Can Anglophones Understand Other Germanic Languages? Nordic, German, Dutch.

Link to the original video
• Can English Speakers U...
Germanic languages are a family of Indo-European languages that originated from a common ancestor called Proto-Germanic, spoken around 500 BC . The Germanic language family includes some of the most widely spoken languages today:
West Germanic:
English
German
Dutch
Afrikaans (derived from Dutch)
Yiddish
Low German
Frisian languages
North Germanic (Scandinavian):
Swedish
Danish
Norwegian
Icelandic
Faroese
The extinct East Germanic branch included Gothic, which died out around the 8th or 9th century CE.
These languages share common features inherited from Proto-Germanic, such as:
Strong and weak verbs: A system where some verbs change their vowel to mark tense (like English sing/sang/sung), while others use a dental suffix (like English walk/walked).
Germanic sound shifts: Historical sound changes that distinguish Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages, including the famous Grimm's Law, which explains systematic consonant changes (for example, Latin "pater" corresponding to English "father").
Word order patterns: Germanic languages typically place the verb as the second element in main clauses, though English has largely lost this feature.
Shared vocabulary: Many basic words are similar across Germanic languages due to their common origin. For example, "house" is "Haus" in German, "huis" in Dutch, and "hus" in Swedish.
The Germanic languages continue to evolve and influence each other, particularly through English's global reach and borrowing of words between related languages.
#languages #germanic #english

[@metatronacademy]

Link to the original video kzbin.info/www/bejne/ooSldnSpa8qli5Y

[@AAA-fh5kd]

nigh< near.. english dude.

[@dansanb]

dude u are learning norsk å svensk and u are doing a good job

[@jaega4247]

I hope you do check out more videos on the Nordic languages. The World Friends channel is a good start for the curious, but I really recommend your fellow linguistic master Langfocus if you want a deep dive in one or more of those languages. I think the modern Danish language has the most interesting history behind it, so feel free to start with that one if you're going for a deep dive. It's also said to be one of the hardest languages to learn at a young age.

[@Wuzzy-qp9kn]

The Dutch speaker is not native, she is from Ukraine I think. As a dutch speaker it was extremely hard to understand her and she didn't pronounce the individual words correctly.

[@H2welh1os]

Yes 100% She does not sound Dutch at all

[@noahjaybee]

I think this series is hosted outside of Europe (I want to say Korea?) I believe, so they have a limited pool of people for these video ideas. This isn't the first video I've seen where they are testing someone's second or third language instead of first.

[@KC2761-d5x]

@@noahjaybee Not just second or third language, it was hardly intelligible without subtitles despite me being a native Dutch speaker

[@OrangeUtanGames]

They never are😭

[@kijkbuiskijkert]

terrible pronounciation! Also Dutch is very keen on making things small "Biertje!" and other culturally specific words. We Dutch don't talk like a dictionary/ like the woman in this video tries to. Which would impact the mutual understanding a lot I think!

[@Pointykek]

The Dutch one isn't Dutch. I don't mind, but when the whole point is to hear the difference, it doesn't really make sense to grab someone that barely speaks it

[@Belnick6666]

Is this some city vs peasant prejudice for dialects?? Or you saying she is not from Holland?

[@ryanj2052]

​@@Belnick6666she's from Ukraine and it isn't her native language.

[@MartijnHover]

@@Belnick6666 It's not a matter of dialect. She just isn't a native speaker, and she speaks with a definite accent. Nothing wrong with that per se, but in this context I'd say they should have picked a native speaker.

[@giselavaleazar8768]

She says 'eat an drink' like it was English. It's 'eet en drink' in Dutch. Eet is pronounced aprox. like in 'I ate lunch'.

[@MrPwblarsen]

@@Belnick6666 no that is not an accent from the Netherlands.

[@VaccinT]

The girl representing The Netherlands has a thick accent that is not Dutch. That's no problem, but maybe she should have tried to pronounce those easy words as close to native Dutch as possible...

[@rafox66]

I don't know where that 'Dutch' person is from, but she's definitely NOT Dutch. As a Dutchman myself, she was the hardest to understand😂

[@marcobreur.]

The Dutch girl doesn't know how other Dutch people speak Dutch

[@JohnnyYounitas]

I read from another commenter that she's actually Ukranian

[@KC2761-d5x]

Immediately went to the comments when I heard her say bier, what the hell was that r sound at the end lol

[@Smokey348]

thats because she ain't dutch.

[@jip5889]

Hey remember what the queen said: De echte nederlander bestaat niet! She knows because she is Argentinian.

[@user-ix8ft5rs6y]

No disrespect the "dutch" one sounds like a polish or ukraine refugee that learned dutch

[@themadazi]

More like tried to wing it when she saw the language for the first time in this video...

