopefully it will be easier if both parents can speak Polish to her, even if mine isn't great to start with. I do wonder who will learn first, me or our child 😄
Congratulations!
I think Polish gives an advantage to learn other languages. If your daughter knows Polish it would be easier for her to learn Spanish or German. Because Polish has gramatical genders, cases and declination like them. If you know how these work in Polish you can much easier understand how they work in other languages.
Now I'm learning German (A2) and I see it's like simplified Polish - less cases, easier declination and no soft consonants.
Be careful if you ever visit the Czech Republic and think "maybe Polish and Czech are similar"... "I am looking for" in Polish sounds like "I want to fuck" in Czech - you're welcome :)
@@justmynickname What kind of joke is this? Please do not mislead.
@@jann.6627
What do you mean?
@@justmynickname There is no declension in Romance languages, and there are no articles in Polish. There are few similarities at all. Although maybe from the point of view of the English language it looks that way.
Can I address a certain attitude that you get among those interested in languages but rarely seen among those who actually do speak several languages?
Why it is that of all the skills a person can master, languages are regarded as something really special but in an often patronising 'party trick' fashion? If we meet somebody who has in depth knowledge of a science do we gasp and say 'oh, you must be a genius' and then drop a hint that unless they recite some chemical formulas, perform a physics experiment or solve a maths problem in front of us we will actually doubt they really have these skills? I remember thinking this when I graduated in languages from university. "What did you do at university?'. "Arabic". "Ooh, say something in Arabic for me? Can you actually have a conversation with someone in Arabic then?" I used to wonder if I'd said "maths' would they have said "Ooh, do a big sum for me!!" Whilst I understood their admiration for something they curiously saw as more complex than maths or physics (which it most definitely is NOT) I always felt that they wouldn't believe me until I actually said something. How often is anybody mentioning online that they have a degree in astrophysics routinely accused of lying?
So please stop seeing language skills as the domain of geniuses. It's a skill like any other. ALTHOUGH this is not helped by 'polyglots' pushing their skills on UA-cam just for attention and fame.
Secondly, native speakers of languages rarely spoken by foreigners I have bad news for you. The fact you rarely hear foreigners speak your language has little to do with the perceived complexity of the language. It has to do with usefulness and necessity. Latin is a complex language but people used to be obliged to learn it because it was the international language of education (Newton published his works in Latin). People learned it because they had to. Russian is a complex language but peoples right across the former USSR learned it and used it as a lingua franca because they had to. So if your language is one of those lesser studied languages maybe recognise it's not because it is somehow impossible. And if a foreigner does speak it, no matter how badly, recognise that it shows a high level of interest in your culture. One which is rarely reflected in learners of English who often just see it as a useful tool rather than due to a love of any anglophone countries.
And one last thing, speakers of lesser studied languages are occasionally (no, actually frequently) prone to comment that any foreigner speaking their language doesn't sound like a native, has an accent, makes mistakes. Really? Surprise, surprise! Sorry to break it to you but YOU don't sound like a native speaker in English either. And no native speaker would expect you to!
Latin is easy for me, that I speak Spanish. It Will be complex for you, English speaker.
Para nosotros, hablantes de idiomas derivados del Latín, el inglés nos resulta complicado pero estamos obligados a aprenderlo porque ustedes no aprenden otro idioma.
I have to learn Hungarian, Polish and Russian for my career lol. Thankfully I love all 3 of the languages and have high hopes for myself. (Also my favorite languages are Hungarian and Finnish!) so this video was quite a treat for me to watch haha.
may I have ask what career that you are doing?
I'd like to make an honourable mention in the Finno-Ugric group - Estonian. Estonian is closely related to Finnish. In fact, Estonians tend to understand quite a lot of Finnish even without any translation. While the language has more Germanic and Slavic loans (due to historic reasons), there are still 14 cases, 9 vowels and the word order is mostly free
Yes, actually, knowing one of the both makes the other quite understandable. When I read an Estonian sentence (knowing Finnish), I mostly see what it's about (not always what it exactly says).
Hungarian has so many easy parts:
- no genders at all (he = she, his = her, nouns don't have genders either)
- only 2 verb tenses, present and past (future is rarely used and expressed with an auxiliary verb)
- almost all verbs are conjugated regularly in all tenses and persons (no need to memorize complicated past tenses like 'take', 'took, 'took'; 'give', 'gave', 'given' etc.)
