13 Languages with HARDEST Pronunciation
Вставка
- Опубліковано 15 сер 2024
- bit.ly/freeslk... As a linguist, I’ve come across some languages with incredibly difficult pronunciation. But these ones take the cake. I’ve come up with 13 languages with some of the hardest pronunciation in the world. How do your speaking skills stack up? Try out these words and let me know in the comments how you did!
📺 WATCH NEXT:
Impossible Languages 👉🏼 • 5 Impossible Languages...
⬇️ GET MY FREE STORYLEARNING® KIT:
Discover how to learn any foreign language faster through the power of story with my free StoryLearning® Kit 👉🏼 bit.ly/freeslk...
✍🏼 ON THE BLOG:
Prefer reading to watching? We’ve got you covered!
Pronunciation Tips (pick your language) 👉🏼 bit.ly/tipsfor...
📖 LEARN A LANGUAGE THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY:
Stories are the best way I have found to learn ANY language. Forget the boring textbooks and time-wasting apps and learn a language the natural, effective way with one of my story-based courses. 👉🏼 bit.ly/storyle...
🗣 SUPERCHARGE STORIES WITH SPEAKING PRACTICE
Many StoryLearning students have found great success combining story-based learning with 1-on-1 speaking practice. We recommend LanguaTalk for finding talented tutors who can help you become more confident.
Book a free trial with a 5-star tutor here 👉🏼 bit.ly/languat...
📸 FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM:
Get daily language tips, comics, reels, and more on Instagram (@iwillteachyoualanguage) 👉🏼 / iwillteachyoualanguage
⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Difficult pronunciation ahead
0:29 - French Vowels
1:54 - Danish Soft D
3:14 - Japanese
4:34 - Sindhi / Hindi / Toda
6:36 - Arabic
9:31 - Polish
11:13 - English
12:13 - Czech
13:58 - Pirahã
15:44 - Navajo
17:41 - Georgian
19:51 - ¡XÓÕ (Taa)
21:42 - Bonus Sound
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
• The language with the ...
• French nasal vowels -...
• "Six Saucissons..." - ...
• Can you pronounce thos...
www.tiktok.com...
www.tiktok.com...
www.tiktok.com...
www.tiktok.com...
www.tiktok.com...
• Rødgrød Med Fløde
• Americans Try To Prono...
• Why Danish sounds funn...
• Danish Pronunciation: ...
www.tiktok.com...
• [ ɸ ] unvoiced bilabia...
• [ ɸ ] unvoiced bilabia...
www.tiktok.com...
• [ ɭ̆ ] voiced subapic...
www.tiktok.com...
• Learn Hindi Pronunciat...
• Toda Stories
• The Arabic alphabet is...
• Arabic- A'yn (ع)
• [ ʕ ] voiced radical p...
www.tiktok.com...
www.tiktok.com...
• Arabic- A'yn (ع)
www.tiktok.com...
• [ q⁼ ] unvoiced unaspi...
www.tiktok.com...
• Say "chrząszcz" - Poli...
• 🇵🇱How to pronounce “pl...
• Most difficult Polish ...
www.tiktok.com...
• Britney Spears Tongue
#storylearning
#learnalanguage
#fluentfast
How many of these impossible languages do you know? 👉🏼 ua-cam.com/video/2rxA-GBYJb0/v-deo.html
as a slovak i can easily say the czech r with the thing
1. French
2. Danish
3. Japanese
4. Sindhi
5. Arabic
6. Polish
7. Icelandic
8. Czech
9. Wari
10. Navajo
11. Georgian
12. Zulu
13. Maori
@@user-yu8jg4lu2u lil bro is lying
I feel honored to know that you included Sindhi language in your video as it's my mother tongue. Meherbani awanh ji ta awanh Sindhi khe unji ehmiyat dini 🇵🇰😊
A large swathe of the sounds exist in various dialects of different languages. I wonder how many natural sounds modernist scholars working to make up some standard tones have eliminated. The modern sovereign state is an artificial barrier to human solidarity and harmony.
My mother - a native English speaker - often used to hum the sounds for the phrase "I don't know" rather than say the actual words.
Shouldn't your mom be already good at saying I don't know because she's a native English speaker?
@@Finity2010-ud2rl well if you know a language well you dont have to pronounce things well to understand, and its faster
I do that too. Lol
@@bywonlineno fr
@@reneedumont2474you might be his mom 😂
I'm Russian and used to have lisp when i was a kid and pronounced "s" like "th". Good to know that it helped later to learn English. My classmates were struggling with "th" but not me.
That definitely became a brag later in life! Meanwhile I’m a native English speaker but when I was younger I used to be terrible at pronouncing numerous sounds, especially the “th” sound (I don’t remember what other sounds but I do remember that I had to do speech exercises to kind of correct my pronunciation so I’m assuming I struggled at more than just the “th” sound). It wasn’t very helpful especially considering the fact that my name has that sound in it. Anyway the point is this comment brought back memories of me explaining to people that I couldn’t pronounce the “th” sound when introducing myself.