[@NotJulius44]

@@themadazi this ⬆

[@whohan779]

That's because she is from Ukraine. It's so abhorrently bad, that I'm confident I could do much better as a German.

[@KacperSuski-wd7uu]

Definitely not polish accent (as a Pole with a good ear)

[@SIG442]

She seems to be russian, and yeah this is very disrespectful and dishonest of the channel and this woman. If this would happen to her own language, she wouldn't be too happy either. Hell, the russians would even kill for that.

[@all-thingstv]

The Dutch girl clearly wasn’t a native, no disrespect obviously. But as a native speaker I could hear that she had learned it and had an accent. I guess you’d expect to hear the actual native pronunciation of the words when watching this video. I don’t understand why they always get non-native speakers for Dutch, like why is it so hard to find a real Dutch native speaker?🤷

[@riesmeister]

I think it's disrespectful to the Dutch language and viewers.

[@module79l28]

They're not hard to find, there have been several real dutch native speakers appearing in several videos on the other channels of the World Friends "group".

[@alb91878]

​@@riesmeisterI agree. As a Puerto Rican person, I would feel disrespected if they had someone from a different country or someone that was clearly not a native speaker representing us, as well. Thank you for your comments, because I was feeling a little gaslit. When the Dutch girl would speak it just felt off for me. I don't know Dutch very well but I've heard it enough to know that something was off with her.

[@riesmeister]

@@alb91878 Yes, it should celebrate different cultures and languages. That's why I watched it in the first place.

[@alb91878]

@@riesmeister exactly! The other thing is they're doing a disservice to the people watching the videos because they come there for an honest representation to hear what they sound like and the differences and appreciate those differences, but how can they when you have some people who aren't authentic? It would be different if they were doing a comparison of people who have learned a language outside of their native one and the sound comparisons, then that would be a different story.

[@IntelVoid]

The German 'nahe' is like English 'nigh' (as in 'the end is nigh'). Interestingly, 'near' is essentially 'nigh-er', and 'next' is 'nigh-est', but at some point we replaced most instances of nigh with its comparative for some reason.

[@panzrok8701]

So near would be like näher in German.

[@HedonisticPuritan-mp6xv]

This is from a video on KZbin I've seen several times. It is specifically constructed to be easily understood in order to show the relationships. One reason I started learning German was because I could understand some things in a movie in German and it sparked an interest, dabbling in the language led to full on studying and practicing. I had no practical use, it was just fun and interesting.

[@ryanpangilinan5803]

Yes I thought so as well! One of my fave videos. You’re talking about the “Dutch & German dialogue that sounds like English” from King Ming Lam?

[@HedonisticPuritan-mp6xv]

@ryanpangilinan5803 yes, that's correct.

[@JohnnyYounitas]

Are there any other sentences that can be constructed like this to be mutually intelligible?

[@HedonisticPuritan-mp6xv]

@JohnnyYounitas probably a lot in Dutch, German has more just the occasional word but off the top of my head- komm her mein bruder- Come here my brother. Wir gehen schwimmen -we're going swimming. Sie hat gute hunde-She has good dogs(hounds).

[@publicminx]

if one also uses the shared latin/greek influence one can create even much more sentence combination which are widely understood. i mean everyone should understand words like for instance in German: Mathematik, Geographie, Universitaet, akkurat, pedantisch, Computer, Airbus, Grammatik and so on ... one can with the common Germanic and shared Latin/Greek vocabulary create easily general sentences which are understood with a bit awareness and pattern matching between German and English ... on the Latin/Greek side the influx is mostly not due to clerical but later academical influences (which is also why you have for all animals, plants etc. latinized name schemata) which was shared in the German/English university world and spread together (as kind of later wave of renaissance romanticism)

[@christianstainazfischer]

I'm not a native Dutch speaker, but the Dutch speaker sounds *really* bad at Dutch. Like for example the way she pronounces 'eten' /ˈeː.tə(n)/ is like 'eat' /it/ and then she calls the a sound, and that's wild. In Dutch the is always unaspirated, so to an Anglophone it might sound like a sound but it is in fact a . Also the long sound /e:/ is more like the long sound /eɪ/ in English, and not even close the long sound /i:/ like in 'feet' /fi:t/ - so 'eet' to an Anglophone should sound more like 'ate' /eɪt/, and not like 'eat' /i:t/, and the past tense 'at' is pronounced more like the English 'ought'. Of course the precise vowel qualities are little different between Dutch and English so using this reference, you'd still have a bit of an accent, but this is *FAR* closer to how it's actually pronounced. Also her pronunciation of the sound is totally wrong too. There IS dialectal and accent differences and it's definitely one of the sounds that has a TON of differences regionally. The most common way is however a tapped /ɾ/, followed with some kind of approximate /ɹ/ sound in coda positions. Sometimes the precise way the trill/tap and approximate are created can differ, but something like this is again the most common way. The second most common is still similar, keeping the /ɹ/ sound in coda positions, but the regular is more like German or French with a velar or uvular fricative, trill, or tap. There are *some* people who strongly pronounce the coda as a velar or alveolar trill of some sort, but that pronunciation is increasingly less common. I'm not trying to belittle her in any way for speaking Dutch, I appreciate people learning this language. However the creators of the show should've been way more intentional about finding someone to represent the language adequately. And this person probably shouldn't be advertising herself as a Dutch speaker, but rather a learner, somewhere probably in the A1 to A2 range. I'm somewhere in the late B2 early C1 area and I personally would be very hesitant to include myself such a video