- cases are like prepositions in other languages, except they are added after the word (in X = X-ban/ben, in the house = a házban)
- you read it as you write it (you can learn to read hungarian in 15 minutes)
- pronunciation is easy (maximum 2 consonants are allowed without a connecting vowel and most of the time there is only 1 consonant)
- stress is always on the first syllable
- plural not needed when specifying the number: 0 ház, 1 ház, 2 ház, sok ház (many), kevés ház (few)
- adjectives are not conjugated before nouns: blue = kék, the blue house = a kék ház, in the blue house = a kék házban
As a nativ Hungarian speaker I realize that your are...right! 👍👍🤣🤣But in this case, I wonder why Hungarian is considered a harder (even the hardest) language here in Europe?
Not so simple as you think. Just an example for the last one: kék házak but a házak kèkek
Pronanciatiation is not easy: szemét vs szemét. 2 different e with completely different meaning
You write as you read: not true
There are innumerable irregular verbs….
Linguaepassione's Finnish skills are really incredible! He speaks very fluently and almost without an accent.
I am a Finn, who over the years in Poland learned to master that language at the C2 level, so feeling doubly honoured.Anyways and most importantly thank You very much for the great video :) :)
I was working in Prague and our Czech assistant called often her Polish friend. She was talking Czech an the Polish girl Polish. And they understood each other!
As teenagers my brother and I used to Hungarianize words by pronouncing them with an accent and agglutinating 'ba' to the ends. "Veer goink to see a movie-ba veet our friends-ock". Not sure how this developed, but it used to mildly annoy/amuse Grandma, which made it fun. We grew up with a set of _those_ parents; although fluent in Hungarian, they found it to be far more convenient as a child-proof eavesdropping tool than as a useful skill to pass along to the next generation. It's a typical mentality of many US-born children of immigrants. The grandparents had already learned English, so why go through the hassle of teaching a foreign language to your newborns. Turns out young children are highly adept at picking up languages and all it takes is for at least one parent to consistently speak the second language directly to the child for the child to become bilingual. My brother and I were almost never spoken to directly in Hungarian as children, but when Dad poked his head into the playroom and said "mit csinálsz", we knew exactly what he was asking and how to answer him (in English, of course).
I've been trying to teach myself Hungarian for over 30 years. I assisted a university history professor who was from Budapest, and he used to give me Hungarian dictation. It became very easy because the language is almost completely phonetic, although sometimes I'd get tripped up on words with _ly_ versus _j_ (say, in _ály_ and _áj_ or _ely_ and _ej._ Since then, I bought a book called _Beszéljünk magyarul!_ and a Hungarian-English dictionary, and I've learned about 2,500 words of vocab, so I can communicate in Magyar better than most other English speakers. The subtleties and nuances of the grammar are still locked to me, though.
What was your motive to learn this language back then? I mean you invested 3 decades in it. I am just curious.
Partly out of deep respect for Prof Martin L Kovács, who was like a father to me, but mostly _because_ it was hard. Also, I'm part Hungarian through my father's mother, though she never spoke it, just German.
j/ly is a challenge for many native Hungarians too.
Hungarian here :) Recently I met a young woman in Poland who is learning Hungarian "only because it's the most beautiful language in the world", she said.
Interesting that we are in the same language family with Finnish, but when I visited Finland, I couldn't figure out anything at all from what I could read or hear. Not one single word!
Although I am pretty good with picking up languages: in the school I learned Russian and both Russian and French in high school, later English in a language school, then through the years I learned German, Swedish and Czech only by living in those countries but no course, and having spent a month or two in Italy and Denmark was enough so that I can understand very basic written or spoken Italian and Danish. Norwegian too, for it is very close to Swedish. From Czech, I can figure out Slovak and a bit of Polish, but the latter is indeed a different kind with all those vowels.
(Above these, I sing in another 10+ languages, but I don't speak those at all).
My current challenge is Polish, because I will go back there to perform for the third time (and more).
My wife's family immigrated from Hungary after WW2 and she was born here. I had to learn some Hungarian so I could talk to the cats. The cats would just stare blankly at me. My wife says I speak Hungarian with a French accent. I can handle French and even some Russian but Hungarian is beyond me.
😂Cats stare blankly
ilyenek ezek a magyar macskák:D
You speak better hungarian than I do then. When I speak hungarian to a hungarian cat it does not even look at me, or my direction, or at least move its ear....
@@istinagy5835 Don't try Russian, they'll plot your demise, justifiable. When I speak French they think they're getting fed, again.
Próbálkozz macskául! 😼
I am a native Hungarian speaker who learned Finnish and had a go at Polish too, so I really enjoyed this video.
Miks?!!!?!!!?!?
@@cribu_ koska asun Suomessa
As a Hungarian,living in Sweden, I was many time asked if I was from Finland.
