Yeah but in the rest of Europe Normandy isn't such a famous region as it is in Britain, it has to do with your history, you lot being invaded by Normandy and such.
@@Nabium I'm not British, but I asume you're talking about 1066, the battle of Hastings? I wasn't really even thinking about that, more along the lines of WW2 and D-day, which is way more well known. Certainly in Britain, but in most of the western world as well.
@@Eis_Bear Ah fair. I didn't even think about the Normandy landing. Sorry for assuming you were British. Where are you from? [edit: I'm assuming German, based on your speeling of ice in your name] But of course, when I was in Normandy there were a huge load of tourists going to see war time stuff. While I was mostly excited to go see a medieval blanket depicting William the Bastard's invasion in a museum that didn't have any other visitors. So I might be biased. Also, as a Norwegian I mostly associate Normandy with Gange-Rolf(Rollo), and the Norse settlement.
@1969peace they surveyed 100 people not 1 person and those counties all boarder the UK. I could imagine if you asked any German to name the French regions that border Germany, they would have no problem doing it.
@@ronancarr Northern Ireland is essentially a foreign country to the vast majority of Brits who live in one of the other three countries of the UK. So it's more like asking Germans to name the Italian regions that border Austria than it is to name the French regions that border Germany.
I don’t know how only 43 people knew Normandy was in France that is not only bad Geography but bad History as well . The Irish one was shocking as well
Unbelievable that only 43 people knew France, 11 knew the Netherlands and 10 knew Portugal (to only say a few). I’m from Costa Rica and I knew all of them, except Ireland (Finland, Norway and Hungary were guesses based on the language)
Portugal and Andorra were the ones I was most uncertain of. I recognised names of at least one of the regions on all other ones except Hungary which luckily is the easiest to guess by just language. Norway vs Denmark and Finland vs Estonia make those difficult to guess based on language if you don't know the regions I'd say.
Funny thing is for some i’ve never heard of but purely by name structure i can kinda understand where it can be. Like Aveiro sounds very Portugese to me. Also that Maa thing is very common in Finland.
This is embarrassing and revealing. But what it reveals isn't so much that British people don't know Europe. I think most Europeans would have a hard time naming regions in any countries other than a few big obvious ones (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, basically) as well. What it reveals is that British people don't know any languages. And I don't even mean know languages as in "know how to speak them". They don't even know *about* them. Don't know how they look when written, how they sound, anything about them. 'Cause this is what should make this task easy. How can you look at "Burgenland, Steiermark, Tirol" and think it's Dutch? How can you not recognize Hungarian and Finnish, two of the most unique and recognizable languages in Europe? How don't you see the "do" in "Viana do Castelo" and think Portuguese? I don't get it. You don't have to have studied any of these languages, I certainly haven't. But how can you grow up in Europe and not be confronted with these languages to an extent that's enough to recognize them?
It might be somewhat relevant, but in the UK our media is predominantly either British or American. We are simply not exposed to foreign languages. For example, when I go to Portugal every year it's very common to hear French music on the radio, or see Polish and German soap operas on TV. Stromae is completely unknown in the UK despite being absolutely massive in Europe for example. There are many, many more examples. We simply do not encounter foreign language media. It's a shame as some of my favourite musicians and TV shows are foreign, but it simply is what it is. It's partially a curse of having so much of the world friendly to the english language, and the prevalence of english-language media.
You answered your own question really with "How can you grow up in Europe?". We didn't grow up in Europe - we grew up in the UK. And I don't mean that in a "grrr Brexit" way. I mean that there is (unfortunately) some level of shared European culture that seems to get stuck at the English Channel and never made it this far. We are not confronted with these languages. Whatever life you led that exposed you to these isn't the same experience we've had. I've never been to Finland, or met a Finnish person, or eaten Finnish food, etc. etc. It's never turned up in my daily life ever. Why would I know what Finnish looks like unless I specifically sought it out?
Brits have a huge disadvantage when it comes to languages. Which is that virtually everyone else learns our language (due to the size of our empire and the current global dominance of one of our former colonies), which inevitably makes us bad at learning other peoples' languages.
@@SeeMyVesp I don't think it's because you didn't "grow up" with the culture. I think it's because British people usually only speak English. When you're able to speak 2+ languages you start to realize what makes your languages/culture different and can extrapolate from that. If you only speak English, it might be difficult to distinguish languages. If you speak English/French, you know Groningen is not in a Romance country and must be Germanic (because it sounds more similar to English than French). If you speak English/Dutch, you know Grand Est is in a Romance country because it sounds more similar to English than Dutch (as English as had more French/Latin influence). You've seen other languages in media, you just skimmed over them because they're all the same to you because you're monolingual.
3:59 - Except Braga and Bragança are completely different places. Also, those aren't regions, they're cities. Regions of Portugal would be places like Algarve, Alentejo, Minho, etc..
they're distritos, which are the first level administrative subdivisions of Portugal, which was what they were going for with "regions" for all of the other countries.
@@JoaoPMFerreira - Nope. Tirol (Austria) isn't a municipal district. Cantabria (Spain) isn't a municipal district. Calabria (Italy) isn't a municipal district. And so on. All of those are what the EU calls "NUTS2 regions". And the question and video title clearly say "regions", not "administrative divisions". Look up "NUTS_statistical_regions_of_Portugal" on Wikipedia for a list of regions as defined per EU rules. There's also an article called "List_of_regions_and_sub-regions_of_Portugal". Districts are an administrative sub-division of sub-regions (which are NUTS3).
