Loukas (They/Them) 🏳️⚧️If you see a long German or Swedish word, first of all, don't panic. It's more scared of you than you are of it. Secondly, take a closer look and you'll see it's actually just three normal words in a trenchcoat, huddling together to deter predators (French and English).
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras@Loukas it’s a Selbstverteidigungsmechanismus!
@gedankenstuecke well that's easy for you to say
@Loukas as my partner’s (kindergarden-aged at the time) nephew who’s a Spanish native speaker once said: “poor guy, can you imagine? Having to learn German as a child?”
Greg Johnson@gedankenstuecke @Loukas The worst dialects are those where you painstakingly hold your breath at the end of every syllable and don’t actually finish saying it.
notsoloud@pteranodo
Try Danish! We skip half the syllables entirely.
The rest we painstakingly end in what can best be described as a sound triangulated to the exact midpoint between sigh, mumble and murmur.
If you know a Germanic language you can decipher written Danish pretty well. It's just that we gave up on pronounciation.
@gedankenstuecke @Loukasmastodon.nu
@notsoloud @pteranodo that’s how Dutch is for me too, speaking German and English it’s easy-ish to read but speak? Hell no!
Paul Cowdell@gedankenstuecke @notsoloud @pteranodo In one of the Janwillem van de Wetering novels the cops congratulate a migrant on his Dutch. He says he likes a language that sounds like you've got a fly caught in the back of your throat.
Titia Schuurman@paulcowdell @gedankenstuecke @notsoloud @pteranodo As one of my (Finnish) friends once said, speaking Dutch is like mixing English, Swedish and German and clearing your throat every time you switch languages.
Kjerstin Gjengedal@gedankenstuecke Whenever I was unable to get by in my limited Dutch, I'd just insert the Norwegian word and pronounce it in a funny way. They always understood my meaning. @notsoloud @pteranodo