The other thing about Hungarian that's easier than most other languages is pronunciation: a letter is always pronounced the same way. So the pronunciation of a word is the sum of the pronunciation of the letters it contains if that makes sense. No tricks, no exceptions, simple as that.
in serbian its the same thing but one letter one sound
Basically yes, there are only a few exceptions in pronunciation. For example, many Hungarians can't even pronounce the word "bocsájtsd" correctly! A few glasses of good Hungarian wine can help a lot with this! :D
Nem hinném. Sokszor másként ejtünk szavakat mint ahogy le vannak írva.
Same with Finnish. No need to have spelling contests in schools.
When I was I child I considered Polish the most special language on Earth - the only one you know without learning it!
Y'all do know that Trevor Noah speaks nKosi, right? He can't speak hillbilly so don't hire him for the CMAs
I am Hungarian, and felt very honored that you mention it on the top of the list...still, it shouldn't discourage anyone! It is "just" an isolated language family, requires some playfulness and endurance from anyone who's about to start it. To escape this "isolatedness", after learning English and French I started to crack the code of other alphabets - in 5 years mastered Bulgarian, for a year I'm learning Arabic and just started to learn Mandarin. Gonna stuck to your channel for tips!🎉
Gonna stick*😊
My foreign friends are amazed by how Finns can produce words while inhaling. My mom often uses sigh-like phrases "joo-o" or "vai niin" (oh well/is that so), inhaling kind of underlines it :)
That is so funny! I tried it myself, and it reminded me that in fact "joo" is often inhaled in everyday spoken Finnish. I never thought about it. 😂
Producing sounds while inhaling is uncommon though 😂
@@prapanthebachelorette6803 Inhale "joo" and you sound a genuine Finn instantly 😁
hm. Like the Swedish do or is it still different (I know Swedish, so that's why I'm curious).
@@simonspethmann8086 My Swedish speaking Finnish friends do the same, didn't know there are "inhalers" in Sweden too 😁 Swedish is the 2nd official language in Finland, somewhat influenced by Finnish language.
I am from Poland, I was so surprised when I saw 'Impossible language nr 3'. But I confirm, it's extremely difficult to learn, grammar is extremely complex. I respect people who are trying to learn this language and I always wonder why people do that. It is only used in one country ( which is not attractive from tourism or business perspective). Very interesting video, thanks Olly :)
Polish is the second most commonly spoken language in England.
I think Poland is attractive from both a touristic and a business point of view, you have nice cities and the mountain part is great as well, also your economy is the largest in the eastern half of the EU and certainly the one with the modt potential for growth
I got a bit sad during COVID times, and decided to learn Polish. As it turned out, it was super easy for a Ukrainian to do it. So many commonalities and similar sounds! But you are right - I still don't know why exactly I decided to - just thought it should be cool. It was my language number 7 I tried to learn.
Polish? Easy peasy. Of course, if you know any other Slavic language.
After English and Spanish, Polish is the most common language in Illinois. Chicago has more Polish people than any other city in the world except Warsaw! That includes all the other cities and towns in Poland!
Hi, I am French and I learn finnish. It's hard because it's very different (vocabulary, noun cases...) but not impossible. I really like that it is written as it sounds, for example.
Yay, Finnish!! (I'm going to ask again for a full video on it, please!) I've been learning it for eight years, and it is such a rich, beautiful language. The grammar is definitely a big challenge, but once you start to understand the rules and see the patterns, it becomes much easier to anticipate when or how to change a certain word / to use a particular case. (Also, one other point is that the adjectives take the case of the noun they're referring to.)
Finnish grammar is easy. It's the vocabulary that causes trouble.
@@GrumpyPumpy Nope. It's the opposite.
I'm a Hungarian who learns Finnish. For me it's not only not impossible but even easy
Helps that they’re related languages. Hello from Finland, language cousin! 😊
Good to read this. It is time to checkout Finnish in duolingo. Just to get a feel for it.
In Polish "dź" and "dzi" is complicated, because while "dź" is just a consonant, "dzi" spells the same consonant before a vowel, except when the vowel is "i", in which case "i" is not repeated:
dźwig (crane, machine not bird) - dź denotes a single sound
chodź! (come!) - dź denotes a single sound, devoiced word-finally
dzień (day) - when followed by a vowel, the dź sound is written as dzi
dzik (boar) - when followed by i, you don't repeat the i
chodzi (walks) - as above
Hungarian here, the word for heart is “szív” not “sziz”, but I guess that just serves as proof of how difficult my language is. Finnish is one of my favourite languages and I plan to learn it to fluency one day, including it’s distant neighbour Estonian! Polish is another intriguing language I have thought of learning although it’s pronunciation is markedly more difficult that the former 2 mentioned languages.
Finnish and Estonian are more closely related to Hungarian than any of the three are to the majority of languages in Europe. So I imagine you would have an easier time with them than Polish, at least?