Also sorry for this comment being so long
@@sampanda407 I couldn't say alleluja (Polish eq. of hallelujah) for the life of me. Every other damn word, no matter how difficult - I could pronounce, includking a tongue twister: Konstantynopolitańczykiewiczówna - I was nailing it every time, but not that damn alleluja. I rponounced it as: ayeyuja XD It was a short lived issue, but still. I guess everybody had some issues with pronouncing words in their native languages but they simply don't remember. Also, I am an English teacher and one of the first things I teach is... pronunciation of th :D
😂
Ekimin ekijuz jiyrma
It's just don't came out properly
Они все лошпеды, бро. Ты перед рождением ввёл рандомный читкод, видимо
For whatever reason "R" seems to be the hardest sound in every language. Except if you're British then it barely exists.
But a common speech defect in English accents is to pronounce the 'r' as a 'w'.
'R' certainly exists in Scottish accents.
I agree. I've tried to explain to people how to pronounce the German r in e.g. "hart" and that it's different from r following a consonant as in e.g. "treffen". The latter seems to be a lot easier as it has an actual sound whereas the r in "hart", "stark", "fahren" etc. is quite elusive.
That always surprised me. I can say British, Italian, French and Belgian R with no problems. WerRy stRainჯ
Does it ~ baely ~ exist?
@@YuliaHadassahK doesn't it almost prolong the vowel before it? In treffen this is more the back tongue r. Can't describe these, I can only pronounce them :P
I’ve taught scores of Japanese people to pronounce “6th“ over the years, and there’s no process more guaranteed to produce tears of joy. It can be done folks!
Just curious, which version of 6th? The English one (where the "x" is rendered as a simple "k" instead of "ks") is quite a bit easier than the other versions where the entire "ksth" string is retained.
As a native American English speaker, I personally pronounce "sixth" like "sixed", only in professional cases I actually pronounce "sixth" correctly.
Other hard words for my Japanese friends to pronounce: jelly roll and rollerblade.
@@mxRian4 jerii rooru, roraaa bureido - easy 🤪
@@tbirdparis - What do you mean by "[t]he English one (where the "x" is rendered as a simple "k" instead of 'ks')"? Are you saying that in England people pronounce the word _sixth_ as /sɪkθ/ rather than /sɪksθ/? I'm from the US, and I've certainly never heard anyone pronounce the word that way.
I’ve studied Spanish, Arabic, Esperanto, Chinese, and Portuguese, and the only one i’ve ever struggled with at all in terms of pronunciation, or ever received any negative feedback from native speakers in, is Arabic. Pronunciation has always been my best skill in language, and even in languages i haven’t studied i’ve been able to impress native speakers by my imitation skill. But Arabic has been a totally different, humbling experience..
As an Arab, I can confidently say that it’s almost impossible to sound like a native if you are not native. Our language is just too hard phonetically.
And we Arabs can imitate most sounds of other languages easily, even if it doesn’t exist in our language. Our throats and tongues are already well trained. For example in this video the only sound I genuinely couldn’t imitate was the Czech R.
@@Ahmed-pf3lgsorry to say that but even Arabic speakers can struggle with the pronunciation of other languages. I am always skeptical of general statements like these.
Why are you learning so many languages?
@@margedtrumper9325 he said: the MOST sounds. Someday my Arabic friend said the same.
@@annettg1202 I don't have this impression. Tell me any Arabic native speaker who sounds like a native in all languages as he claims. I have come across languages with far more difficult sounds anyway
I'm from England and have always pronounced the "th" sound just as a regular "f" sound, it's how i naturally grew up and learned it, for my whole life no one has ever mentioned or questioned it either
You're my hero. I'm a Russian and TH was the most fucked thing I ever struggled with in my school days.
We dont have that shht in Russian, and no articles either))
@@AndreiBerezin
Russian actually had a letter for Th, similar to Greek Θ. But it was pronunced like F, so eventually it was axed as unnecessary.
I'm glad to hear that, dude, because I don't think I'll ever understand what “th” is, so I'm gonna be throwing “F's” around, too.
TBH I think the only people who are bothered by pronunciation of "th" are English teachers - I've been in many different parts of UK yet almost all of them had different pronunciation of "th" and even me, nonnative speaker, it was easy to pick up, so the differences have to be huuuuge.
@@AthanasiosJapanYes some letters have changed in how they are transliterated.
/θ/ used to be transcribed as Ф but now as T
/ɦ/ used to use Г now X
As a Russian I find in Czech more challenging distinction between long vs. short vowels, rather than Ř.
For Russian the emphasis (ударение) is the most difficult part of the language. In Polish on every penultimate syllable. In Russian very irregular and unpredictable.
@@alfonsmelenhorst9672 yes, the "shifting" accent, my nightmare, when I was learning Russian XD Polish has predominantly stable accent on the second to last syllable in words. If the word has only two syllables the accent is on the first one, obviously. Not talking about dialectal varieties, of course, but standard version of Polish.
Ah yes - plast vs plášť :D
I’m from Poland and I was able to pronounce all the sounds from all the languages first try
same, that’s so easy for me
no u werent
No you werentt
I've gotten like half, maybe a bit more. If you speak our language every day with that pronunciation there will be no problem transitioning to others
"Ř" is really crazy... so Poles got rid of it a couple of centuries ago and replaced it with an ordinary Ż (but they continue writing it as "rz").