@@RFC3514 The meaning of the word "region" covers a lot more than the relatively new concept of statistical regions, including administrative divisions, which usually correspond to historical regions a lot better anyways.
@@agostonschranz8810 - "the relatively new concept of statistical regions" is *based on existing, well-established regions.* They weren't just pulled out of thin air, those are the official EU statistical regions because they are what _the people living there_ classify as regions. For most countries, those were exactly what they picked for this question. Tirol, Calabria, etc. They didn't just pick some random administrative districts, they picked regions. And British contestants would be far more likely to recognise actual _regions_ (like "Algarve" or "Alentejo") than administrative districts (which are all named after cities) like Bragança or Aveiro, which no one calls "regions". One can literally find *an official map of the regions of Portugal* in ten seconds. And if they wanted to be even more "historical", they could have looked up a map of _provinces_ of Portugal, which are the predecessors of (and have very similar names to) present-day regions and sub-regions. None of those are the same as districts.
@@agostonschranz8810 - You can find a "map of the regions and sub-regions of Portugal" (which are based on historical provinces) in less than ten seconds. They're a completely different concept from districts (which aren't "historical" at all, they're just the area around each major city, defined for judicial and electoral purposes). EU statistical regions are based on those historical regions, they weren't just pulled out of thin air.
I used to live in Andorra so I got SO excited when it came up because I knew it for sure, if I was on there I would've picked it 100% because it's an answer that practically no one would know unless they'd been in Andorra and knew the country pretty well.
It has different Parishes. They're kinda like municipalities basically. Andorra is not *that* tiny and is very mountainous so, historically, before all the money allowed them to connect them, all of the villages were rather secluded.
@realhawaii5o As a French-speaking Canadian, I'm familiar with parishes becoming formal municipalities (there are lots of them in Québec), but in a country our size, no one would ever think of a typical municipality (much less one called a "parish") as a "region". If you're a tiny country, though...
@@beorlingo I know, but I forgot about Andorra whilst playing the game in my mind which is rather silly of me. As a linguist all names sound extremely Catalonian to me
Easy peasy Did it in literally 30s. If you can recognise the language you can immediately tell the country. Trickier are the German speaking countries but if you know geography well you can manage to answer correctly.
Andorran language doesn't exist. They speak Catalan there. And yes, I can recognise Catalan. I can speak Italian, French and I can understand spoken and written Spanish quite well and I could tell that was neither Spanish nor French. Then if you know geography you know those are not Spanish and French regions.
Alexander confused me with his pronunciation in the first one because he pronounced SZ as “sh” like in Polish. I knew it couldn’t be Polish because of the V instead of W so that made me think it must be Czechia or Slovakia. SZ in Hungarian is just pronounced /s/.
Also, s by itself is pronounced /sh/ and a is pronounced somewhat as in 'hot'. I don't know why both Alexander and Richard pronounced Occitanie a 'Ossi...' instead of 'Oks...'. I suppose they pronounce 'flaccid' with soft c's too. Not that I should care too much about pronunciations, as I don't expect foreign speakers to sound English when they pronounce English placenames.
@@brewitbear It’s the same on ‘House of Games’. Richard has a good idea of some languages’ orthography but is awful at others. It’s not like a random foreigner pronouncing British placenames, because (1) most other countries’ names can be pronounced by just knowing a few spelling rules and (2) these are educated media professionals. If I can roughly pronounce any word from any regularly spelt European language, they ought to be able to too.
@@icturner23 Thank you for that. I have to agree. I had excused Richard and Alexander because I put them in the same boat as the average bloke. But, yes, if they are presenting a show where common foreign language text appears, they should take the trouble to to at least learn the rules that apply to 'regular' text; and some languages seem to be consistently phonetic, so there does not seem to be much trouble to take. Alexander, in particular, has made an effort with Spanish and Italian pronunciation. His is much better than mine.
Not sure what I find more astonishing - the lack of knowledge of British people or the fact that Andorrans thought "hey, this country is soooo big, let's divide it into regions" 😂
Never heard of it, tbh. I knew all the other regions (a couple were guesses based on language), but Norway I did not know. Based on "Finnmark" I assumed it has to be Norway or Sweden, but that's it
@@tinkywinky8558 Sorry. My knowledge of WWII is relatively limited. I've never heard of the battle (campaign?) you mention - but I did cross-country ski a fair bit in my youth (before my knees started giving way...) Were cross-country skis involved? (If so, I know about the Finnish winter resistance to a Soviet invasion in/around 1940 that did involve infantry on skis, but don't know about any of the names of its battles, etc.)
I thought this was some kind of april fools episode at first, but I was literally shocked to find out that this was a serious challenge for these ADULTS to proceed with elementary school level geography 🤦🏻♂️. Quite sad to be honest.
Every single one was easy apart from Row 3... Have a few ideas, but genuinely unsure 'maybe Slovenia or Bulgaria' going for a semi-out there one a little bit?
I’m Hungarian born in Canada, and I got all 14 correct. You can deduce a lot by knowing and being familiar with not only geography but the languages as well.
Is the concept of the show to be a little bit more informed about the outside of UK? Brits really should be on their own. Probably only the English, I don't know who participates.
It is a piece of cake. I am really surprised they did not know the correct answers. Their language is English and mine is not and I would win over these contestants.