[@celsus7979]

She gave ot her best shot. It wasn't a good one. But the blame should go to the producers. They should at least inform the audience that they couldn't find anyone in time and settled for her. I know it's hard to learn a new language, so i applaud her for doing it. It's just not a good representation of the dutch language.

[@christianstainazfischer]

@@celsus7979 yeah exactly, not her fault at all

[@SIG442]

You know it's seriously bad when even non-Dutch speakers clearly can see how bad her Dutch is. To be honest and brutally honest, even a 3 year old Dutch kid could do better Dutch then this lady can who probably has just a few lessons and getting pushed on stage as 'expert speaker'.

[@EmeraldVideosNL]

I am a native speaker and agree with your point. It looks like you studied my language more than I have😅. She is definitely not Dutch, I myself had trouble to understand her. She pronounced eat and drink just as in English. Phonetically I'd say it should sound more like: eight-un en(as in end) drink-un.

[@cliftonfurney5083]

Look up. "Dutch and German phrases that sound like English " a really good video

[@Enbdhhdu8e3]

@metatronacademy About Dutch being pronounced differently depending on the region, it's more complicated. Dutch in itself is only low-Franconian(Frankish which is why the sallic law has old dutch in it)whilst the northeast of the Netherlands is Low-Saxon and Frisian, all 3 are seperate low-german languages, not just dialects(although Frisian can also be considered Anglic like english). Just as Standard German in Germany is only one version of high German whilst in Germany, many variants are spoken as well as Platt(low-saxon just as in the Netherlands). Strictly speaking about "standard dutch" and its pronunciation differences, the biggest are found on the separation of above and below the Rhine. Below the rhine in Limburg, Brabant and Flanders the g, for example, is way softer than that of above the rhine in Gelderland, Holland or Utrecht, my personal theory for this is the fact that the Dutch in Gaul (Southern Netherlands+Belgium+Northern France) have historically had more latin influence due to obviously being the Franks who settled in Roman-Gaul whereas the Northern Franconians have more influence with the Frisians(because Holland was originally Frisian)and the Saxons. So in general there are 3 dutch/low german languages in the Netherlands(Low-franconian, Low-Saxon & Frisian)and within Low-franconian which is the standard dutch language there are still large pronunciation differences due to bordering influences from latins and/or other German(ics).

[@MartijnHover]

Yes, and none of these is spoken as the non-Dutch "Dutch" speaker speaks it in this video.

[@jpdj2715]

The short is that the girl presented as speaking Dutch is not a native and still learning. She frequently is beside the point. She's cute and may be an enrichment to Dutch society, but she's not a language specialist.

[@TeKett]

Old English and Old Norse are sister languages. My uneducated guess is the differences are the same as with Swedish vs Norwegian, where you understand about 80%.

[@Hooga89]

There are contemporary sources from the time that says Anglo-Saxons and Viking traders really had no problem talking to eachother, I'm going to assume it's because they weren't having very deep discussions about religion or politics or whatever and were just haggling over goods. Which would make sense.

[@JohnnyYounitas]

Old English is supposedly mutually intelligible w/ the Friesian language which is still spoken in the Nederlands

[@Weda01]

Old English and Old Norse belong to distinct Germanic branches (Old English stemming from West Germanic and Old Norse from North Germanic). Among the Germanic languages, Old Frisian is the closest relative to Old English, as both are part of the Anglo-Frisian language branch. Following this, Old Saxon is also closely related since Frisian, English, and Saxon all fall under the North Sea Germanic branch (also called the Ingvaeonic branch) within the West Germanic languages. This distinguishes them from languages like German or Dutch, which belong to a separate branch of West Germanic.

[@EddieReischl]

Yeah, Old English had so many influences, starting with the Celtic, but having the Saxons, Jutes and Angles go there, and then Danelaw, you can hear the similarities. Then the Normans come from France, but that becomes more the language of the royal court, and everyday language is heavily Old German/Old Norse influenced.