By the way, Ř in Czech often becomes voiceless, typically after another voiceless consonant.
It sounds like a J to me. I don’t get it.
@@Ahmed-pf3lg it's a lot harder than J, with tongue vibration
That's why in Polish there is one sound that can be spelled as "ż" or as "rz", depending on word's etymology. A real struggle for Polish kids at school.
I'm a learner of Polish. For some strange reasons, I didn't struggle much when I started learning this sound, despite it also doesn't exist in my mother tongue, Thai. Probably thanks to my teacher and my Polish friends.
Slavic languages in general are tough for englishmans, since their language is maded up, they are same as niemcy.
As a Georgian I was genuinely happy to see Georgian language here
Gamarjoba from the Ř country. 👋
@@siebensunden Gosh, "ř" mentioned
Georgian sounds like it was seriously taken from prehistoric times and don't mean it in a bad way - when I hear linguists talking about Proto-Indo-European, I think of Georgian for some reason, it just feels like a time machine. Greetings!
Georgian pronunciation is not that hard
Same!
Polish: "you have to say very simillar sounds next to each other"
English: hold my beer with "-sth"
See also "sch" in Dutch. Thankfully they have the good sense to only pronounce the "s" when it's at the end of a word.
@@TangoKilo3 yes, I missed Dutch here
As a Georgian learner I can assure you the pronunciation is the easiest part… if you think pronouncing ყ is difficult, wait until you see the verb system 🤣
as Polish, id like to correct some things:
1. first phrase is a tongue twister, hard even for poles.
2. if u say prosię instead of proszę, everyone will understand you, we rather use word świnia to call a pig, prosię is a small pig.
3.the last phrase is also a tongue twister, but i never heard that before
Czech's fricated r is how I used to pronounce the trilled r before I learned how to do it properly
It sounds like a J to my ears I don’t understand how it’s an R.
@@Ahmed-pf3lg Think of it as a trilled J! Try it - so hard! :)
@@Ahmed-pf3lgthat's why Poles dropped this sound in the 15th century and started to pronounce it either sh or zh
@@Ahmed-pf3lgWhy everyone say it's R it isn't R it's Ř
@@Ahmed-pf3lgIf you thing it's J then you are weird
The Tlingit language uses the "ɬ" sound like Navajo. Actually, this sounds is quite common in the native American languages of the Pacific Northwest and Southeast Alaska. Tlingit has an ejective form of ɬ, as well as combinations of it. For example dl, tl, tl'. The language has no L or R sound that is in nearly all languages. It also has a near full set of ejectives, including the back part of the mouth. It is likely to contain sounds in no other language.
@@LangXplorer Thanks for having an interest in the Tlingit language! Certainly the phonology and verb system is the most intimidating aspect. It is a very beautiful and unique language.
The ɬ is one of my favorite sounds, so it is cool to hear it is on the Caucasus languages. It is a part of the world I'm interested in. I found it quite interesting that Georgian phonology had some similar features. The ejective consonants seem to be most common in mountainous regions.
Yeah, I thought so. I guessed Navajo wrong because I knew that sound was in Tlingit.
I also immediately thought of Tlingit! Glad to see it in the comments. I think the -tl sound in the Nahuatl language has a similar tongue position too (and it's in the same language family as Navajo!)
I would have thought Tlingit would have easily made this list. There is even a book called "Sneaky Sounds" that is meant to help with the difficult pronunciation.
I guessed Upper Tanana instead of Navajo or Tlingit because that has the sound too. Although I guess it makes sense since all three languages are grouped in the Athabaskan/Na-Dene language family.
Ejectives in Georgian are difficult. But strangely enough, some ejective pronunciation of certain consonants has been creeping its way into many English dialects relatively recently. People are increasingly making their "k" sounds ejective, with quite a distinct click to it, when trying to make emphasis.
I try to learn Georgian and I also noticed this in my English! Although its not my native language, and I dont use the ejectives in German
My father unknowingly makes ejective consonants relatively often in his speech at the end of words, especially at the end of sentences. He makes an ejective k, t, and p (and probably more) pretty often.
As an Arab, the Georgian sounds were a piece of cake for me lol
So for me as a German the ejectives like k', t' or ts' are not that difficult. With this q', I'm not sure if it would be pronounced as the "qaf" in Arabic or only with a glottal stop. And the kh is the most difficult so I can't pronounce
What about Russian? The famous "Ы" sound (it exists also in Polish and Romanian, but not in the same exact form), hard and soft consonant pairs for almost all consonants (and always making minimal pairs!), dark L before vowels, strong vowel reduction (especially of "O"), assimilations of consonants, unpredictable stress patterns (unlike Polish or Czech), even pairs of words with the same exact orthography, but different stress...
miagki /tviordy znak + yery
for me hardest part in Russian is the intonation, you ve to learn for each word, in Polish is always second last syllable, whereas Czech always first: btw medieval Polish was like Czech!