Their language is English... so what? These region names were not in English. The show host even had to guess how to pronounce them, sometimes not knowing the pronunciation.
The only one I guessed wrong was Andorra. My thought proces was similar to the man with a glasses but I decided for Belgium and I was thinking that during their reign in Benelux they named some of the regions there. Funny thing I was in Andorra once just forget about this regions.
Looking at this and feeling smug, until I realized "oh wait I knew the hard ones because I live close to them..." Did not get Andorra Ireland and Spain. Hungary was a bit of a guess, but I knew it wasn't Poland.
So they gave him pronunciation guides for the Hungarian ones but let him butcher Steiermark, huh? But Richard is totally right that football fandom helps immensely here. Even for the Andorra ones, FC Encamp also played in the qualifying stages of the UEFA Cup in the early 00s.
Yeah, Andorra is the only one I might not have gotten had I not known the football clubs. Otherwise this was fairly simple, Idk how they don't see some obvious languages like Hungarian or Finnish in those words
considering the monumental battles that turned the tide of WW2, there is ZERO excuse for nearly anyone in Europe to not know Normandie (Normandy) is in France
I am from Eastern Europe, not even in the same part of the Continent (aside from maybe Hungary) as these and guessed them as he read them. Edit: I'm going to be honest, I did get Portugal wrong and couldn't be sure of Andorra on my initial guess but figured it out based on the rest of them.
@@goblue1117 That makes more sense, since Luzern would definitely be the one out of those three cantons that football fans would recognise thanks to FC Luzern (Ice hockey fans would recognize Zug more)
Each largeish town is a region. Andorra has several valleys, so each is their own region, plus one which they created relatively recently. They call them parròquies, which means "parish". Not dissimilar to some Caribbean islands. Even today the heads of state are the bishop of Urgell and the president of France (a bit like the kings in england where they technically rule, but not really), so another connection there.
That was what threw me off about it. I am an economist working on EU, and everything was super easy as I often work at the regional level. However I had never seen those regions. Indeed, Andorra does not have any region recognized by NUTS (the EU classification of European regions). The 6 "regions" mentioned are actually parishes, and they are as large or smaller than municipalities in other countries.
All of them? I didn't know a few of those myself (Andorra, I guessed Sweden instead of Norway, Ireland). And I also wouldn't always have gotten the relative obviousness right. For example, I thought Spain would have scored higher as sooo many Brits visit Spain.
@@pedluc2010 - For most other countries they picked actual regions (like Tirol, Calabria, and so on). The equivalent in Portugal would be provinces (or the new EU-defined NUTS2 regions, which are based on those provinces), not municipal districts. No one would say "the city of Braga is in the Braga *region",* that's redundant. If you open the Wikipedia article about "historical regions" and then click on "Portugal", you get the list of provinces (Alentejo, Algarve, and so on). British contestants would be much more likely to recognise those than some random northern cities.
@@robertfoulkes1832 - Neither of them writes the questions, though. I get the feeling that Fry sometimes convinces himself that he's an expert on something just because he was given some notes about it. Maybe it comes from being an actor, he "gets into character" a bit too much. Richard usually seems more aware of his limitations. He's really good at UK geography, country borders, flags and capitals. Beyond that, he mainly knows about his job (TV production). I think he's the first to admit he knows very little about natural sciences, maths, foreign languages, and so on.
How is this so difficult for people? Tirol is a dead give away for Austria. I can't even describe how easy France is, despite the names being French, Normandy is literally there. The third I knew because of Sligo. I can't imagine this is hard for British people, it's literally your only neighbour. Germany beyond easy. Don't understand the issue. Especially Saarland is very famous. Aveiro and Bragança are obviously Portuguese. Even if you didn't know Viana do Castelo sounds very Iberian, and 'do' is Portuguese. Penultimate one might be a bit hard, but the 'sz' in Veszprem is a giveaway it's likely Hungarian. It could be Polish, but Somogy doesn't zound Polish. The last one had unique spelling, it's either Finnish or Estonian. But they wouldn't ask Estonia. I didn't even watch the video to see if I have it correct, just got mad after France had 43 points.
Man, this country's insistence on geographical ignorance does annoy me. I can appreciate not everybody knows all of these, but even a little knowledge or recognition of other languages goes a very long way.
No one said it was Scandinavian tho - it’s Nordic which is different. Scandinavia is a peninsula and technically only Sweden and Norway are Scandinavian.
@@sv-bd5em The point was that Finnish really doesn't sound anything like the Scandinavian languages. Therefore saying "it sounds Nordic" is a bad way to describe it. It either sounded Scandinavian, or it sounded finnish/estonian/finno-ugric.
Cavan Leitrim and Sligo are counties, 2 of them are in Connaught and one in Ulster, they are not regions, and have no connection to each other, Sligo Leitrim is an electoral constituency, but no connection to Cavan. Probably just picked 3 random counties
There were plans to merge them. I think Berlin voted yes in the referendum, and Brandenburg voted no, because they feared they'd end up with fewer resources.
Everyone talking about how awful these contestants are, but I did even worse. 😭 I could do capital cities or place countries on a map, but I’ve barely heard of any of these regions.
tbh, its not so much about having heard about the regions, its more like how can you deduct them based on spelling. Its actually harder for countries that only speak one certain languague and aren't really invested in speaking something else. Like, the UK, they pre-dominantly speak English but little else. But for me personally, i am Dutch, so for me its actually easier, since we aren't only taught Dutch and English at school, but in some cases also German, France, Italian, Portguese or Spanish. So then it because easier to deduct languagues based on their spelling. Like, when i saw both lists, i could easily cross them off, except for Hungary. Took me a little to deduct it, since i way like, its either Hungarian, Slovenian or Slovakian, but then i was like: Its probably Hungarian, because Slovakia and Slovenia aren't as old of countries as Hungary.