Well, for Polish, you could just go down the border and learn Croatian, it's complicated enough, grammar is basically same as Polish. And then the regional sub-languages with German, Italian and Turkish words.
@@isaacbruner65 "Finnish and Estonian are more closely related'
Really? They say so, but it is just false. Not a single word is even close.
heart, tree, head, eye, hand, man, horse, sun, grass
finnish: sydän, puu, pää, silmä, käsi, mies, hevonen, aurinko, ruoho
estonian: süda, puu, pea, silm, käsi, mees, hobune, päike, rohi
Now here comes hungary:
szív, fa, fej, szem, kéz, ember, ló, nap, fű :D:D:D
How is Estonian a distant neighbour to Finnish?
@@istinagy5835yes but at least in the grammar its sinilar
We appreciate how well you've articulated your insights. Keep working hard.
I appreciate that!
This was a fun video. I have heard Hungarian a lot, as I had acquaintances from Hungary and even visited some of their family in Hungary. But I never managed to learn more than a few words.
The Xhosa is the most fascinating language with all the different clicks and rasping sounds, I did hear it a lot when I visited South Africa.
I had been learning Fiinish in my school. It is a very beautiful language, and I find it extremely musical! And now... now I learn Arabic. Why do I keep torturing myself?
أتمنى لك النجاح
@@hml25 شكراً ))
You were learning Finnish in school?
@@jmwild22 Yes, optionally. I was studying in Saint Petersburg, it's about 150 kilometers away from the Russian-Finnish border.
Just to be better.
I spent a summer with an international group that also had some people from Hungary. What I found strange was that I couldn’t hear when a sentence ended because the voice doesn’t get down.
That is just because - as in every language - speakers tend to be careless. You just got the wrong groupof speakers. Intonation is regarded by many as something unimportant, but if spoken correctly, the end of a sentence should go down in Hungarian. What you heard is a kind of "brain thing", when the speaker can't make up their mind to end the sentence and start a new one. Sorry to say, in my opinion this has to do with intelligence and education.
I learned Hungarian at 24. Loved it so much I stayed:) not impossible.
Polish has very few vowels because Finland stole most of them in the Great Vowel War of 889 AD. Umlauts have been unearthed at archeological sites all throughout Poland, and at one point the Polish government even considered re-incorporating them into the vernacular. However, due to the small number of umlauts recovered, it was felt that there were simply not enough to go around. Therefore this idea, along with the centuries-old umlauts, has been shelved somewhere in a closet in Warsaw.
Hilarious comment! Made me LOL 🤣
Limiting ourselves to languages with decent enough learning material available (no native American, no native Australian, no native Amazonian, no Borneo), the languages I'm seriously afraid of are Georgian, Thai, Javanese, Vietnamese, Cantonese (yep) and possibly Mongolian.
I'm fairly sure there are more difficult ones, but as already said, I'm limiting myself to language for which learning material is readily available.
With Javanese I assume you’re concerned with the part where you need 3 entire dictionaries of politeness levels to “fully” learn it, but these days many Javanese (like me) can barely speak mid let alone high Javanese. If you were to learn just low Javanese, which is very simple in my opinion, you’d already be able to communicate and “impress locals” really well, honestly!
I'm a native polish speaker and it was super funny hearing people who try to speak my language. Thank you for including polish on the list and best of luck to everyone who is trying to learn it. 😊
Hey, Olly. Since the Tibetan diaspora of the 20th century, lots of Westerners have been attempting by to learn Tibetan-mostly while studying Tibetan Buddhism. Many people have talked about how it’s one of the worlds hardest (least phonetic) writing systems, but few UA-camrs have covered how hard it is to learn because of its verbs. They just work so differently than most European or East Asian languages. You should make a video about it!
Tibetan writing is not less phonetic than that of English.
I think that in medieval Tibetan the written language bears little resemblance to the spoken language.@@juandiegovalverde1982
I can read it ok but speak it haltingly. It is kind of inside out compared to English but not so different to Japanese.
It is easier to learn too read than thai,which is my second language. The palette of sounds is easier than thai. But the grammar is complicated.
Inside out? @@billking8843
I come from Japan. As a persistent traveller (and language-learner) I think that the hardest language is Greek, but maybe the richest.
Because of conjugations?
And not only...
Yess Greek! I was wondering why it wasn't included :'(
@@aprilaoine because it's nowhere near as hard as xhosa.
Kalimera
I'm a language teacher and no language is impossible to learn. What may be impossible to overcome is laziness, self-doubt, or opportunity.
Good luck with Hungarian 😂
I, agree they are hard at first but with time it ain't easy
One good thing about Finnish, it's is almost completely phonetic; every letter is pronounced, and pronounced the exact same way regardless of surrounding letters (bar a few rare exceptions). There's no such thing as a Finnish spelling bee; as soon as you hear a word, you know how it's spelled, exactly as it sounds.
