What Serbian sounds like to foreigners/kako srpski jezik zvuči strancima

follow me on Twitter
I asked some Canadian students what Serbian sounds like to them. I started by playing them the audio from the a of a Serbian TV show. Then I asked them to guess which language was in the sample played to them. After a few guesses I gave them visual clues from the video so they could see the script and ethnicity of the people in the sample video.
Most of them thought it was one of the romance languages, like Spanish or Italian. In fact, I also thought the first few seconds of the clip sounded like a romance language.
Finally, I asked them to imitate what they have heard for native Serbian speakers to hear what their language sounds like to foreigners. This segment took some convincing because the subjects did not want to offend anyone or seem racist. Therefore please do not blame them if you are offended, I asked them to do it and most of them did it reluctantly.

I used "Miljana Gavrilović - Tačno 9 (4.3.2014)" as the sample.

[bankrow]

"Russian...? Polish..?"

"You're very close..."

"...German?"

Lol wtf

[rachel-csou]

Watching this video as Serbian is very funny xD

[piros]

In my family nobody speaks Serbian but me, and I was listening Serbian music at home and my father asked me if it was French. Serbian sounds beautiful.

[Cris-hdwb]

Serbian is an amazing language, from Romania !❤

[BlunderCity]

Don't worry dude, Serbs won't be offended if you compare them to Russians.

[AndjelkoNS]

Greetings from Serbia! Good imitations.

[morjahd]

јако лепо
да ли има неког србина овде
real serbian

[thrmove]

This was so fun to watch. Thank you for the video! Greetings from Serbian person! :)

[pruE]

Thank you so much Shunfu for accepting this request of mine! It was very interesting to hear what foreigners think of my native language, as I've always wondered that!

[porschashaniqua]

Best 4 melodic languages in the world are Serbian, Italian, Portuguese and French.

[mZStarCraft]

Russians are our brothers, we wouldn't be mad if you compared Serbian to Russian. :)

[patryk]

KOSOVO JEST SERBSKIE!!! kosovo jest serbia

[ГаврилоПринцип-иф]

all slav lenguages are similar and diferent in their way..so it is not offensive to think that it sounds like russian or any other slav language.. greetings from serbia

[golubovicvladan]

I often say to foreigners that my language sounds like russian because it's the biggest slavic language. But when you hear both languages you see that serbian has very few soft sounds. Russian has two complete sets of hard and soft sounds.

[pincopallo]

Don't worry guy we love russians they are our brothers

[g.a]

Why the f would we be offended if you compare us to Russia? 😂 We love Russian!! 😂😂

[milostivi]

Russian??? Polish???

Very close.

German
Seriosly

[InkubusGames]

1:42 that girl said "veći prostor" perfectly! Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian is almost identical and not an easy language to learn. Partially because of certain sounds that we use like Ć, Đ, Ž and most vicious of them all sound "Lj". On top of that, grammar is full of exceptions. The only easy part of our language is writing - it is without any exceptions and each character bears same sound regardless of it's position in the word. Also, combination of characters do not affect sound of the character as it is typical for almost all Western spelling.

[elenaspasic]

Hi from Serbia. I'm SERBIEN girl🙋🤗🇷🇸

[misteraxl]

Thing is the most common accent of Serbian isn't even standard Serbian, but very harsh and slang-influenced Belgrade accent (our capital Belgrade) which is what is heard in video...Real Serbian is a lot softer but we Belgradians are most numerous among Serbs (2 out of 7 million in the country) and most commonly heard in music, films and tv shows.