@ It sounds like the key is to know a little about several languages. A typical Brit will have some knowledge of French, and maybe German or Spanish top. But they’ll know nothing of the plethora of other European languages/cultures. What you’re saying reminds me of Geoguesser where people can deduce a country based on roadsigns or adverts. And I actually do speak another language semi-decently, but it’s Chinese. 😭
Because it's irrelevant to learn about regions of Europe, it won't help you in life at all. Thay being said, most people in all countries wouldn't know the answers.
This kinda explains Brexit I think, if only 43% of the audience recognise Normandy as a Region of France.. Shocking really..
It did say Normandie but that shouldn’t matter. Grand Est should also be good clue.
Even worse that only 33% knew that Brandenburg was in Germany. I refuse to believe these people are real.
Yeah but in the rest of Europe Normandy isn't such a famous region as it is in Britain, it has to do with your history, you lot being invaded by Normandy and such.
@@Nabium I'm not British, but I asume you're talking about 1066, the battle of Hastings? I wasn't really even thinking about that, more along the lines of WW2 and D-day, which is way more well known. Certainly in Britain, but in most of the western world as well.
@@Eis_Bear Ah fair. I didn't even think about the Normandy landing.
Sorry for assuming you were British. Where are you from? [edit: I'm assuming German, based on your speeling of ice in your name]
But of course, when I was in Normandy there were a huge load of tourists going to see war time stuff. While I was mostly excited to go see a medieval blanket depicting William the Bastard's invasion in a museum that didn't have any other visitors. So I might be biased.
Also, as a Norwegian I mostly associate Normandy with Gange-Rolf(Rollo), and the Norse settlement.
As a continental European I think it's crazy how difficult this is for these contestants.
You can deduce a lot from the makeup of the word as Richard said
@@nicflayyes!
Uusima sounded Polish to one of these people....
Indeed crazy, thought this was an easy one
The British appear not to be aware of the existence of Hungary. Fascinating, really.
as a german who recognized the irish regions i was shocked by how few britains seem to have basic knowledge of ireland
Yes me too.
@@1969peaceyeah but only 28 of the audience got it
@1969peace they surveyed 100 people not 1 person and those counties all boarder the UK. I could imagine if you asked any German to name the French regions that border Germany, they would have no problem doing it.
And how badly he pronounced cavan
@@ronancarr Northern Ireland is essentially a foreign country to the vast majority of Brits who live in one of the other three countries of the UK. So it's more like asking Germans to name the Italian regions that border Austria than it is to name the French regions that border Germany.
Just going to book a holiday in the netherlands tyrol area...
They even have a famous song about the Dutch Mountains from the band the nits
Honestly, they do almost sound dutch it you've never heard of them.
@@FYYTWYFN Is it anything like "The dikes are alive, with the sound of music..."?
Skiing there is the best!
I don’t know how only 43 people knew Normandy was in France that is not only bad Geography but bad History as well . The Irish one was shocking as well
I expect that people never thought of Ireland because they are thinking of continental Europe (English persons looking east, not west)
Playing it "safe" when they scored 100 in the first half 😂
Like they’ve never watched the show before 🤦♂️
She must like to live dangerously :)
I think she just wanted to avoid a 200 point humiliation.
“Looks a little bit Spanish and a little bit French” is exactly how I got that one right lmao
It's catalan i guess
Lappi, Pohjanmaa and Uusimaa? Totally sounds like Polish, Kevin 😂😂
Polish, famous for its vowels
3:58 Braga is a whole other region from Bragança xd
they do have the same roots though
Unbelievable that only 43 people knew France, 11 knew the Netherlands and 10 knew Portugal (to only say a few). I’m from Costa Rica and I knew all of them, except Ireland (Finland, Norway and Hungary were guesses based on the language)
As a hungarian, I surprised that you recognised our language...
Portugal and Andorra were the ones I was most uncertain of. I recognised names of at least one of the regions on all other ones except Hungary which luckily is the easiest to guess by just language. Norway vs Denmark and Finland vs Estonia make those difficult to guess based on language if you don't know the regions I'd say.
Funny thing is for some i’ve never heard of but purely by name structure i can kinda understand where it can be.
Like Aveiro sounds very Portugese to me. Also that Maa thing is very common in Finland.
Yeah i had never heard about the hungarian and finnish regions but i just guessed by the language (although finnish could've easily been estonian tbf)
@@tugabooganah look at some estonian it looks different as well
@@----xo2bm tbf not really, unless you speak the language, it would look really similar
This is embarrassing and revealing. But what it reveals isn't so much that British people don't know Europe. I think most Europeans would have a hard time naming regions in any countries other than a few big obvious ones (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, basically) as well. What it reveals is that British people don't know any languages. And I don't even mean know languages as in "know how to speak them". They don't even know *about* them. Don't know how they look when written, how they sound, anything about them. 'Cause this is what should make this task easy. How can you look at "Burgenland, Steiermark, Tirol" and think it's Dutch? How can you not recognize Hungarian and Finnish, two of the most unique and recognizable languages in Europe? How don't you see the "do" in "Viana do Castelo" and think Portuguese? I don't get it. You don't have to have studied any of these languages, I certainly haven't. But how can you grow up in Europe and not be confronted with these languages to an extent that's enough to recognize them?