In Croatian the word is spelt exactly as it sounds as well.
Danish is extremely difficult, in spite of its relatively easy grammar. Pronunciation is near impossible for foreign speakers.
I don't know, maybe putting a potato in my mouth would help...
How will you explain the fact that hundreds of thousands of immigrants have learned to speak it fluently? My 'hood' has e.g. lots of Africans who pick up the language in months. Danish is a rhytmic-metric language where stress and intonation mean everything, partly due to the absense of grammatical inclination.
I immediately thought of Danish, but it wasn't in the video. But then I guess many languages have something difficult to master. I'm Dutch and our ui- and sch-sounds are also challenging for non-native speakers.
As a migrant I learned Danish in 2 years. It is the easiest language I learned, 100 % more logical than english, but pronounciation is very problematic.
Danish sounds like a very drunk Norwegian.
Fun fact, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish and Japanese languages have some similar features in sentence structure and word formation
And Korean too, they say.
What about estonian? (I’m Estonian)
@@Kyosuke-han ты эстонец, тебе виднее 😄
@@Kyosuke-han If you belong to.the Fenno - Ugrian language tree, then you would probably have an easier time learning Korean, Japanese, or the Turkic languages.
I am Swedish, and Korean sentence structure is a real challenge to me.
Hungary,Romania,Finland have the Latin- Roman roots of words and the Hungary is from the Huns of Mongolia.
I am proud to say I learned Georgian. ქსრთულუ ენა
Counting is based on 20s. So 95 is 4 x 30 + 5 + 10
There is a different verb “to have” for animate and inanimate objects. Also adjectives like “old” is different for animate and inanimate objects.
It also has a lot of consonant clusters and of course a unique alphabet!
Why in the name of everything that is holy would you wanna learn this fecking language? It's both difficult and utterly useless to a foreigner. თუ გიჟი და მაზოხისტი ხარ თქვი ეხლავე, არ განგსჯი.
Please don't scare people with the terrible Polish spelling 😅 It's different than English, but it's got its rules and we learn them at school. Some sounds are expressed by two letters instead of one, but it's at least pretty accurate, unlike English, where you have to memorize every single word, lol
Fun fact - we don't have spelling lessons at school and we hardly ever use spelling letter by letter to tell someone else how an English word is written. I worked at a big office where we used English a lot, and our British colleague was a sort of shocked hearing that the girls, instead of spelling a word, just read it carefully according to the Polish rules, and it perfectly worked 😁
Naaaa,it doesn't scare me....i'm romanian,so i bet if i would live in Poland for a couple of months,i would speak polish fluently. I say this because for every polis word it must be a close word in romanian,as it have a LOT of synonyms from latin ,dacian ,getic,tracian and proto slavic. For example in romanian air can be :aer,cer,vazduh,suflu,vant. Pick your polish or slavic word from the list😄
@@draculakickyourass vazduh sounds like Russian vozduh воздух, and I think we've got related words for breathing. Our "air" is "powietrze", coming from "wiatr" (wind). What are Romanian words for wind?
@@Piwonia67 vant😀
I'd say it's an overstatement, there are some words and sounds that are pretty similar, there are some words with uncommon sound groups and sometimes one might need to spell their surname out if it's uncommon. I definitely do! I also clearly recall learning to spell in kindergarten and having to go to a logopedist because I had problems saying voiceless and voiced consonants properly.
@@SirithPL But there is no such thing like "spelling bee". We have dyktanda but this is because "u" and "ó", "h" and "ch", "rz" and "ż" sound the same. All the rest is easy to spell and write.
Even though Finnish is not Indo-European, it shares in many ways the same logic of thinking with the Germanic languages. Once you memorize the Finnish words for stuff (which is a next-to-impossible task) and get the hang of the declension system (which is also difficult), the rest will be easy, both pronunciation and the logic. The more remote languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, don't function with the same European logic, making them even harder for a native English speaker.
The Hungarian language is interesting. Not Impassible , but difficult.
There is no gender problem in it.
25 years ago, I read a short story (25 pages) featuring two people, Gabi and Viki (nicknames). According to the story, it shows their 3 months of living together. You couldn't guess whether Viki is Viktoria or Viktor. Also, does Gabi use the name Gábor (Gabriel) or Gabriella? There is no She or He, only Ő . (Of course, there is no Her/His either)
I remember that some learners (and grammarians) called it perfect.
Hungarian here. Viki is almost certainly a she. I don't think I've ever heard Viktor be called Viki. It's not implausible but would be kind of weird.
@@TheHighborn
I had a classmate and a colleague we called Viki.
