German vs Swedish vs Norwegian vs Dutch | Can they understand the German language? | #1

How similar are German, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch? We designed an activity to help you figure it out on your own. What do you think?

🏋️‍♀️ Support my Work:
My name is Norbert Wierzbicki and I am the creator of @Ecolinguist channel.

📝 Contact details for the guests of the show are:

Florian Sunnus - German Teacher and YouTuber @SolarLingua
Freja - Irish language Twitter @FrejaasGaeilge; a knitting project on Instagram @travellinghonsestrikk
Louis - Dutch video maker @barbarianblue on YouTube and Instagram
Åsmund Tveten - science teacher from Norway

🕰 Time Stamps:

0:00 - Introduction
2:36 - 1. Sentence
12:02 - 2. Sentence
18:49 - 3. Sentence
27:42 - 4. Sentence
35:28 - Important Announcement

🎥Recommended videos:

🤗 Big hug to everyone reading my video descriptions! You rock! 🤓💪🏻

#languages

[FailedAngl]

Of course the Dutchie's got a bike in the background!

[kristoferpersson]

I love that the Dutch fella, who studies in Sweden, pronounces every german word with a perfect Swedish accent :D

[amjan]

The best thing is when the panelists break down cognates and explore the sentences beyond just translating. And this video is exactly like that :)

[annemaus]

Probably, The German speaker didn't think of it but using the word "swine" to strengthen Something is a thing in German too, or at least in some dialects. You can say, for example, that it is "sau kalt" which translates to "sow cold" and basically means "extremely cold". So the word for a female pig is also used to strengthen the meaning of another word.

[Willy_Tepes]

I am Norwegian and very proficient in English. After I started learning German I find both Dutch and Afrikaans easier to understand as i can cross reference between the languages I know.

[B-Meister]

My dad is Frisian and he worked wiith Swedish people. When either of them couldn't think of how to say something in English, my dad would speak in Frisian and the Swede in Swedish obviously, and they would understand eachother.

Languages are so cool :)

[echtvergoldet]

If you know one of those languages + english, you actually can fill out a lot of blanks for translations to your mother tongue. A lot of words are either used in the germanic or latin version. Especially Dutch feels like a German dialect witch is heavily influenced by English (which totally makes sense geopolitically)

[Nardo]

"Dus" sounds very similar to the English "thus" which is seldom written, and is spoken even less. It's cool that "dus" is seemingly everyday Dutch, but it's very formal in English. Thanks for this video - das war schweinlich interessant!

[SpiritmanProductions]

When I was following the written text, I couldn't believe how much of the Swedish was 'missing' in speech. Is that normal, or did she speak unusually quickly?
(I'm fluent in EN and NL, but I've had almost no exposure to the Scandinavian languages.)

[CouchPolyglot]

Das war super interessant, da ich vor einem Monat angefangen habe Schwedisch zu lernen. Voll cool auch Sätze in Norwegisch und Niederländisch zu hören und lesen! 😁 Weiter so 👏👏👏

[caseyrogers]

Very nice linguistic selection of the three “panelists”

[bartcharlow]

I'm a native English (American) speaker. I deeply enjoy these linguistic family comparisons as they test my ability to find common roots and figure out meaning from context. Have often had the fun of doing so when trying to get along in various European countries. My studied languages are Latin and the Romance tongues, but I do recognize some Teutonic words. Not surprisingly, some of the words in this one have a lot of commonality with English. It's easier for me with the written sentence first, then the spoken word. Please continue these wonderful exercises! And I have to say that Freya has the most animated expressive face.

[Blackadder]

What a great idea, letting them all speak in their own language. I was happy to learn that I understood quite a lot of the Nordics, but knowing the context and reading the written text as they spoke was very important, if it had been a podcast I wouldn't understand anything,

[tbirdparis]

"Dus" in Dutch is obviously not a cognate with "so" in English, "also" in German and "så" in Swedish/Norwegian. But it's not a totally random word that doesn't show up in other Germanic languages - it's a cognate with "thus" in English, which has pretty much the same meaning, The main difference is that in English, "so" is most commonly used in regular speech while "thus" is usually reserved for more formal or written contexts.

[jenson]

As a native German who grew up in East Frisia (Northwest Germany) I was a bit shocked how much Dutch I could understand. That's probably because the low German language is pretty similar to the Dutch! 😂

Dutch 90%
Swedish 5%
Norwegian 5%

[ferrugemalemao]

Being from Southern Germany myself: at least hear, you can put "sau-" as a prefix in front of words like the Swedish girl and Norwegian guy explained to have the same emphasis. "Sau" being "sow"(femals pig) in German
EDIT: Norwegian "unnfange" could be cognate to German "empfangen"? Which means to receive or conceive a child

[Mortac]

As a Swede, I was surprised to discover some years ago that I actually understood some Afrikaans. When I learned that it originates from Dutch immigrants in Africa, it made sense, since Dutch has many similarities with the Scandinavian languages. Some words are exactly the same, and others are very similar, but I could of course not speak or understand whole sentences.

And regarding this video, I understood German at roughly the same level as my fellow countrywoman. I don't think she was doing anyone any favors in the first minutes of the video, though, where she was speaking quite fast and somewhat unclear and with the heavy dialect. But she spoke much more clearly after the initial presentation.

Swedes and Norwegians, by the way, understand each other probably up to 95% of what is being said in a conversation. Some words are traps, though, with entirely different meanings even if they are spelled and pronounced more or less the same.

[stevenlk]

As a Chinese who learned English and German as 2nd and 3rd language I found this extremely entertaining xD. I’m surprised by how much I can Dutch and Norwegian I can sorta figure out by listening to the pronunciation. Also kinda made me wanna see if there’s such a similar comparison video between Japanese Chinese and Korean 🤣

[Stahlwollvieh]

As a German native with some Norwegian knowledge: What Åsmund actually missed in regards to "kühl" is that Norwegian has the very similar "kjøl", like "kjøleskap" ("Kühlschrank" or simply "fridge" in English). "Unnfange" is closely connected to a similar German word, but not quite "anfangen" - it's "empfangen" ("to receive"), which can also be used as "to conceive" (a child) but for this purpose it is very old fashioned.

[SimonWillig]

In dutch we only use the word heim in a combination heimwee which means homesick.
In dutch we also have the saying "ik heb gezwijnd" which means something like I was very lucky or i had a narrow escape.
The difference in dutch between limiet and begrenzing is that limit is used in the given context and begrenzing is used more as a technical solution for instance to prevent a moped to go faster than 45 km/h.

Thank you for this interesting and pleasing video