It might be somewhat relevant, but in the UK our media is predominantly either British or American. We are simply not exposed to foreign languages. For example, when I go to Portugal every year it's very common to hear French music on the radio, or see Polish and German soap operas on TV.
Stromae is completely unknown in the UK despite being absolutely massive in Europe for example. There are many, many more examples. We simply do not encounter foreign language media. It's a shame as some of my favourite musicians and TV shows are foreign, but it simply is what it is. It's partially a curse of having so much of the world friendly to the english language, and the prevalence of english-language media.
You answered your own question really with "How can you grow up in Europe?". We didn't grow up in Europe - we grew up in the UK. And I don't mean that in a "grrr Brexit" way. I mean that there is (unfortunately) some level of shared European culture that seems to get stuck at the English Channel and never made it this far. We are not confronted with these languages. Whatever life you led that exposed you to these isn't the same experience we've had.
I've never been to Finland, or met a Finnish person, or eaten Finnish food, etc. etc. It's never turned up in my daily life ever. Why would I know what Finnish looks like unless I specifically sought it out?
It could have been Finnish or Estonian: I needed Lappi to separate them.
Brits have a huge disadvantage when it comes to languages. Which is that virtually everyone else learns our language (due to the size of our empire and the current global dominance of one of our former colonies), which inevitably makes us bad at learning other peoples' languages.
@@SeeMyVesp I don't think it's because you didn't "grow up" with the culture. I think it's because British people usually only speak English. When you're able to speak 2+ languages you start to realize what makes your languages/culture different and can extrapolate from that. If you only speak English, it might be difficult to distinguish languages.
If you speak English/French, you know Groningen is not in a Romance country and must be Germanic (because it sounds more similar to English than French). If you speak English/Dutch, you know Grand Est is in a Romance country because it sounds more similar to English than Dutch (as English as had more French/Latin influence). You've seen other languages in media, you just skimmed over them because they're all the same to you because you're monolingual.
Funny how much football helps you learn geography 😁
I know right.
Like the club Lazio. Which is directly the name of the province the city Rome lies in
Youd think these contestants were American by how little they knew
well our closest countries are other wealthy English speaking nations...
Considering since voting in Thatcher England has been doing its best to copy the worst of the USA that absolutely checks out.
Your avarage Englishman isn't that smarter than your avarage American.
Brits are the Americans of Europe
Why are Europeans so obsessed with America?
For once, my obsessive research into Andorra pays off....
3:59 - Except Braga and Bragança are completely different places. Also, those aren't regions, they're cities. Regions of Portugal would be places like Algarve, Alentejo, Minho, etc..
they're distritos, which are the first level administrative subdivisions of Portugal, which was what they were going for with "regions" for all of the other countries.
@@JoaoPMFerreira - Nope. Tirol (Austria) isn't a municipal district. Cantabria (Spain) isn't a municipal district. Calabria (Italy) isn't a municipal district. And so on.
All of those are what the EU calls "NUTS2 regions". And the question and video title clearly say "regions", not "administrative divisions".
Look up "NUTS_statistical_regions_of_Portugal" on Wikipedia for a list of regions as defined per EU rules. There's also an article called "List_of_regions_and_sub-regions_of_Portugal". Districts are an administrative sub-division of sub-regions (which are NUTS3).
@@RFC3514 The meaning of the word "region" covers a lot more than the relatively new concept of statistical regions, including administrative divisions, which usually correspond to historical regions a lot better anyways.
@@agostonschranz8810 - "the relatively new concept of statistical regions" is *based on existing, well-established regions.* They weren't just pulled out of thin air, those are the official EU statistical regions because they are what _the people living there_ classify as regions.
For most countries, those were exactly what they picked for this question. Tirol, Calabria, etc. They didn't just pick some random administrative districts, they picked regions.
And British contestants would be far more likely to recognise actual _regions_ (like "Algarve" or "Alentejo") than administrative districts (which are all named after cities) like Bragança or Aveiro, which no one calls "regions".
One can literally find *an official map of the regions of Portugal* in ten seconds. And if they wanted to be even more "historical", they could have looked up a map of _provinces_ of Portugal, which are the predecessors of (and have very similar names to) present-day regions and sub-regions. None of those are the same as districts.
@@agostonschranz8810 - You can find a "map of the regions and sub-regions of Portugal" (which are based on historical provinces) in less than ten seconds. They're a completely different concept from districts (which aren't "historical" at all, they're just the area around each major city, defined for judicial and electoral purposes). EU statistical regions are based on those historical regions, they weren't just pulled out of thin air.
I used to live in Andorra so I got SO excited when it came up because I knew it for sure, if I was on there I would've picked it 100% because it's an answer that practically no one would know unless they'd been in Andorra and knew the country pretty well.
Hang on! How could a tiny place like Andorra have REGIONS??? It barely has neighbourhoods...
I'm curious about Monaco now...
It has different Parishes. They're kinda like municipalities basically.
Andorra is not *that* tiny and is very mountainous so, historically, before all the money allowed them to connect them, all of the villages were rather secluded.
@realhawaii5o As a French-speaking Canadian, I'm familiar with parishes becoming formal municipalities (there are lots of them in Québec), but in a country our size, no one would ever think of a typical municipality (much less one called a "parish") as a "region".