[@erickj.933]

English is the most "Latinized" of the Germanic languages due to its influence from French. French, in turn, is the most "Germanized" of the Latin languages😅

[@lizsalazar7931]

French pronunciation sounds similar Dutch in my opinion with the R U and E

[@lissandrafreljord7913]

@@lizsalazar7931 Dutch has several sounds for R, depending on the region and position of the R. At times it is a voiced alveolar tap or trill like in Spanish and Italian, at times it is a voiced uvular fricative like in French, and at times it is a voiced retroflex approximant like in English (more common in the Netherlands, but not in the southern dialects and Flemish).

[@lizsalazar7931]

@@lissandrafreljord7913 well French and Dutch sound similar in pronunciation

[@InqvisitorMagnvs]

About 30% of the modern English lexicon is derived from Anglo-Norman French, another 30% derived directly from Latin. Also about 7% derived from Greek. Although the most common daily English words are Germanic in origin, while Græco-Romance vocabulary predominates in specialty fields. The French that influenced English is far from the modern language called French. Rather English derived words from a dialect of Norman Old French with some Old Norse influence from Viking ancestors who settled Normandy and adopted Northern Old French language. After the Norman Conquest of England, insular Anglo-French would develop in Britain from Norman Old French in isolation from continental Middle French and modern French. Most English words of “French” etymology entered Middle English from Anglo-Norman Old French; hence /ch/ in English words like _change_ , _chamber_ , _Charles_ is pronounced like Old French /č/ [t͡ʃ] vs. /ch/ in fewer English words later borrowed from the French of France like _chateau_ , _champagne_ , _Charlotte_ pronounced like modern French /š/ [ʃ].

[@lissandrafreljord7913]

@@lizsalazar7931 I don't hear that at all. I find Dutch phonology some where in between English and German, with a bit of European Spanish too (retracted S, throaty G, unaspirated voiceless plosive consonants (T, P, C/K)).

[@sylvainvanduyl6143]

The last time they also had a 'not native' Dutch speaker. As a Dutch person, she does not show off the right style we talk. That is a shame, because she rumbles over the prenounciations. No Dutch say 'Eat' (like she does)...we say Eet (like ate). Is it so hard to get a native Dutch speaker, who makes it possible to have the details correct.

[@BlackAdder665]

I feel your pain. It's like when in American films a character allegedly speaks German and it sounds like someone who either had a stroke or wants to mock the language. 😀 There must be at least one person in L.A. who speaks proper German and can teach them? It's usually only one or two lines anyway.

[@Nazdreg1]

In German, we have a similar word to "Spise" for eating. It is "Speise". "Speis und Trank" is an archaic/fancy way to say "Essen und Trinken". It is like Renaissance fair speech. :)

[@tangente00]

In meinem vornehmen Hause, wo die goldenen Pokale funkeln und die kostbaren Speisen auf silbernen Schalen prangen, gebrauchen wir, die wir dem erlauchten Stande angehören, stets den vornehmen Ausdruck „Speis und Trank“. Denn es ziemt sich für uns, die wir in den höchsten Kreisen verkehren, unsere Tafel mit solch erhabenen Worten zu schmücken, wie sie unserer Würde und unserem erlesenen Geschmack gebühren. So lade ich Euch denn ein, an meiner Tafel Platz zu nehmen, wo Speis und Trank in Fülle und höchster Vollendung gereicht werden.

[@whohan779]

We indeed do have three nouns & verbs for ‘(to) eat’. 1. ‘essen’/‘Essen’⚲ (used in most contexts; for regular people) 2. ‘fressen’/‘Fraß’♂ (used for animals or ill-mannered people, esp. eating without or only with improvised cutlery despite not custom for the meal in question) 3. ‘speisen’/‘Speis(e)’♀ (fancy term; sometimes used in fairy tales from medieval or early modern times)

[@mormacil]

Spijs is also an archaic Dutch term for food. Not even fancy, just straight up archaic.

[@BlackAdder665]

True.

[@olgahein4384]

@@whohan779 We also have 'Futter/futtern' (nowadays a slang, but actually the proper terms for animal food. Also sounds similar to the english 'food') and we have 'Mahl' (a meal. Also used as 'Mahlzeit' which is also the word for the time to have your meal and how you great each other during lunch break in some places).

[@mxbmvnvmbncmbn]

Nóreg, Svítjód, Dannmork, Tyskland, England, etc, heyrer allar saman, í Germánskam upphavleg vår. Gaman vídeo Metatron frå Nóreg! Det er og bra at veita, at Nóreg hevr tvau språk: Bókmaul (Bokmål/Dano-norwergian), og Nýnorsk (New Norwegian), der Nýnorsk hevr ýver tausund dialektar. Vissa dialektar nærast seg til Donsk, médan vissa dialektar nærast seg til Íslansk, sum dialekten min, kva hevr datívbeyjing og reflexive verb. Det vil segja, tvei menn kann snakke tvo heilt úlikji språk.