Both male (Viktor)
But I haven't met such a man since the 2000s
Cantonese speaker here - a learning hack I grew up with when learning Cantonese as an overseas born kiddo - Cantopop (or nursery rhymes if it tickles your fancy), and TVB dramas and variety shows. 80's-90's Hong Kong cinema like Stephen Chow and the Young and Dangerous series usually comes with written Cantonese and English subtitles.
Aforementioned kiddo now teaches Cantonese on weekends to the next generation of overseas born Cantonese kiddos.
Thanks for keeping Cantonese alive! Cantonese forever! 🇭🇰 💪
@@letsgowalk it is a matter of cultural pride, which in the context of the diaspora is linked to fluency and usually a lightbulb moment. My lightbulb moment was when I realised countless people automatically assumed "knee how" was a socially appropriate way to respond to "well technically, I'm ethnic Chinese, but-". I don't want our kids to grow up thinking "what I speak is just a dialect" like I did for so long. No. We absolutely have the words to write Cantonese as spoken. Our vocabulary is found in 唐詩宋詞. Cantonese is dying in its native 廣州 and not too good in Hong Kong and Macau, we are our last chance. So I persist.
17:50 _"The hungarian language is a code"_ (Tucker Carlson)
Most of the things people say are hard about Polish you pick up in like a week, like the weird alphabet, etc. What truly makes it so hard for me is just the pure speed, I can understand everything in writing but when it comes to listening to Poles speak it’s impossible to catch up. English-speaking folk speak fast sometimes, sure, but we have more vowels and they’re of different lengths. Polish grammar, for me, is also pretty easy after a couple months. It’s just that damn speed.
True and unfortunately - the laziness of people that blur the letters together although they shouldn't. Bad pronunciation is also not so uncommon and it even frustrates me, the native. :/
Also, speed is something every learner struggles with. I remember when I couldn't understand a single English sentence, because for me it was so fast. Now, with every language, I just listen, a lot, not being bothered whether I understand or not. The brain will slow it down naturally with time. You can listen to audiobooks, as they are usually read much slower than our normal speech.
And thank you for admitting, that Polish grammar and reading is doable. Polish people tend to boast off how difficult Polish language is. I'd say it's not even close to some other languages. Not the easiest, but not the hardest.
Think about a thick Glaswegian accent. Even many English have problems understanding it. An American understands almost nothing, and I guess people not fluent in English would not understand a word.
Wow, Olly! This video is an incredible journey into the world of languages considered impossible. His ability to detail the unique characteristics of each language, from clicks and tones to cases and vowels, is not only educational, but also highlights his linguistic expertise. Keep up the great work, I can't wait to see your future language adventures! 👏🌐✨
He IS stealing videos from other people without permission.
The Hungarian alphabet has 14 letters for vowels, but the language uses 15 vowels. The letter 'E' represents the open E and closed E vowels too. For example: the word 'ember' = human has two different vowels, the first E is open, the second is closed.
The frequency distribution of vowels in Hungarian speech:
1. a: 21.6 %;
2. e: 17.1 %;
3. o: 10.2 %;
4. i: 10 %;
5. ë: 8.9 %; it is not in the alphabet
6. á: 8.8 %;
7. é: 8.8 %;
8. ö: 3.4 %;
9. u: 2.4 %;
10. ó: 2.1 %;
11. ő: 2.1 %;
12. ü: 1.6 %;
13. í: 1.3 %;
14. ú: 1.2 %;
15. ű: 0.6 %.
As a native speaker I also think that Cantonese “Ng hai hou naan ze” (It's not that difficult). But one feature that was not mentioned is the abundant usage of modal particles. Just using different particles will determine your sentence is a statement, a question, a request... and the emotion you express.
Depends on the definition of "fluent" though. I've seen a lot of 北佬 like me speak what should be intelligible Cantonese but Canto speakers still won't stop laughing, and vice versa. If your standard is low, then it's not that hard, but if your standard is "native level" then Asian languages in general are difficult.
@@LibeliumDragonfly You mean 鬼佬？
If people are laughing, rest assured that they are not hostile (which could have been completely different if you look Chinese and speak with a Mandarin accent).
It is never easy to speak like a native in any language, same for English to me.
@@elnovenohermano I'm from northern China, so no, 北佬 it is.
For a native Lithuanian, Polish is like a pleasant conversation with the child . Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Basque are a real challenge for me
I hired a teacher to learn Xhosa in my fifties. What a rich and fascinating experience. The clicks have to be regularly practiced if you're used to European consonants, so it's not easy, and I've never got fluent, but a deep dive into the alliterative grammar and Xhosa metaphorical expressions grew my respect for it as a complex and even humorous language.