If you're a tiny country, though...
Andorra is a lot bigger than Vatican or Liechtenstein, it takes around 1.5 - 2 hours to drive through the country depending on traffic and snow.
I mean cities have destricts so why cant a small countries have admisitrative divisions (here they work as regions ig)
I thought the Andorran sounded very catalan but didnt think they would put catalonia down. It being andorra explains a lot.
They do speak Catalan in Andorra
@@beorlingo I know, but I forgot about Andorra whilst playing the game in my mind which is rather silly of me. As a linguist all names sound extremely Catalonian to me
@@MrAdrien1999 personally, I figured Andorra would be too small to have regions.
@@beorlingo The mountains/valleys split it up somewhat.
@@beorlingo - In my experience, each person you meet in Andorra speaks a different language.
As a Brit I’m actually embarrassed at the lack of knowledge here…
Brit also, either I am good at geography or these contestants are ignorant.
It has nothing to do with being British, most people in all countires have limited general knowledge.
Easy peasy
Did it in literally 30s. If you can recognise the language you can immediately tell the country. Trickier are the German speaking countries but if you know geography well you can manage to answer correctly.
You recognized the Andorran language?
Andorran language doesn't exist. They speak Catalan there. And yes, I can recognise Catalan. I can speak Italian, French and I can understand spoken and written Spanish quite well and I could tell that was neither Spanish nor French. Then if you know geography you know those are not Spanish and French regions.
Alexander confused me with his pronunciation in the first one because he pronounced SZ as “sh” like in Polish. I knew it couldn’t be Polish because of the V instead of W so that made me think it must be Czechia or Slovakia. SZ in Hungarian is just pronounced /s/.
Also, s by itself is pronounced /sh/ and a is pronounced somewhat as in 'hot'. I don't know why both Alexander and Richard pronounced Occitanie a 'Ossi...' instead of 'Oks...'. I suppose they pronounce 'flaccid' with soft c's too. Not that I should care too much about pronunciations, as I don't expect foreign speakers to sound English when they pronounce English placenames.
@@brewitbear It’s the same on ‘House of Games’. Richard has a good idea of some languages’ orthography but is awful at others.
It’s not like a random foreigner pronouncing British placenames, because (1) most other countries’ names can be pronounced by just knowing a few spelling rules and (2) these are educated media professionals. If I can roughly pronounce any word from any regularly spelt European language, they ought to be able to too.
@@icturner23 Thank you for that. I have to agree. I had excused Richard and Alexander because I put them in the same boat as the average bloke. But, yes, if they are presenting a show where common foreign language text appears, they should take the trouble to to at least learn the rules that apply to 'regular' text; and some languages seem to be consistently phonetic, so there does not seem to be much trouble to take. Alexander, in particular, has made an effort with Spanish and Italian pronunciation. His is much better than mine.
Missed Hungary and Andorra. Surprised how few knew Finland and Norway, those were my answers for round 1 and 2.
The English truly are the Americans of Europe, aren't they?
This American knew them all
I am English and I got all of them. I guessed two I must admit.
The general person in all countries would not be able to guess most of these, it's not country specific.
I actually went on holiday hiking in the encamp region a few weeks ago, crazy to see it come in handy
Thick as mince
This really does shine a light on how little us Brits are taught about other nations' geography and history, poor display by all.
I'm taken aback, so few people knew the Netherlands
Can I recommend you some EUIV in this trying time?
Not sure what I find more astonishing - the lack of knowledge of British people or the fact that Andorrans thought "hey, this country is soooo big, let's divide it into regions" 😂
Telemark... really no one recognises that?
@@mrsarkey Only skiers (and mostly cross-country ones even then). Not a lot of those in the UK, I imagine...
@@PeloquinDavid But nobody knows about WW2? Heroes of Telemark?
Not everyones 60 +@@tinkywinky8558
Never heard of it, tbh.
I knew all the other regions (a couple were guesses based on language), but Norway I did not know. Based on "Finnmark" I assumed it has to be Norway or Sweden, but that's it
@@tinkywinky8558 Sorry. My knowledge of WWII is relatively limited. I've never heard of the battle (campaign?) you mention - but I did cross-country ski a fair bit in my youth (before my knees started giving way...)
Were cross-country skis involved? (If so, I know about the Finnish winter resistance to a Soviet invasion in/around 1940 that did involve infantry on skis, but don't know about any of the names of its battles, etc.)
I thought this was some kind of april fools episode at first, but I was literally shocked to find out that this was a serious challenge for these ADULTS to proceed with elementary school level geography 🤦🏻♂️.
Quite sad to be honest.
Every single one was easy apart from Row 3... Have a few ideas, but genuinely unsure 'maybe Slovenia or Bulgaria' going for a semi-out there one a little bit?
Knew them all, shocked at their lack of knowledge
Inter d’Escaldes the football team, andorra✅
Even if you don't know the regions - the languages make most of these obvious?
I’m Hungarian born in Canada, and I got all 14 correct. You can deduce a lot by knowing and being familiar with not only geography but the languages as well.
The world famous mountain sports region of Tyrol located in the flat-as-a-pancake Netherlands... Wow😂😂
Ouch! Seeing the first scale dropping
Is the concept of the show to be a little bit more informed about the outside of UK? Brits really should be on their own. Probably only the English, I don't know who participates.
Greetings from Saarland my dudes
It is a piece of cake.
I am really surprised they did not know the correct answers.