@@walterweiss7124 Czech is tricky as well: this stress on the first syllable can be completely obscured by a long vowel elsewhere in the word.
@@watchmakerful In English there are long vowels in unstressed syllables too, e.g. avatar /ˈæv.ə.tɑː/.
Мне кажется, что "ы" среди славян больше всех распространен в украинском. Практически везде, где мы говорим "и", они говорят "ы"
As a danish person who is fluent in english has family in france and thus speaks spme french and is at a conversational level in japanese I see this as a complete win
The "sh" sound problem
Japanese Sh=Mandarin X(palatal)
Bulgarian Sh=same as English
Polish Sz=Russian Ш(retroflex)
Russian: hold my beer 🍺 Now hold my Ы 😂
The ɨ? It appears in many languages.
I teach Hindi to Italians and it's always fun to have them notice how the retroflex ra (ड़) sound is present in the Venetian dialect too...
Wow!
La "R di Marghera"?
Most people get it wrong when learning foreign sounds. If you can’t hear the sound, you won’t be able to make it. So the first stage is to listen to the language, and gradually you will start to build a representation of it in your brain. Once you have that, you can then start to make it yourself. For some sounds, such as both ch sounds in German, and the ll in Welsh, you might need some help from a native speaker - on UA-cam say - explaining the mechanics. And it often takes time, because you’re training your muscle memory. In other words, your tongue and mouth muscles are having to learn new movements, not unlike learning to ride a bike. In fact, an accent comes slowly, as your hearing and muscle memory improve. Sometimes you can’t make a sound until you get the timing and intonation correct. Even if your accent stinks, keep at it, keep working, you will get there. Oh, and native speakers are often not good teachers, they can be the worst, because it’s natural for them.
3:54 Ewe is considered on of the most difficult languages in Ghana. It doesn't just do that weird thing to the 'f' sound, it does it to 'd', 'v' and 'p' as well. It gives the language a characteristic sound as if the speaker's mouth is filled with food.
So best way to learn that language is to speak while you eating, funny challenge 😂
@@miloscarapic4502 🤣🤣you know what. this might actually work. time to learn it.
@@miloscarapic4502 It might be. Francophones say Anglophones sound like we're talking with potatoes in the mouth.
I was pretty shocked that French and English were included in this video, but Hungarian wasn't
The intervocalic T and D in American English in words like better and header is quite a rare sound and difficult to articulate for non-native speakers. I can even tell in movies that it's a British actor playing an American character when he or she sometimes let slip a not so quite genuine rendition of those sounds.
Yes, it’s by far the hardest sound.
From an Arab.
In fact, it’s the only sound I kind of struggle with.
You're talking about the voiced dental/alveolar tap, right? I thought it was a pretty common sound in a lot of languages. I know Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and some other languages use it.
@@katelinakeene7578 It's not exactly the same. The tap is ever more slight and with more aspiration in the American version. But yeah, I get what you mean, it does sound quite similar to the r in some variants of Spanish as well as Japanese, Korean and most dialects of Turkish.
@@elimalinsky7069 That tap sound or something very close, I believe can also be found in many European languages, namely Portuguese, Italian, French, German...
I found that the “gy” in Hungarian is a little tricky. The “sps” in English is a tough one (like in “lisps” or “crisps”)… always makes me laugh saying a word with an “sps” ending because it sounds so crazy 😂
Ollie, I swear I've heard my cat make some of these sounds! 🙃
😄
I'd like to say, that Czech consonant {ř} is mostly confused with polish dyphtong {rz}. In Czech {ř} makes sound like a [rʒ] while in Polish {rz} makes just [ʒ]. Recently in Polish existed a dyphtong {rż} that makes the Czech {ř} sound but it exactly has evolved to {rz}. Thete is also a letter {ż}, that also makes the sound [ʒ]. In Polish we have also a letter {ł} that stands for the sound [ŭ] or [w]. Polish is not a language, it's a mind state. And I say it while I'm actually a Pole.
Wrong, the "ř" in czech is [r̝] and the "rz/ż" in polish is [ʐ].
Hey Ollie, Japanese is definitely one the hardest languages to learn (for English speakers), but the one thing that isn’t that hard is the pronunciation
agreed. Japanese has the EASIEST pronunciation of basically any language.
What makes it difficult for English speakers isn’t exactly the pronunciation, but more so because of the three writing system: Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji. Similarily, both English and Japanese use intonation depending on the pitch accent
@@lostinstardust4228 The video is specifically about pronunciation though. He isn't talking about the writing systems.
I thought I was good but then I saw "っ" "えい" "おう" and "ん"
@@Okami_gris that’s not easy but I don’t think is enough to warrant a mention in this video
First of all, there is a missing letter in this sentence in 9:47:
"Soczewica, koło, miele, młyn" [Lentils, near or wheel, grinds, mill]
Second:
It is a real pity that most linguists never spoke about minority languages. Even when my native is Silesian I would like to share some news about Kashubian. It is a West Lechitic language that sounds awesome, but is hard to speak [Phonologic is more unique compared to other languages from this group]. Here is a sample:
ua-cam.com/video/NAYpp73_qG4/v-deo.html
Pozdrŏwiōm! Chōwcie siã!