[@Hooga89]

Dette er en imponerende autistisk form for landsmål.

[@h6502]

what Norwegian dialect is that? i speak Icelandic and that read much more understandable than Danish (they make us study that as kids)

[@Hooga89]

@@h6502 It's some kind of creation he made himself by amalgamating several conservative Norwegian dialects, it's not remotely official in anyway.

[@mxbmvnvmbncmbn]

@@h6502 It is a form of Høgnorsk, basically Nynorsk before it attempted a merge with Bokmål.

[@TheFrerc]

Vissa dialekter är väldigt lika svenska dialekter i Finland

[@KarlKarsnark]

Scandis can all understand each other, but the Danish are famous for having an "odd"/hard to undersgtand accent. It's a bit of a running joke among them all.

[@jaysterling26]

& the numbers in Danish are %£€@!

[@Hooga89]

It's a truth with qualifications that we can understand eachother. As a Norwegian I would say that Norwegians have a better time understanding both Swedes and Danes than Danes and Swedes have understanding Norwegian and eachother and experts who study it think it's about Norway culturally speaking being exposed to more Swedish and Danish through TV in their youth but also Norway has many dialects that are very different from Standard Norwegian, so they develop a more competent "ear" for linguistic difference. The farther back you go in generations, the easier time people have though, it's the younger generations that have more issues. In my personal experience people who are 50+ years old from Denmark or Sweden respectively, have no problems understanding my Norwegian, it's usually people in their 20s-30s who either don't care to try to understand or haven't been exposed to it enough.

[@mike200017]

Hey, don't make fun of people who were unfortunately born with a potato in their mouths.

[@livedandletdie]

It's not that we can all understand each other, and Danish isn't the worst offender of accents... that goes to some of the Norwegians, like Trondersk or Trondelag... or to Sweden with Elfdalian, or Gutnish, or Westrobothnian, or Scanian. Denmark only have a single bad one, and that Sønderjysk.

[@theherk]

Kamelåså

[@gregorde]

Not to be pedantic, but it is AnglOphones. Who am I kidding, on this channel pedantry should be welcomed.

[@giugiubi]

I'm sure it's well appreciated

[@TheMouseandTheWall]

I am from England and say ANGlophones

[@ccapoccia]

@@TheMouseandTheWallNo one says the word “anglophone” in this video. I’m guessing that the word “anglophone” was misspelled in the title when the video was first posted but it has been corrected now that we see it.

[@tovarishchfeixiao]

@@ccapoccia It's still written as "angliphone" though. At least in my view.

[@Yotanido]

@@tovarishchfeixiao It's correct now for me, but yeah it was definitely "angliphone" before

[@PC_Simo]

4:06 It’s actually just compounding, not agglutination; because it’s not smashing various affixes onto a stem, but smashing a bunch of stems (nouns) together, to create a new (compound) word, not a word form / inflection.

[@celsus7979]

How is that girl dutch?!

[@celsus7979]

Yep, they tried to fool us, she isn't dutch 😄 metatron would do a better job after a few dutch lessons!

[@HedonisticPuritan-mp6xv]

Immigration?

[@celsus7979]

Must be very recent. She doesn't know how to pronounce basic words.

[@user-ix8ft5rs6y]

She is for sure polish or ukraine immigrant i have plenty of them living in the village that sounds the same.

[@themadazi]

@@user-ix8ft5rs6y She sounded like this was her first lesson tbh.

[@tannhausergate7162]

In meiner Erfahrung eher nicht. Edit: Now that I've seen this, they could have pointed out that German has an equivalent of the Nordic "Spise" in "Speise", which is in common usage. For the example sentence, the most obvious would be "Speis und Trank"" of course, but you encounter it in a lot of situations. There is the term "Speiseeis" for ice cream to distinguish it from other forms of ice not intended for human consumption for instance.

[@mroldnewbie]

Thanks for pointing this out; the languages are way more similar for this sentence than the video showed. Danish also has "æde" which is a vulgar word for eating. Spise in Danish comes from German, æde is the real original Danish word.

[@Hooga89]

German also has the Scandinavian word for "speak", e.g "schnacken" in many Northern dialects, it's just not used in High German.

[@highks496]

@@mroldnewbie That's interesting because "essen" in German is the normal word while "speisen" as a verb is almost ironic in contemporary German because it sounds so over-the-top fancy. The noun "Speise" is less over-the-top and is still being used especially in advertising, where the noun "Essen" just wouldn't sound right. It's too simple. You don't want to advertise your food as "Essen", although it's not vulgar, but still too simple for advertising.