I lived in central Australia and tried to learn Luritja-Pintubi. What I learnt helped get peoples attention but damn was it hard to get anywhere . I did know a non indigenous dude that was fluent and it was so impressive to witness him interact with the community.he really helped bridge the cultural gap out there
I'm doing battle with Cantonese right now, but I feel Vietnamese deserves a mention ... I've been speaking/studying for 15 years and still feel like I'm at pre-school level, it sounds like it comes from another planet (and is quite closely related to Cantonese)
Only superficially - Cantonese is Sino-Tibetan, whereas Vietnamese is Austro-Asiatic. Vietnamese acquired tone from surrounding Sinitic languages quite early during its development, but in terms of its basic vocabulary, it's still Austro-Asiatic, so it's related to Khmer (even though the two groups have historically been, ahem, less than cordial to each other).
In your experience, does Cantonese seems easier to learn compared to Vietnamese (I am a Vietnamese learner, hoping to study Cantonese in the future - yeah I like to suffer lol)
@@SiKedekI did not realize this fact about Viet language being Austro Asiatic. I heard my first really good rock music in Viet just a few hours ago, the band UnlimiteD. Viet is one of the very few major languages I know Nothing about... Just today I learned that the Dong is the world's smallest currency too!
@@SiKedek I'd say it's more than superficial at this stage in the development. Certainly they originate from two different language families, but belonging to the sinosphere for so long meant Vietnamese developed very strong Chinese traits (i.e. acquiring the tones about 2000 years ago), and quite a lot of common vocab - just to throw out a couple of terms - the words for university and student are almost exactly the same. But perhaps that's why Viet is so tricky, it's picked up the Chinese tones, and some pronunciations, but retained a grammar that I've never seen anything like anywhere.
@@davidl.2243 Hi David, for me Cantonese is a little easier ... but I have studied/spoken Mandarin for more than 20 years, so that is probably part of it. But I do recommend studying Cantonese, it's a lovely language, very sonorous, and of course, Hong Kong, where everyone speaks it, is a fantastic city.
As a Finn, I just love seeing people learning Finnish, the little töksähdykset (=blunders, try to pronounce that monster) that people often get during sentences when they forget a tense are adorable
I am currently learning Finnish. I started when I was studying for a year in Finland.
For me spelling was easy. The pronunciation not too hard once I got the ä/a, the r, and the h in coda (like in "nähdä" or "hiihto").
(Some Finns even told me that I didn't sound foreign, and I can't say the same for my English)
For the grammar, once you understand that you replace for example "in" with "-ssa/-ssä" or "from" with "-sta/-stä", it's not that hard except for some irregular words.
The lexicon however, is really different. For that I really feel how it has nothing to do with French (my native language) or English.
The hardest is probably to not speak English with the Finns. Because, when they feel that you are uncertain, some of them immediately switch to English😅
Also, I wonder why Estonian didn't figure in this list with the õ vowel or the fact that it distinguish between short, long and overlong vowels. And it also has a case system similar to the one in Finnish, and that lexicon too. However it doesn't have the vowel harmony (but that can make some words harder to pronounce).
I didn't start to learn Estonian (yet). But for me, Estonian looks harder than Finnish.
Fellow Finnish learner here. 😊 I have an Estonian friend who speaks and teaches both, and she thinks Estonian is harder because the grammar isn't as logical as Finnish grammar, but to me, it seems like a lot of it is the same as/ similar to Finnish puhekieli. I haven't looked much into it Estonian, yet, though. I'm waiting until I feel very comfortable with my Finnish before I tackle it.
@@corinna007 Yeah, Estonian will come easy if you already know Finnish, or the other way around.
I’d include Siksikaitsipowahsin (Blackfoot) in the sequel to this. It’s one of the Indigenous languages where I live and it seems outrageously difficult! Or Anishnaabemowin (Ojibwe) or Neheyawewin (Cree).
Almost any Native American language would probably be difficult to learn for an English speaker but I have heard Navajo (Diné) is exceptionally so.
@@isaacbruner65 I live with several Polynesian languages. They're not exactly a walk in the park either
a great course to use for Anishinaabemowin is Pimsleur! the dialect is ever so slightly different than what we speak in my area, but it's pretty spot on and most of the dialects ARE able to be understood by each other, with a few exceptions of course
My thoughts exactly!
Agreed! here in Mexico we have 64 indigenous languages with Nahuatl and Mayan influencing heavily on Spanish in Central and South Mexico, even people form Northern Mexico have trouble with common names and places let alone English people
As a hongkonger, really appreciate the efforts to including our language- Cantonese to the video!!!!!!
