I came across this multilingual video the other day and thought I’d share it with you:
Could you keep up with all these languages?
20 thoughts on “Multilingual video”
Amazing!!! 🙂
Excellent! The first 3, then I was lost 😉
Well then, which one is the polyglot now, the woman or the man? 🙂
By the way, it’s terrible how the woman pronounces Hungarian. The man is just a bit better, mostly because he dares to say one word only.
That was hilarious 😀 The man’s pronunciation of Swedish was terrible 😀
His German was no picnic either, but that’s being pretty picky.
cool vid, but the arabic was almost unintelligible!
Gle mhath ach chan eil Gaidhlig aca!!
In line with what they did to the other languages, they would turn the Gaidhlig to Garlic. Be glad there is no Gàidhlig aca!
Even though a few of the languages are a little dodgy, it’s still a cool vid. I only know the French and German.
I wish the Hungarian section had been longer. Like Attila said, hers is awful, his is rather good. But what can one tell from two or three words? She was the unlucky one, getting the gy [ɟ] sound.
I’m sorry, Szabolcs, but this is a frequent sound in languages of the world, for example, it appears in English, too, what may be their mother tongue. One shouldn’t engage in such conversations in films without good pronunciation of the languages prepared. Pronunciation is something you can learn. Why didn’t they do that?
For the record, what the man ACTUALLY says (or tries to) is “Arabic is the language which I learned when I went to Cairo.”
I was a little disappointed that they barely made it out of Europe.
LAttilaD, in all fairness, there is no [ɟ] in English, nor even a close approximation. The closest sound in English would be the voiced post-alveolar affricate (the English ‘J’ sound).
This [ɟ] is completely different from the english J, as is obvious enough in its different location and manner of articulation. Surely it is not correct to pronounce “Magyar” as “Majar.”
That was a rather disingenuous comment, as [ɟ] is a very rare sound in the majority of languages, save for dialects of Arabic, which even then the sound if not official.
Sorry to hear that, Will. But I learned English does have the sound, in words when a D is followed by a U pronounced as “you”: produce, induce, introduce, duke and so on. (Similarly, the sound [c] is found in at least one English word: mutual.) Am I wrong believing this?
As for the rareness of the [ɟ], referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_plosive you can hear it in all Slavic languages (except Polish), Latvian, Basque, some Romance languages, Turkish and Gaeilge, not counting the Asu language which most of us probably didn’t hear about.
Now, I know it’s a little minority of languages, since Ethnologue counts 6909 languages in this very minute, but… 🙂
PS. I looked for the words I mentioned in online dictionaries. Wiktionary shows their pronunciations as containing [dj], not [ɟ]. But the difference is, I believe, small enough to make these words useful to help English speakers to learn the sound [ɟ] when learning a language having it.
By the way, mutual is listed with [tʃ], not [c]…
I understood French, German and Italian fine, despite their strong accents. Although I can’t vouch for the Greek and Hungarian, I assume they would have been similar. The Arabic was really terrible though, especially the way he said لغة (lughah, language) which came out like “lukhiyah.”
This is from the TV series Indiana Jones Jr. ( if I remember the title correctly)when he meets this suffragette in first world war London. The clip ends too soon. Since his name is Jones she then asks him in Welsh if he speaks Welsh.( Her mother is Welsh) He dosen’t.
I understood the french and the german, most of the italian and i was able to pick out the arabic.
Oh, I really like when then mix in languages in TV series. Especially on English speaking one, seeing that it’s not that common. Being a native Swedish speaker I of course also get a extra kick out of hearing Swedish.
I did not find the man’s pronunciation in Swedish that bad at all actually and his line actually made sense.
Her pronunciation was on the other hand close to unintelligible – sounding almost more Dutch then Swedish – and the line seemed to be a poor, word-by-word translation from English, leaving the grammar failing.
Amazing!!! 🙂
Excellent! The first 3, then I was lost 😉
Well then, which one is the polyglot now, the woman or the man? 🙂
By the way, it’s terrible how the woman pronounces Hungarian. The man is just a bit better, mostly because he dares to say one word only.
That was hilarious 😀 The man’s pronunciation of Swedish was terrible 😀
His German was no picnic either, but that’s being pretty picky.
cool vid, but the arabic was almost unintelligible!
Gle mhath ach chan eil Gaidhlig aca!!
In line with what they did to the other languages, they would turn the Gaidhlig to Garlic. Be glad there is no Gàidhlig aca!
Even though a few of the languages are a little dodgy, it’s still a cool vid. I only know the French and German.
I wish the Hungarian section had been longer. Like Attila said, hers is awful, his is rather good. But what can one tell from two or three words? She was the unlucky one, getting the gy [ɟ] sound.
I’m sorry, Szabolcs, but this is a frequent sound in languages of the world, for example, it appears in English, too, what may be their mother tongue. One shouldn’t engage in such conversations in films without good pronunciation of the languages prepared. Pronunciation is something you can learn. Why didn’t they do that?
For the record, what the man ACTUALLY says (or tries to) is “Arabic is the language which I learned when I went to Cairo.”
I was a little disappointed that they barely made it out of Europe.
LAttilaD, in all fairness, there is no [ɟ] in English, nor even a close approximation. The closest sound in English would be the voiced post-alveolar affricate (the English ‘J’ sound).
This [ɟ] is completely different from the english J, as is obvious enough in its different location and manner of articulation. Surely it is not correct to pronounce “Magyar” as “Majar.”
That was a rather disingenuous comment, as [ɟ] is a very rare sound in the majority of languages, save for dialects of Arabic, which even then the sound if not official.
Sorry to hear that, Will. But I learned English does have the sound, in words when a D is followed by a U pronounced as “you”: produce, induce, introduce, duke and so on. (Similarly, the sound [c] is found in at least one English word: mutual.) Am I wrong believing this?
As for the rareness of the [ɟ], referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_plosive you can hear it in all Slavic languages (except Polish), Latvian, Basque, some Romance languages, Turkish and Gaeilge, not counting the Asu language which most of us probably didn’t hear about.
Now, I know it’s a little minority of languages, since Ethnologue counts 6909 languages in this very minute, but… 🙂
PS. I looked for the words I mentioned in online dictionaries. Wiktionary shows their pronunciations as containing [dj], not [ɟ]. But the difference is, I believe, small enough to make these words useful to help English speakers to learn the sound [ɟ] when learning a language having it.
By the way, mutual is listed with [tʃ], not [c]…
I understood French, German and Italian fine, despite their strong accents. Although I can’t vouch for the Greek and Hungarian, I assume they would have been similar. The Arabic was really terrible though, especially the way he said لغة (lughah, language) which came out like “lukhiyah.”
This is from the TV series Indiana Jones Jr. ( if I remember the title correctly)when he meets this suffragette in first world war London. The clip ends too soon. Since his name is Jones she then asks him in Welsh if he speaks Welsh.( Her mother is Welsh) He dosen’t.
I understood the french and the german, most of the italian and i was able to pick out the arabic.
Oh, I really like when then mix in languages in TV series. Especially on English speaking one, seeing that it’s not that common. Being a native Swedish speaker I of course also get a extra kick out of hearing Swedish.
I did not find the man’s pronunciation in Swedish that bad at all actually and his line actually made sense.
Her pronunciation was on the other hand close to unintelligible – sounding almost more Dutch then Swedish – and the line seemed to be a poor, word-by-word translation from English, leaving the grammar failing.
Two thumbs up for trying though. 🙂