[@leonard3468]

As a German I of course wish English had stayed more on its Germanic roots, would have made it a lot easier for me, like Old English is so much more understandable to a German who doesn't speak English at all than modern English is... but at least the grammar elements stayed Germanic like the distinction between strong and weak verbs and the change of sentence order in questions for example

[@Bapho434]

Finally a video with German in it. I would love to see metatron trying German. I’m a native and 9/10 he nails the Pronunciation fr. Like Essen was nearly perfekt. Respekt Bruder

[@TuaTeMauAkauAtea]

I really like the Metraton channel and a fun and light channel full of Italian soul. The English The Italian and Latin and the Ancient Italic are married languages The Italian, Venetian, Latin the Ancient Italic and the French conquered and assimilated English to the Romanic side, then Hellenic, then Phrigian and then Anatolian in both grammar and in the grammar logic and vocabulary and symbolism. It takes Shakespeare's work the "Merchant of Venice" and translates the work of the English for Venetian, for Italian, Latin, Normand and ancient Ilirian, French, Norman and Greek and Italic. The logical, grammatical, literary, poetic, prosaic and logical categories of the English work are the same in Italics, Latin, Italian, Venetian and French and Norman and Greek. Even the etymologies of words are equal or similar as well as semantic and grammatical constructions. It does not take my words as prison or as a cage or dogma, test yourself individually and discover for yourself the Romanic English now. Shakespeare is regarded as the reference of modern English pros of now, as this same Shakespearean English is heavily Romanic, tradition for the afore mentioned languages, will discover a lot of resemblance to the etymological roots and the current English language grammar. Discover by yourself the Romanic conquest, assimilation and total modification of English from today, nowadays.

[@corinna007]

I've commented before that my family speaks Mennonite Low German, and that it's a language somewhere between German and Dutch. I've never studied Dutch, but because of my Low German background and also studying High German, I can usually pick out a bit more than I expect when I listen to it. Afrikaans, too. The Scandinavian languages are trickier, but I can also pick out the odd word, especially when I try reading them.

[@Mulmgott]

Low German is a distinct language from High German which is still spoken in some parts of Germany and the netherlands. It sometimes is also called "Low Saxon".

[@corinna007]

@Mulmgott True. But the Low German we speak part developed in the Vistula delta after my ancestors were forced to leave Frisia / Germany / the Netherlands after the Reformation. From the little bit I've heard of the Low German spoken in Germany, ours a bit different. Our branch of Mennonites in particular is referred to as Russian Mennonites because before coming over here to Canada, my ancestors were in Zaporizhia for a while, which at the time was still part of the Russian Empire.

[@sststr]

If you really want to go deep on the Germanic origins of English, go check out Simon Roper's channel. I seem to recall he actually used these exact sentences in one of his videos, but I can't recall any more which one. For the linguistics geeks who like the history of English specifically, he has a really great channel.

[@paulthomas8262]

@metatronacademy English has more word with Latin rots but structurally it i Germanic. But where the is a latin words there is usually some Germanic alternative that can be used. Also Bythoic languages before Anglo Saxon was also somewhat affected by Latin, just not to the same extent as the Norman invasion.

[@thethrashyone]

One thing I find fascinating is cognates between Germanic and Romance languages that correlate 1-to-1, such as the word for breakfast in Spanish literally having the same composition (des = apart/break, ayuno = fasting). Even the word welcome breaks down 1-to-1: bien = well, venido/a = come.

[@panzrok8701]

Both language groups have the same Indo-European root after all.

[@publicminx]

there is also a religious aspect to 'break fast' ('fast' not in the sense of quick but for a certain phase/period not eating anything). breaking this 'fast' (in German Fasten).

[@Jonas.A.Larsen]

its worth pointing out that in written form Norwegian is basically Danish thats evolved over time, as Norway was forced to use Danish while under Danish rule for quite some time.

[@karliikaiser3800]

I find such videos too general. It should be about one language from one country with variants like Saxon German, Franconian German and Bavyrian. Lower Austrian, Styrian and Tyrolian. Bookmal and Nynorsk or similarly.

[@alaruno8325]

The Korean channel stole the examples from this channel: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qKq5eGiCfbeAgJYsi=7t_haUg3TBR29P4w

[@ryanpangilinan5803]

I hope that it was credited in the video, but yeah I recognized this too

[@riesmeister]

Very interesting, thanks. The plot tickens about this fraud channel of World Friends :-)

[@angelavonhalle5144]

I found that those Swedish crime TV movies showed me that the language is easier to understand where situational awareness is there. When the two police officers went up to a house to interview a man,you know "how are you", "come in", "come here" etc. were perfectly understood. So, I watched the episode whenever it came up and more and more made perfect sense.(P.S. English and German, and romance languages). Only translating words is a painful way to learn a language.

[@alicelund147]

For Norwegian it depends on if it is "bokmål" or "nynorsk". Bokmål is more like Danish, Nynorsk is sometimes more like Swedish and sometimes completely different from both Swedish and Danish.