Yesss, I'm waiting for some more videos about "unpopular" languages! Especially Silesian
Fun fact: The American NFL player Karl Kasule used to swear in Kashubian to avoid drawing a foul for bad language.
@@robertwilloughby8050 That's awesome and a cool way! 😎😎
I'm an American native speaker of English and I had to have speech therapy as a little kid to pronounce "th" correctly
This was a fun video! As a kid, I may or may not have been the bored kid in the classroom that would make all kinds of noises with my mouth…and never got caught🤣I thoroughly enjoyed attempting to make all those sounds!
That one American who didn’t even try and just said rodgrod med flod as if it were English 😂 most of them do that and then have the nerve to ask “am I saying that right?” 😂
I once made a constructed language that featured both /θ/ and /r̞/ in a /θr̞/ cluster. Best thing I've ever done 😂
Profile picture checks out
@@katakana1 You know what. That was brilliant haha
I thought i was the only one who made up their own language as a child 😂
@@idylla5972 Haha, me too. I made up my own alphabet so my mom would stop reading my diary.
if you are talking about the Czech "ř" than it's not /r̞/ in ipa but /r̝/
I say "Sixth" properly. 😁 Icelandic and I think Faroese also have the "Thorn" and "Eth" sounds, as well as that "tl"/"ll" sound in Navajo and Welsh (Tlingit has it too).
That's one of the nice things about Finnish; the pronunciation is very straightforward. It's the case system and consonant gradation that will get you.
Ayn is the sound that brings me to frustrated tears in my Arabic lessons xD I'll get it someday
The trick is listening. Listen to regular A then Ayn repeatedly until you hear the difference.
I did the same with B and P until I managed to do it lol
I have some advice for you, and I am of Arab origin, and I am happy to help you with the pronunciation of “ayn” in The Arabic language is that the letter “Ayn” comes out of the muscles that are used for vomiting, that is, from the stomach, if you notice that
@@user-mo2nj3qb3t OH MY FUCKING GODS THAT WORKS SO WELL THANK YOU
The Sicilian Language - and yes, it is a language, not a dialect of Italian, has roughly 9 sounds that are not found in Italian. One of the most difficult is DD as in the word “beddu” (beautiful). Even children of Sicilian immigrants have a hard time with it. It is basically like the D in English “good” but with a longer “stop”. This is extremely difficult for non-natives when it is an initial sound as in “ddà” - “there”.
Then there is the R. Similar to the Czech R, the TR, which has variations within it, the STR and the DR, similar but not quite like the DR of English “shrug” and “drug”.
Olly, I just returned, and this time around I learned via Wikipedia that Nexalk is also known by the name Bella Coola, and is on Canada's Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
A few weeks ago, I saw this word on a video here, and was so intrigued, I called the tribal office, and learned the following: Ka:’yu:’K’t’h’/Che:K’tles7et’h’ =
kah-you-kuh-CHECK-ul-seth, which is also on Vancouver Island.
I've been studying Georgian (used to live there a couple of years ago and will be moving back next month! 🇬🇪) and absolutely love the language. It's so beautiful and rich. I don't have too much trouble with the sounds except for that dreaded ყ sound. I can use it with an "a" vowel afterwards, but definitely struggle with following it with an "i" vowel. Oh well, just gotta practice and practice! ❤
The “Ы” sound in Russian is pretty hard for foreigners too. Probably the closest thing to it in English can be found in the phrase “go with it” (the second “i” sound)
quite frequent in English : most Americans pronounce Bill as Russian byl. last e in decided. Final Russian y as in Trotsky rhymes with Roxy.
@@MrMirville You mean something like the E in 'VErmont' or 'dElusion'?... just asking...
This vowel can be hard for english speakers. But in Scandinavian languages, for example, it is quite common.
This video brought some of my fav language content creators! Glad to see the language appreciation. Subscribed! Looking forward to more
Danish actually has four standard ways to pronounce d: hard (often in the start of a syllable, such as in "dansk", "Danmark"), soft (as demonstrated on the video, and which derives from an ð, so actually a variant of the th-sound found in English words like "leather"), silent (in front of an s or t as in "spids" or in "mareridt", or occasionally at the end of a word/syllable in some dialects, such as "mord" in Jutlandic) and as an epiglottal stop (often after a konsonant and at the end of a word as in "and" or "ild"). In some Jutlandic dialects, the soft d kan take on the character of a Danish j (similar to y in English) and on the island of Fyn it is often missed out completely. So yeah, we actually have lots of ways to pronounce d.
indeed, german Leder (leather) is quite soft D
@@walterweiss7124 not at all the same as the Danish soft d, which is the voiced dental approximate ð. The German d is always a d.
i think i as a swedish person managed to produce some of these sounds! my roommates are probably wondering why i'm doing weird random noises in the middle of the night.
I just make a regular English "f" sound when I want to say the syllable "fu" in Japanese. I can make the trilled "r" sound (famously used in Spanish), even at the end of a word, and can do the rounded and nasal vowels of French. The French "r" is the one sound in that language that I really can't do, I wonder how I sound to native speakers when I try to approximate it. Making foreign consonant and vowel sounds as a native English speaker is always a lot of fun. I particularly like the clicks of southern African languages, such as Xhosa (Nelson Mandela's first language).
