I don’t think it has anything to do with Nazism or Hitler. It’s just that German enunciation is, relative to English, very hard. All the consonants that English shares with German tend to be more plosive in German. Then there are the gutterals, which sound harsh to people whose native language doesn’t have them. And the vowel pronunciation is not as relaxed as in English, which also gives an impression of rigidity to English ears. At least, that’s my impression.
Hebrew has some of the same qualities. I don’t personally like the sound of any Semitic language, but that’s probably partly because I live above a Lebanese couple who fight in Arabic all the time.
Welsh I don’t know enough about.
I don’t think that expressing aesthetic opinions about languages is rude in and of itself. It just depends on how it’s done.
I dislike also semitic languages…but arabic has some nice facets…I can’t really explain when they hang onto a short a and air is released but that’s funky. Plus arabic music is mysterious. And women who dance in those golden and red outfits.
"And around here, I keep hearing people say German is a harsh and ugly language. It hurts and pisses me off that people so misunderstand German because of it’s association to hitler speech films. "
Indeed. You can’t stop that. The german exchange students in our school were faced with much hostility. I just don’t think any one will forget things that’s all…and the ignorance of some stupid kids not even involved…
i only heard korean once, and the person was korean. maybe the fact that she is a violist has something to do with the musicality i ‘liked’ about korean.
i wish i would know more korean… i only know the following words:
kamsahamnida, mianhamnida, aniong, aniong haseo, and also chellbo with a really weird ‘l’. how is it pronounced?
I’m disapointed Episcopus, you didn’t even mention a negative thing about Welsh. Does queer mean gay in England? I have to get myself an English English dictionary. My favorite word thus far is bint, even though I don’t have a fluent understanding of it.
I had a friend from Spain in college (UT-Austin) say Mexican Spanish sounded effeminate!
That’s funny, I once saw this Mexican girl mock Spain Spainish with a haughty gesture. I’ll use Lex’s term to describe what she looked like when mocking Spain Spanish: “nancy boy”.
(“Gothic” as in Germanic tribes of the sort that caused the Romans troubles, not people wearing black and smoking clove cigarettes).
Haha, smoking cloves… I like this stereotype. It works for me. Here is one person renaming it to Gotish.
i wish i would know more korean… i only know the following words:
kamsahamnida, mianhamnida, aniong, aniong haseo, and also chellbo with a really weird ‘l’. how is it pronounced?
Well, I don’t know what is “chellbo”. Korean ‘l’(or ‘r’, we don’t distinguish them in Korean) is pronounced with your tongue in position of English ‘d’ or ‘t’. So some ‘d’ or 't’s in english words are recognised as Korean ‘r/l’. For example, ‘data’ as many an american pronounces, we hear it as ‘dera’. And ‘editor’ as ‘erirol’. Japanese ‘r’ has similar property, as far as I know.
something is suspicious here… was she lying to me?
and about the r’s, i tried to teach her how to say R the way israelis do(germans too) that was hilarious.
she said about every letter instead of R.
now, i remember that Nure or Nule was song, but what is the past tense for the verb to sing in korean?
or the imperative?. cause that’s what Ronen means.
“Learning a foreign language too early, in some cases, may not only cause a speech impediment but, in the worst case, make an child autistic.”
but I definitely agree it’s quite worrying. Seems like the parents are just expecting too much from their children, and pushing them too much. That they will resort to surgery just shows how desperate some parents are, it’s not just the surgery itself that’s terrible, but also the whole concept of desperately wanting their children to be good at something they may not naturally be very good at and pushing them. I imagine those poor children that just can’t live up to those too high standards will feel quite inferior and frustrated not to mention always feeling you have to live up to your parents expectiations all the time (which are so high the child would virtually have to give up playing and having fun to meet them). Stress at such an early age?
Dutch,
but in fact I’m bilingual: so I speak Frensh as if it were Dutch.
I also know little bit English, German, Latin and Greek.
And now I’m beginning to study, New-Greek, Italian and Russian.
And in februari I will take a course to perform my English, cause in july our university has chosen me to go to Greece for an international symposium about Homer. It looks great, but I will have to express myself a little better in English.
No it’s not just him, I find it really hard too. But I am in the very first beginning now. It’s not my goal to know Russian as well as Latin or Greek. That gives me a little comfort!
I can say a couple of words in Russian…either “please” or “thank you” (I can’t remember which one) and the word for “brother”, but I can’t spell them, so…
well I am French speaking… But I’m not queer. I am however female.
French is my native language, I know English as my second language. I used to know Spanish ( 5 years in high school, it used to be that my Spanish was better than my English, but those years are long gone). I studied a bit of German, but that’s also gone.
I don’t remember what I thought about how the English language sounded, because I was surrounded by it from an early age.
Does queer mean gay in England? I have to get myself an English English dictionary. 
My favorite word thus far is bint, even though I don’t have a fluent understanding of it.