[@SteamboatW]

But, can you even speak "nynorsk"???

[@Belnick6666]

Swedish is easy to learn in one way, but it is very hard to learn the "flow" have not seen a KZbin polyglot handle that, they can say the words, but without the flow it sounds very very weird, so weird that I might not understand what they say, even when they say the correct words

[@blueredbrick]

I saw the original and hoped they would pull the video down after doing sonething usefull with the comments. The Dutch person is just not doing a good job. She is not a native speaker at all, not even close. Could not enjoy the video because of it.

[@BUSHCRAPPING]

interesting that in england "beer" is quite a modern word, its only fairly recently that it has overtaken "ale" especially in the more conservative areas. its also tied to the expanding lager market and the word became more specific.

[@highks496]

The cognate of Norwegian "spise" would be German "speisen" (verb) or "Speise" (noun). It also means "to eat" and "food" but it's a little dated. It is still being used though when you want to convey that the food is first class. It's also a part of the compound word "Speisekarte" (the menu in a restaurant), literally the "food-card".

[@TheBarser]

Yeah spise is a loan word into danish/norwegian and here in denmark it became the word for how humans eat, and æde how animals eat. In denmark you get corrected by your parrents if you say if we should æde as its considered rude. But if you go not far back in time that is just the common word everyone used, but then the elite changed it by the adopted german word being the fancy word we should use

[@afternoobtea914]

As a swede I can easily understand norwegian and danish. German and Dutch is not so hard either. Välkommen is for one person and Välkomna is for multiple persons. You should here it in Scanian.

[@dennisjensen2239]

As a native Danish speaker it has always surprised me, that when on vacation Danish is often mistaken for Dutch...

[@dbullcutter]

3:20 finnish is not a german language. It belongs to the same linguistic family of hungarian and estonian.

[@Nifuruc]

German also has "speisen" which is a fancy word to mean "essen" (to eat). It could be translated with "to dine", but the problem is that "dinnieren" exists as well. Faszinating stuff indeed :D

[@rasmusn.e.m1064]

yeah, at least in Denmark we only use "æde" for animals or when speaking rudely/familiarly. I think we got "spise" from German "speisen", so I guess the distinction in fanciness is preserved but the distinction has moved, if that makes sense.

[@FlorisFlowergarden]

Yeah in dutch it’s the same. We say ‘Spijs’ or ‘Spijzen’ 🙂

[@amerikawoche8243]

I think the menu in Germ. restaurants is the "Speisekarte".

[@highks496]

@@rasmusn.e.m1064 we use another verb "fressen" for animals - or to convey that somebody eats like a pig. The noun "Speise" is still more commonly used in German, especially in advertising. No restaurant would call their food "Essen", they call it "Speisen" (plural). Because "Essen" sounds too simple and bland for advertising.

[@panzrok8701]

@@rasmusn.e.m1064 For animals/speaking rudely we have the word "fressen" in German. It's pronounced similar to "essen" just with "fr" in front of it.

[@anashiedler6926]

what i noticed from the nordic ones. In german, there is an older version of "Essen und Trinken" - if you say it like the nordic ones (eat(s) and drink(s) instead of "to eat and to drink"), you could also say: "Speis und Trunk" which sounds very similar to the nordic ones.

[@Schwingedesraben]

"Welcome" seems to be a very ancient expression/concept. I did some research, and found it even in alt norse and old germanic, and if my sources are correct, even in proto indo european language.

[@josteingravvik2381]

Hi @Metatron !! Just a little bit on the Norwegian version of the English word "to Eat". The Norwegian girl in this video was using the "Bokmål" (the most used of our 2 official variations of our language, and mostly spoken in and around the capital Oslo.) word "Spise". In other dialects and in our 2nd official variant, "Nynorsk", you can just as well use "Ete". Here you see the similarities clearly with English. This word Ete/Eat is just 1 out several houndreds if not thousands of words left in England by the Anglos, Saxons and Jutes + the Vikings. Best regards from Norway !!

[@gregorde]

@@josteingravvik2381 supposedly, Norwegian is the easiest language for native English speakers to learn. The written language and grammar are quite similar. But those vowels and diphthongs….

[@josteingravvik2381]

@@gregorde Yes I have seen this statement before, but I don't really know if this is the case.. We have all these dialects which people speak normally, and these are quite different from "Bokmål". And we have 3 more letters in our alphabet, all 3 are vowels which you point out..😆2 of these sounds you allready have in your language, they just don't have spesific letters in English. The Ø/ø is like the I/i in "flirt, and skirt". The Å/å or sometimes written "Aa/aa) is like the A in "All, small, tall". The last one, Æ/æ I am not so sure about exist in English.😃 It is kind of most like the American English A in "mad, bad,sad" just with an even wider mouth opening....This is the best way I can explain it a 4 am 😛😋

[@mxbmvnvmbncmbn]

​@@gregorde Um dú líkjar tvauljód (tvíljód, diftongar) kann du prøva dialekten minn, sum hevr myket diftongar og konsonantklyngar. Sjå under: 1 - ein, ei, eit 2 - tvei, tvæ, tvau 3 - trí, trjå, trju 4 - fjóre, fjóra, fjøgor Helsr frå Nóreg!