I was learning Japanese before i quit but learning that fu sound as super easy. the moment they said the sound is between a h and a f i mate the correct sound quickly and accurately first try.
8:22 Actually in arabic we have something called قلقلة qalqala which is emphasising certain sounds and pronouncing them at the back of your throat so we know how to make this sound also
Pronunciation in Arabic isn't hard, but is challenging to sound like a native speaker. But the most challenging thing in Arabic are grammars, for example: "you" in English have a many shapes in Arabic:
أنتَ: you for mescaline singular
أنتِ: you for feminine singular
أنتما: for two persons mescaline or feminine
أنتم: for mescaline plural
أنتن: for feminine plural
In addition, In the verbs, there are three different ن we add at the end of verb, heavy emphasis نّ, light emphasis نْ and ن for feminine verbs, and every ن change the vowel of word, good luck for all 🙋♂️
So many things in Arabic are difficult for me: the alphabet, reading (especially signage), pronunciation, and grammar. I am also learning Japanese and Mandarin, and while both those languages have their challenges, nothing compares to Arabic. Arabic is completely kicking my a$$
@@evelynriedel2334
Arabic needs a lot of time, but after that you will notice that Arabic is very logical process. Moreover, nothing impossible even Arabic language. 💯
As a native speaker of one of turkiс languages, I can say that english pronunciation is a peace of cake 😋
the [ ř ] IS a sound you can find in spanish. it's mostly known as "assibilated r" and tend to occur when people with a Andean dialect pronounce word with s and r close together. Well some r at the end of a syllable sometimes turn into a ř, kinda randomly too.
I'm pretty sure some rare dialect in Greece is said to use a variation of it too.
It's also similar with one of the "r" variations we have in Costa Rican Spanish.
Turkish has the R with horns. Especially when the R is at the end of a syllable or a word, we make the exact same sound but we still spell it with a regular R.
Günler
Haftalar
Arkadaş
İrdele
Those r’s are the exact same sound with that one.
Japanese is one of the easiest languages pronunciation wise (the bilabial fricative literally takes seconds to learn). Everything else in Japanese is a nightmare though.
How are your moras? :)
@@marikothecheetah9342 If you can pronounce double consonants in Italian and long vowels in most European languages, they shouldn't be a problem. They may sound intimidating if you overmysticize them.
@@Tukemuth but... moras aren't about prolonging vowels or glottal stops... they are about pitch accent...
@@marikothecheetah9342 Pitch accent is something else entirely and it's definitely not a matter of life and death in Japanese unless you want to sound like a native, in which case good luck learning any language.
@@Tukemuth "When dictionaries give pitch accent, they'll usually indicate it with a number. The number tells you the mora where the last high pitch is." - yeah, totally different. And yes, I do want to speak like a native, what's wrong about it"? :/
Polish is such a beautiful language… I gave up learning it early on. Maybe I’ll revisit it.
North Caucasian languages like Chechen, Lezgian, and Kabardian would like to have a chat
Fr
Most Māori pronounce wh as simple f. Back in the 1960s, old Māori folk were saying they could remember when they were children, and even then the old folk pronounced as f. Comparison with other Polynesian languages indicates that it almost certainly was once a ɸ. There is a section of the western North Island where h is a glottal stop and wh is a glottalised w: I can't distinguish it from an ordinary w. I have heard a very few Māori pronounce it as ɸ - I think mainly from around the Bay of Plenty, but I could be mistaken.
Some older New Zealanders (myself included) pronounce the English wh (in "when", "what", etc) as ʍ, which to me is indistinguishable from ɸ. Exception: the wh in "wharf" is pronounced as an ordinary w.
I didn't expect our language, Japanese, to show up on this list. It's so easy to pronounce, including the "f" sound, which may be more of an "h" sound at times.
Americans have a strange kink with claiming that Japanese is difficult. I've been learning English for 25 years and Japanese for only 15 years, yet I sound completely natural in Japanese and people can't really tell on a phone while I gave up on attempting to sound natural in English - it's just too hard and messy, it feels like the sounds are endless and every word needs a separate pronounceation training, which is just too much
Actually to replicate Japanese accent is pretty easy, much easier than English or Russian with their random stress and up and down intonation and schwa sounds instead of clear vowels.
English is my second language and found it not too bad to learn, although I found french and German much easier. I think if you can learn Welsh you can speak anything.
Hungarian "gy" is also difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers.
so is the Hungarian "ty".
I knew x!óõ (Taa) would be here, it’s my favourite language, I mean I’m a British 14 year old so I don’t have a chance of speaking it but I think it sounds amazing.I think the term khoisan is a tad outdated because it groups together completely unrelated languages just because of region but im not entirely sure. A Good video though, it’s a language far too few know about.
Thank you so much for explaining why I’ve heard so many Brits pronounce sixth as sick-th! I was telling my sister about this recently (we’re Canadian so say six-th) and played the end of Ed Sheeran’s song Photograph (where I first noticed it) and she was floored and as confused as I was! 😂 Appreciate the new knowledge that I can now pass on!
