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).
@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?”
@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.

@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 @gedankenstuecke That about sums it up. I'm in Denmark quite often. Reading is not a problem. But the pronounciation make both speaking and listening conprehension difficult. Sometimes it just sounds as if they already had their 5th beer or so, at least in Thy... 😬