Their language is English and mine is not and I would win over these contestants.
Their language is English... so what? These region names were not in English. The show host even had to guess how to pronounce them, sometimes not knowing the pronunciation.
I'm more surprised that you thought the general person would know these answers.
In the first set I knew all except for Ireland. In the second set I knew all except for Andorra.
I've got all, but honestly the Ireland one was tricky
The only one I guessed wrong was Andorra. My thought proces was similar to the man with a glasses but I decided for Belgium and I was thinking that during their reign in Benelux they named some of the regions there. Funny thing I was in Andorra once just forget about this regions.
Looking at this and feeling smug, until I realized "oh wait I knew the hard ones because I live close to them..." Did not get Andorra Ireland and Spain. Hungary was a bit of a guess, but I knew it wasn't Poland.
Only didn't know Andorra
so happy i got them all except norway and andorra
i thought The Heroes of Telemark was quite well known
@ never heard of it 😂
Got them ALL in 3 seconds... I'm a Brit but I live in France, although every Brit should know most of these
i know encamp bc i got it once on geoguesser and it was the first time i got 5000 points
So they gave him pronunciation guides for the Hungarian ones but let him butcher Steiermark, huh?
But Richard is totally right that football fandom helps immensely here. Even for the Andorra ones, FC Encamp also played in the qualifying stages of the UEFA Cup in the early 00s.
He butchered the Hungarian one too I believe
@@MikeRees And Cavan in Ireland.
And Inter d’Escaldes play European qualyfiers like every year
Yeah, Andorra is the only one I might not have gotten had I not known the football clubs. Otherwise this was fairly simple, Idk how they don't see some obvious languages like Hungarian or Finnish in those words
@@MikeRees He did. SZ is S in Hungarian and SH in Polish. He used Polish pronunciation.
this hurts to watch, i'd love to participate there
considering the monumental battles that turned the tide of WW2, there is ZERO excuse for nearly anyone in Europe to not know Normandie (Normandy) is in France
I am from Eastern Europe, not even in the same part of the Continent (aside from maybe Hungary) as these and guessed them as he read them. Edit: I'm going to be honest, I did get Portugal wrong and couldn't be sure of Andorra on my initial guess but figured it out based on the rest of them.
Brits and their ignorance perfectly shown here😂
I correctly went Austria and Netherlands as my answers for each round.
Loving football always helps with places and flags.
That's so easy.
Make note that before Neuchatel Xamax is meeting anyone in any european tournament they have to promote from the challenge league hahahahha
Think it was a subtle reference to Celtic’s famous loss to Xamax given the contestant said he supported rangers
@@goblue1117 That makes more sense, since Luzern would definitely be the one out of those three cantons that football fans would recognise thanks to FC Luzern
(Ice hockey fans would recognize Zug more)
Not if they win the Swiss Cup
@RefBobby22 that would be the first time ever
I got them all but the Ireland one, which is tricky.
Strasbourg is not in Grand Est, it is in Alsace
Its both, they took the larger modern regions not the historical ones
Andorra is big enough to have regions?
They had 6 until 1978, but then they expanded it to 7 :)
This is thought as well while considering the answer hahaa
And one with a compound name, at that!
Each largeish town is a region. Andorra has several valleys, so each is their own region, plus one which they created relatively recently. They call them parròquies, which means "parish". Not dissimilar to some Caribbean islands. Even today the heads of state are the bishop of Urgell and the president of France (a bit like the kings in england where they technically rule, but not really), so another connection there.
That was what threw me off about it. I am an economist working on EU, and everything was super easy as I often work at the regional level. However I had never seen those regions. Indeed, Andorra does not have any region recognized by NUTS (the EU classification of European regions). The 6 "regions" mentioned are actually parishes, and they are as large or smaller than municipalities in other countries.
Toulousain
Slightly missed chance to confuse some people by using the Swedish name Österbotten for Pohjanmaa, since Swedish is the main language in the region.
I would think that these are all pretty simple....
All of them? I didn't know a few of those myself (Andorra, I guessed Sweden instead of Norway, Ireland). And I also wouldn't always have gotten the relative obviousness right. For example, I thought Spain would have scored higher as sooo many Brits visit Spain.
hanifah and tahirah done well 😁
Tbh, I guessed Sweden instead of Norway and did not guess anything about Andorra
How the fu** arent Germany and France answeres in the 90 Points
Braga and Bragança are not the same regions/districts in Portugal
And neither of them is a region, they're cities.
@RFC3514 they're districts too, and that is why I assume they used them as proxy for regions
@@pedluc2010 - For most other countries they picked actual regions (like Tirol, Calabria, and so on). The equivalent in Portugal would be provinces (or the new EU-defined NUTS2 regions, which are based on those provinces), not municipal districts. No one would say "the city of Braga is in the Braga *region",* that's redundant.
If you open the Wikipedia article about "historical regions" and then click on "Portugal", you get the list of provinces (Alentejo, Algarve, and so on). British contestants would be much more likely to recognise those than some random northern cities.
Richard Osman is not as brainy as he's made out to be. Same as Stephen Fry.
@@robertfoulkes1832 - Neither of them writes the questions, though.
I get the feeling that Fry sometimes convinces himself that he's an expert on something just because he was given some notes about it. Maybe it comes from being an actor, he "gets into character" a bit too much.
Richard usually seems more aware of his limitations. He's really good at UK geography, country borders, flags and capitals. Beyond that, he mainly knows about his job (TV production). I think he's the first to admit he knows very little about natural sciences, maths, foreign languages, and so on.