Olly I am a high school student who wants to study with sex in college and entertainment degree from Columbia with this video you're helping me understand how linguistics works and how to get closer to my goal and learning every language so I read it I thank you
I think Slavis languages are hard to pronounce as a Korean American
i feel proud to be able to pronounce famous czech "r" (i'm polish btw)
Me too, I am Bulgarian though.
How similar is it to Polish “rz”?
@@hiberniancaveman8970
Nowadays there's no difference in pronouncation between Rz and Ż. Until XVII century Rz used to sound exactly like Ř. Now it's a relic in some dialects like Masurian.
@@AW-dt8ct *Now it's a relic in some vernacular languages like Masurian, Kashubian, and Silesian. 😁😁
As a southern Norwegian I always get tripped up by Danish because it's so close but yet so different and I couldn't quite figure out the missing link. Shame I found this video the day after coming home from Denmark, but hopefully I'll remember the tongue trick for next time
As a french person learning english everyday at school, I can tell, for my classmates, it is like...impossible challenge... the "sth-" sounds become "ze" and it goes on.... personally, I just know french and english in this list, but I am still searching for a language to learn to annoy my parents, so one of these may be perfect
My tactic for the czech Ř:
Im the word "Pleasure", say the phoneme "s", or in czech "Ž".
Then, say the phoneme "R", but as a strong trill, like the spanish one
And now, say R Ž, then faster and faster and faster, and you should get the czech Ř
Several years ago I went to the bank and, noticing that it was 14 juillet, asked the teller to say "qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons", a line from the Marseillaise. This contains all four nasal monophthongs, /ʁ/ (r grasseyé), /y/, and /œ/ (which is usually interchangeable with /ø/, but there is a minimal pair), all of which are impossible for monolingual Anglophones.
Many years ago, while proofreading translation files for a word processor, I found the phrase "wielkość czcionki" (font size), which has three confusingly similar affricates in succession.
/θ/ and /ð/ also occur in Greek.
Is there a video I have specifically for French vowel pronunciations?
my family's accent (comprised of monolingual spanish speakers only) has the czech Ř where normal spanish would have an initial R trill. and so i've always pronounced it like that so my native variety has 3 rhotics. only now I realize no one else I know other than them says it that way.
Ř is also in the kobon language. Also as a native czech I never heard the fairy tale.
In Persian 🇮🇷 we also have Czech R, ( ژ ) in some words like ( ژله ) = means jelly
Or some of our names like:
ژاله، روژینا ، روژان
Zhale, rozhina, rozhan
3:34 as a Turkish, Japanese pronunciations are easy. Because we have same pronunciation rules
as a native amharic speaker Georgian sounds are very easy to pronounce i mean like very easy
Попробуй произнести букву "ъ"
The /ř/ sound is quite extended in South American Spanish dialects and some western Brazilian Portuguese dialects, mainly from Ecuador to Paraguay and northern Argentina and northern Chile. Is an allophone for the /r/ in those dialects. To my northern-Mexican ears, sounds as a retracted s (/s̠/ from northern Spain, Greek or Finnish) but voiced.
As a Bharatiya, people don't know that Sanskrit pronounciation is even harder for its speakers, especially the sounds ṅ and ṃ, as well as ṛ
Hehe. 9:40 reminds me of the legend that the Flemish in the war against the French in early 14th Century, had their password be "schild en vriend". Those who had trouble pronouncing it correctly had their head cut off.
One thing that really makes it hit home how amazing the human brain is when it comes to languages is ironically learning computer programming and specifically how compilers work. We have symbols (letters) that can be pronounced in countless different ways and even if mispronounced, the listener can commonly still understand what's being said and when it comes to writing the symbols can be switched around, left out and replaced with others quite extensively and still be intelligible. We can even say the exact same thing but convey different meaning through tone of voice and even further by adding facial expressions and body language. When writing software on the other hand, you can't make a single mistake before the compiler get's tripped up.
Imagine you're saying "pretty please" in polish put end up saying "pretty pig"
piglet, indeed, similar with hungarian cheers! where it sounds like "ass" if you mispronounce :))
The adjective part is different in those two cases (pięknie proszę vs piękne prosię - note the lack of i in the second which means different sound). Most native speakers would be clued by this. Unless this is something you also unable to pronounce.
поставить ы на превьюшку и не рассказать о русском - грех
Some words in Circassian (or Adygea) are also very hard to pronounce
Welsh has a few other sounds that are a bit tricky to pronounce, like rh [r̥], mh [m̥], nh [n̥] and ngh [ŋ̊]. For example, my dog is fy nghi [və ŋ̊iː], and in Pwllheli is ym Mhwllheli [əm m̥ʊɬˈhɛli]. Now try Rhedodd fy nghi ym Mhwllheli efo fy nhad (My dog ran in Pwllheli with my dad).
