What makes some languages sound BEAUTIFUL?

You can learn 150+ languages (from the gorgeous to the gross) with quality native-speaking teachers on italki🎉. Buy $10 get $5 for free for your first lesson using my code ROBWORDS

Is 🇮🇹Italian delightful and 🇩🇪German disgusting? Is 🇨🇳Mandarin a melodic mess? In this episode, Rob meets the linguists who've tried to work out which are the world's prettiest and ugliest languages. The results are sure to surprise you.

==LINKS==

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==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introduction
0:34 Good and bad reputations
2:30 ITALIAN - The most beautiful?
3:40 italki
4:50 GERMAN - The ugliest?
6:09 EXPERIMENT
7:32 RESULTS
8:07 Disliked languages
9:45 THAI - A tonal language
11:05 Languages we like
11:36 MOST BEAUTIFUL familiar languages
12:30 TOK PISIN - A popular Creole
13:44 How German did
14:28 SIDE EFFECTS
15:23 The ideal voice
16:38 CONCLUSION

#languages #linguistics #breakthrough

[RobWords]

Let me know what you make of the findings. And remember, you can learn 150+ languages (each with its own charm) with quality native-speaking teachers on italki🎉. Buy $10 get $5 for free for your first lesson using my code ROBWORDS

[bartmannn]

As a German living abroad, I always speak as calm and nice and soft as possible, when people want to hear some German - just to see their surprised faces. What they were expecting what German has to sound like was (literally) "FRITZEN! FRATZEN! FROTZEN!".

[SalixTree]

I was born in Germany to a German mother .. she used to read fairytales to me in German. (I have since moved to Ireland, so I speak English mostly) But to me, when I hear German language spoken, it always feels like a fairytale language, soft, sweet and innocent.

[jackrowe]

My parents were deaf. Sign language was my native "tongue ". It can be beautiful in its artistic movements. It can also be awful when crudely or clumsily done. I think this is true of all of the languages I've studied.

[pekanut]

Achtung: German has been distorted by all these Hollywood Nazi films where German is only yelled. And of course it gives a very negative connotation to that language

[Grobohalic]

I always thought German was ugly. Then I traveled to Germany and Austria. I distinctly remember sitting in a restaurant and hearing a group of native speakers at a table near me, and I was instantly smitten with the sound of it. They were laughing and talking, and just doing what one does in a restaurant. I pondered why it sounded so warm and welcoming now when I had always found it so ugly and angry. I then realized that pretty much the only times i had heard German being spoken before were in movies and documentaries about WWII. Any language is going to sound hideous if it's being used to shout hateful rhetoric.

[andwiel]

I am a German native speaker and live abroad. I often hear that my German sounds surprisingly smooth and nice, even beautiful, not at all what German sounds like. I then ask where else they hear German. Then they say: in movies. It often turns out that they sometimes only know German from stereotypical shouting of soldiers in WWII movies and have actually never heard normal German.

[cargyle]

I took German in high school, mostly to be rebellious. Everyone and their dog was taking Spanish, and I didn't want to take French because I thought it sounded too "fluffy." But once I started learning German, it opened my eyes. My first teacher was a native German who was extremely mild-mannered, the opposite of what I thought he would be. Learning German taught me so much about looking past cultural stereotypes, finding common ground, and seeing people as individuals. I also learned so much about language in general. I loved it so much that I ended up taking 4 years of German, instead of just the 2 years of language study that were required. Looking back, this language choice seems very impractical, since I never have the opportunity to use it. But it will always have a special place in my heart.

[nidisponiblecarays]

I had never heard German except in movies, until one day I watched a short film in German. At first I didn't know which language it was, but I had never heard anything so beautiful. I fell in love with it inmediately. Then I found out it was German, so I started studying it and Germany was the first country I ever visited. Greatings from Spain!

[Psychol-Snooper]

I had a problem with German, even though I took it in school... but then I found out their word for an owl was "uhu, " and forgave it all its faults.

[UltraVega]

German actually doesn't sound bad at all when you hear regular people speaking it normally. Its actually pretty cool and fun to speak.

[InquirywithHelena]

I was prejudiced against the sound of German and then one day I heard German poetry spoken in a soft masculine voice and I was completely bowled over.

[Bread_Cubing]

BREAKING NEWS GUYS Every language sounds harsh if you YELL in it

[parkpatt]

Once, on a trans-Atlantic flight, I got to hear flight attendants speaking in German and it completely changed my mind about the beauty of the language. It was wonderful!

[steventsakiris]

Im a greek speaker and I find Portuguese a very beautiful language

[AlmostEthical]

I think the issue with tonal languages is that they are akin to playing random musical notes. With atonal languages, a person can effectively choose the melody of their inflections or stick to one-note.

[vitorm]

Brazilian Portuguese is definitely the most beautiful language ❤

[jsoliv]

I speak Portuguese, English, Spanish and French, once you've been exposed to a language, this feeling of beauty vs ugly vanishes. I've been learning German and Italian and both of the sound beautiful to me.

[mokodo_]

I always thought Romanian was a very underrated language. A romance language, with heavy slavic and turkish influence, really unique. Plus they have letters with little hats, like â & Î

[thehun]

In the 70s I was working in South Africa. I was living with my British girlfriend and after a while, she got used to me talking on the phone to other Hungarians. I found a record in the local library with samples of dozens of different languages. I think it was the Lord's Prayer read by male and female native speakers. I made a tape with about ten samples from French to Mandarin. One weekend we had a barbeque, (known locally as braai) and had several different nationalities as guests. I created a voting sheet asking them to rate the different languages from 1 to 10. I did not name the languages, just numbered them, but of course, they recognised some of them. As far as I can remember, the French got an average close to 10, the Italian followed it very closely, then the Spanish. German got a much higher rating from the locals than from expat Brits, maybe because all the locals could speak Afrikaans which is very close to Dutch and German. Vietnamese and Mandarin were at the bottom of the list. My language, Hungarian was in the middle, except for one person who gave it 10, but it turned out to be my girlfriend, so it did not count....