How is this so difficult for people?
Tirol is a dead give away for Austria.
I can't even describe how easy France is, despite the names being French, Normandy is literally there.
The third I knew because of Sligo. I can't imagine this is hard for British people, it's literally your only neighbour.
Germany beyond easy. Don't understand the issue. Especially Saarland is very famous.
Aveiro and Bragança are obviously Portuguese. Even if you didn't know Viana do Castelo sounds very Iberian, and 'do' is Portuguese.
Penultimate one might be a bit hard, but the 'sz' in Veszprem is a giveaway it's likely Hungarian. It could be Polish, but Somogy doesn't zound Polish.
The last one had unique spelling, it's either Finnish or Estonian. But they wouldn't ask Estonia.
I didn't even watch the video to see if I have it correct, just got mad after France had 43 points.
They got really unlucky with Greece.
I got all of it at the first glance except Hungary, I thought it was Czechia, 6/7 .
Finnish doesn't look like Polish at all??? What the f
After the 3rd minute I stopped the video. I cannot bear this level of geography. Is this really representative for the UK?
Me who got all of them right (even Andorra).
Butchering my beuatifull Language, Veszprém wasnt even that bad, but Somogy is just tearful
cavan leitrim sligo was difficult...from croatia...lika istra zagorje 😀
how did more people get greece than france? what is this
I got all of them but i am from Austria so i should know
Is it the 51st state? Their education system seems to suggest it
Sorry we didn’t have a course on subregions of Austria and Finland in our curriculum :/
I don't know if it's impressive or sad that I got 100% on both boards
Woof. Folks!
The Hardest one was Andorra lol
it wasnt . Spain was obvious so what other country has spanish/catalan as langauge ?
we should stop making fun of americans, we should just make fun of non-continental europeans instead
Man, this country's insistence on geographical ignorance does annoy me. I can appreciate not everybody knows all of these, but even a little knowledge or recognition of other languages goes a very long way.
Hungary was the only one I didn't know, I thought it was Czechia.
The pronunciation was pretty appalling. Worst I ever recall on a show like this.
This is quiz with geniuenly hard questions. I like it
I'm proud I got them all right. I even guessed Finland because it's clearly Nordic but reminds of Hungarian a bit which means it's probably Finland.
It wasn't scandinavian. Could have been Estonian I guess, or Sami (from the language), but that's not a country i its own right.
@@thehoogard It WAS finland though. I'm right?
@@arandombard1197 Yes.
No one said it was Scandinavian tho - it’s Nordic which is different. Scandinavia is a peninsula and technically only Sweden and Norway are Scandinavian.
@@sv-bd5em The point was that Finnish really doesn't sound anything like the Scandinavian languages. Therefore saying "it sounds Nordic" is a bad way to describe it. It either sounded Scandinavian, or it sounded finnish/estonian/finno-ugric.
and they say americans are bad at geography, i only missed norway
This is a terrible showing for the education system in the UK.
Do people not read atlases for entertainment anymore?
The Hungarian pronunciation 💀💀💀💀💀
The catalan pronunciation too was bad, but I guess all the native speakers feel the same.
0:47 worst pronounciation of Uusimaa I’ve heard, im not even Finnish
Is it just me, or is this trivial?
I’d say it’s pointless.
Cavan Leitrim and Sligo are counties, 2 of them are in Connaught and one in Ulster, they are not regions, and have no connection to each other, Sligo Leitrim is an electoral constituency, but no connection to Cavan. Probably just picked 3 random counties
"Regions" here means "whatever the main divisions are called".
watching this kind of stuff is such an ego boost
Austria
France
Latvia
Germany
Italy
Croatia
Finland
Berlin is not part of Brandenburg… the more you know*
There were plans to merge them. I think Berlin voted yes in the referendum, and Brandenburg voted no, because they feared they'd end up with fewer resources.
Everyone talking about how awful these contestants are, but I did even worse. 😭
I could do capital cities or place countries on a map, but I’ve barely heard of any of these regions.
tbh, its not so much about having heard about the regions, its more like how can you deduct them based on spelling.
Its actually harder for countries that only speak one certain languague and aren't really invested in speaking something else. Like, the UK, they pre-dominantly speak English but little else.
But for me personally, i am Dutch, so for me its actually easier, since we aren't only taught Dutch and English at school, but in some cases also German, France, Italian, Portguese or Spanish. So then it because easier to deduct languagues based on their spelling. Like, when i saw both lists, i could easily cross them off, except for Hungary. Took me a little to deduct it, since i way like, its either Hungarian, Slovenian or Slovakian, but then i was like: Its probably Hungarian, because Slovakia and Slovenia aren't as old of countries as Hungary.
@ It sounds like the key is to know a little about several languages. A typical Brit will have some knowledge of French, and maybe German or Spanish top. But they’ll know nothing of the plethora of other European languages/cultures.
What you’re saying reminds me of Geoguesser where people can deduce a country based on roadsigns or adverts.
And I actually do speak another language semi-decently, but it’s Chinese. 😭
Yikes
Lads this is a shocking inditement of the Brits education system. They are the yanks of Europe 😂
Because it's irrelevant to learn about regions of Europe, it won't help you in life at all. Thay being said, most people in all countries wouldn't know the answers.
“It’s not as easy as you might think” dude I never studied geography past age 10 and I knew all this.