Sorry, I'm late to the conversation but I just discovered the video and can't resist joining in. The topic brings back wonderful memories of my time being stationed at the Defense Language Institute or DLI for short. This is the military's immersive language school which expects you to be fluent to graduate. Now as a brand-new soldier fresh out of basic training I had no choice as to which language I would learn. We did not know until we arrived at DLI what that language would be. A handful of my fellow soldiers were separated from the man group but most of us were asked what KP is. To which we of course we replied kitchen patrol. Only to be corrected that this was DLI's shorthand for Korean. And thus, I was entered into one of the three languages with the highest failure rate at the school. Russian was another but that was dismissed as the Russian did things purposefully to make your life difficult. Chinese and Korean were the other two. I can safely say that Korean was worse than Chinese due to the fact that not only did we have to learn Korean but also Chinese since so much of the Korean language is Chinese. Korean has all the tonal issues you mentioned. You also had to understand the honor system since you talked completely differently depending on how your status compared to who you were talking to. Most languages you either read left to right (English) or right to Left (Japanese as Manga fans will know) but with Korean you alternate directions (each line you switch the direction you're reading. There is no punctuation or capitals and the words all run together. Yes, Korean has an alphabet, but the Chinese non-alphabet kept popping up. At our orientation we had a class size of about a hundred students (we would be broken into smaller groups of ten for actual learning). We were told to look left and right. Of the three of us only one would graduate. I was not one of the three. I could read, write and comprehend with no difficulty. The listening did me in. Still, I lasted for close to 5 months which amounted to 2 Years of intense college Korean. over thirty years later I can still impress those who don't speak the language and embarrass myself around those who do. It has been handy for telephone scammers as the last thing they are prepared for is their target to be speaking nothing but Korean.
You mentioned that in Finnish the stress is always on the first syllable of the word. This is true also for the Hungarian languamge.
From what I understand, this is true to most if not all Uralic languages.
Hi Olly! I'm a Hungarian musician of the older generations. As your video above contains a few details about Hungarian language I admit, yes, that is from the harder ones. But there are elements of which make easier to study Hungarian. We have only 3 or 4 words in the whole area of the language with mute letters. In Hungarian there are much more vowels than in English, but they must be pronounced in the same way in all of the words that contain them, all the time. And as we have no mute letters, if you know the sounds of letters, you can pronounce everything what you read. The grammar is more complicated - but if you have someone to speak with - you can speak the language sooner or later.. 😊 The emphasis is always on the first syllable of the word. We don't have genders in the language.
Válasz
I am on a mission to learn czech, which is very similar to polish in its structure and vocabulary. Every time I learn something new I get all sweaty from how complicated it is, but its very rewarding once you learn. I feel that I have conquered a new level of language mastery, which makes other languages seem quite simple. It also shows that nothing is impossible, you just need to give it time and patience.
That's great! But yeah, the slogan for Czech could be: "Learn Czech. Every other language will seem easy by comparison!" :D
@@frufruJ hahah yes!
Or as an old retired substitute teacher we had in my czech class when I lived in Prague 10 years ago. He came into the classroom and the first thing he said was: "It is better to commit suicide than trying to learn Czech"
As a native hungarian, i am a fluent czech speaker but i have to say its a hard language to master. For me, its easy to understand but hard to pronounce correctly. Its a long journey to master any language, but as i speak english quite well, for me, learning spanish is definitely easyer than learning czech. But as i became fluent in czech (albeit far from perfect), i realized that i understand slovak, and some of polish, serbian, croatian, even russian languages.
@@zsoltpapp3363 I know, I find it the same. But the big switch for me was shifting focus from acheiving mastery to enjoying the learning process. Every time I learn someting new I know that I get a little more proficient, even though I'm far from mastery. The famous 80/20 rule says that 20% of the words make up 80% of the content, so you don't need to know everything for it to be useful.
@hugoingelhammar6163: Hi, I'm Czech born in Prague. For me is Czech the easiest language on the world. I learned it to fluent level between 1st and 3rd year of my life. 😀 😀
I learned German, English, Norwegian and Finnish too. And like was writen: If you learn one language of the same group, you begin understand others too. So I found, that Finnish is so different from other european languages, that I can better understand the bilingual signs in southern Finland in Swedish (only from my Norwegian and German). I mean, Finnish grammar is not so difficult for me, because czech grammar is sooooo complicated, that almost nothing surprises me anymore, but Finnish vocabulary is like anything from the other universe, not from Earth.
If you want gratis to chat with a native Czech, just write. 🙂
In the mid-1990s I was an English teacher in Romania. The town I lived in, though, was more than 90% ethnic Hungarians. I tried learning Hungarian, and very quickly I gave up!
Because you are English. You are not good at it in general.
As a Hungarian it was nice to be mentioned in a video like this. And yes our language is an interesting one. Don't worry about messing things up (word ending, grammar rules and such), sometimes even us native speakers get tangled up in the different rules and such.😂