My mother is Georgian and I'm learning Georgian too, and while certainly not the easiest I didn't expect Georgian to be on this list. Apart from whatever hellspawn in the garden of Eden "ღ" is and the fact that ც and შ sound the exact same to me (though according to my mom I do pronounce both correctly, idk how that works but I'm certainly not complaining) it's actually not that bad and that's coming from someone that already has problems pronouncing things in my native language and English
Man, I love knowing all about languages (even though I only know 2) and seeing all those different sounds. I didn't have such a hard time getting the pronunciation of Ayin or ř and I say, when you get the hang of it, is not really that difficult, anyone can do it.
It's interesting and weird to see different sounds, and different sounds so difficult to pronounce. I find it more difficult to pronounce the "r" that isn't in English or rolled/trilled. Danish is so difficult in the pronunciation, more so than in French, and with even more silent letters than in French. "Though" in the "th" is how to pronounce the "d" in Spanish. The Czech one of the r with a written accent on top was once ranked the most difficult character in the world to pronounce. Only in English does a spelling bee exist. I am interested in Georgian to learn and I have begun to learn it.
Mongolian also has that sound that exists in Welsh and Navajo.
Wow, that's cool!
I am a Portuguese who has studied 7 languages, although I'm only fluent in 5 of them, and there will, very probably, be an 8th one in my future when I move to Thailand. I effortlessly reproduced all the sounds I saw in your video within 3 or 4 tries. Nevertheless, I gave up on trying some of the sequences of 4, 5, or more chained sounds in some of the languages the speakers displayed. Language is an amazing thing, no matter the sound of it.
I looooove polish! Am learning polish at the moment
"So-che-vi-tsa kowo mee-ele mwy" ;)
And "vwo-swa-vek"
I don't find pronun hard til i hit words like prszeprasam with 4 or 5 consonants in a row haha
Hmm like a man which already tried to speak with different people from Poland in Polish I can proof that Polish pronunciation really not so effortless for foreign people who learning this language but I for example already used to speak in this language and also pronounce these different languages and remember only one this skill will come to you eventually. Just continue learning this language
Haha, most of my friends can't pronounce the English "th" sound. Even the ones who speak a good English, and sometimes it doesn't even feel close to me.
Another difficult sound is the "w" sound which doesn't exist in most European languages. Usually it is substituted by a "v" sound. Here the thing is that the sound itself is not very difficult to pronounce but it is fairly close to the "v" sound so many people don't pick up the difference.
I learned some Czech in the past, I didn't get too far, but I think I can pronounce the ř sound pretty well. It is the hardest at the beginning or words (the r+ʒ approximation doesn't really work in that case), and it is also quite tricky in consonant clusters (like Střibro).
The Welsh ll sound is not particularly difficult, I think, but it sounds very weird, especially the voiced one. I never learned any Welsh though.
To me, who speaks Finnish natively, it has been sometimes commented that by international students that the Finnish language is pronunciation hell when we happen to talk about it (which is not common). The Finnish language includes letters that foreign speakers fail to pronounce in Finnish because they are pronounced differently in their languages: E, G, I, J, O, R, U, Y, Ä, Ö and pronouncing D as ð. In addition to these, many foreigners also seem to have difficulties pronouncing the letter combinations ss, tt, ts, ht, ng, oo, uu, ou, au, eu, ai, ei, yö and äe in Finnish and for some this slows down their language learning. But yeah, then there are also languages that are more difficult to pronounce than Finnish, like the ones well mentioned in the list of the video.
One stumbling block in terms of pronunciation is, for example, the name Spede, which is not pronounced like the word "speed". If you want to know how to pronounce the name Spede correctly, for example, write the Spede into google translate and set the pronunciation to Finnish.
languages of Northern Caucasus next please
Random thought: when did "take the biscuit" morph into "take the cake"?
In Arabic I find the sad ص, dad ض and ظ more difficult. I even don't hear the difference. The ع ق ح is so apparent, that after struggling in the beginning the moment I got it right I got it perfectly.
I'm Albanian, we actually have TH as a separate letter to T.
Same in Arabic
Écureil sounds like squirrel in Swedish, ekorre. I noticed that you pronounce the s-sound as the retracted-s, like how the Icelandic, the Finnish, the Spanish, the Greek and the Danish pronounce "s". Some people in China do this, too. In Northeast China, we have two click sounds similar with the Khoisan language in our dialect, often used in rural regions.
Something I like to do to practice difficult sounds is to come up with a tongue twister that uses a lot of them. For example, I’m learning Biblical Hebrew (which was pronounced differently from modern Hebrew) and it has a sound that it shares with Arabic, that’s kind of like an H, but it’s pronounced further back in the throat. In Hebrew it’s written with the letter ח (het). So once my Hebrew got good enough to where I could construct grammatical sentences in my head, I came up with a tongue twister to practice that ח (het) sound.
Here’s the tongue twister I came up with:
חמשה חמורים אחרי הירח
“Five donkeys behind the moon.”
I would say that Hmong has really tough pronunciation. A huge number of Hmong vowel and consonant sounds simply don't exist in English. Combine that with ~8 different tones, and you have a pronunciation nightmare.
I find it funny how the hardest French word for English speakers to pronounce is also often the hardest English word for French speakers to pronounce lol