[@gregorde]

@@mxbmvnvmbncmbn It’s shocking how much I can understand with just English. I know I wouldn’t understand it spoken but this is what I got on a first read: ??? ??? Like ??? Diphthongs can you (you can?) ??? My dialect … have many (?) diphthongs and consonant??? See below (A bunch of ways of saying 1, 2, 3 and 4) I’m guessing du means you. Tvaujoth means two??? (Since you gave the words for two) I guess the other bit is “vowel” since that’s what’s a diphthong is. I’m going to guess “um” means “if”, so “if you like diphthongs (two vowels, diphthongs) you can … my dialect … have many diphthongs and consonant???: I can’t really guess “prova” or “sum”, but I can guess some things that would make grammatical sense in English. Maybe prova is related to “provided” or “prove”, contextually, maybe use? Attempt? Contextually “sum” probably means “it” or “which”. Klyngar sounds “cling” (sticks together), so maybe that’s consonant clusters (consonants that stick together) from context? And, wow, your grammar is really similar to English.

[@mxbmvnvmbncmbn]

@@gregorde Your guesses are actually really accurate, "tvauljód" is a combination of neuter-gender two "tvau" and plural sound(s) "ljód", which is a way of saying diphthong, meaning literally "two-sounds". Prøva means to try, or to test something, and "sum" means "like" pretty much. You are almost spot on, it says: "If you like diphthongs you could try my dialect, which has a lot of diphthongs and consonant clusters." Really good job, I'm surprised you could get so much out of it!

[@tubekulose]

In the present tense, the German verb "essen (to eat)" is cunjugated as follows [By the way, experience has shown that the other tenses seem absolutely crazy to non-German speakers 😁]: 1st pers. sg.: ich esse 2nd pers. sg.: du isst 3rd pers. sg.: er/sie/es isst 1st pers. pl.: wir essen 2nd pers. pl.: ihr esst 3rd pers. pl.: sie essen Btw., the imperative forms are: sg.: iss! pl.: esst!

[@jaysterling26]

The only Danish I understood was in a Carl Dreyer film, ' Come here now !'. It's now thought Frisian came from England, not vice versa. Isn't ' sky' actually Norse for 'cloud'? My Swedish ancestors would be proud , although I do live in the Danelaw..

[@TheBarser]

yes sky means cloud here. the english word sky is himmel.

[@Bobbias]

Being a native english speaker I always find it interesting how different it feels trying to read things in a romance language vs a germanic language. The distribution of cognates is such that "everyday speech" is typically easier to understand in germanic languages (although sound shifts and words english has replaced with loans from elsewhere complicate things) while technical subjects are much easier to follow in romance languages, even despite the additional differences in grammar. I'm not sure how much this was aided from my bit of compulsory french education in school though (I'm canadian). I can barely say anything beyond "ou est la toilette?" or "je ne comprends le français." But I'm sure my exposure to those latin based cognates has helped me better identify cognates in other romance languages.

[@swedenisthemotherland3952]

Metatron react to Sabaton any song from the carolus rex album (Swedish version).

[@Halfdanr_H]

My first language is English. When I was at school I learned German very quickly and easily, then I began learning Swedish and Danish. I always struggled with Danish pronunciation, and my grandmother was disappointed with that 😅 Also I feel like the British girl is at a disadvantage because of her dialect. I think speaking my dialect (Tyne and Wear) makes it easier to understand when listening to Nordic and Germanic speech, because our vowels are more similar compared to a Southern English dialect. I have 3 friends who are originally from Sweden who are far more open to speaking in English with me because they say they can understand me much better than the other English speakers.

[@Aoderic]

The Danish/Norwegian (bokmål) word for eating (or something you eat, i.e. food), "spise" is a loanword from Low German, which is inherited from Proto West Germanic, "spese", meaning foodstuffs. Is ultimately from Latin. And exist in modern Italian as spesa/spese, and can among other things mean groceries. It also exists in modern German "speisen" and can mean a meal. Since it existed in Proto West Germanic and Old Saxon, the predecessors of English. The word might also have existed in Old English, but have since died out.

[@johanbranstrom9992]

it exists in swedish to: spis = a stove utspisa = serve food

[@Aoderic]

@johanbranstrom9992 Indeed, though it's not common to use it for the verb "eat"

[@SteamboatW]

​@@johanbranstrom9992... and Spisa = to eat.

[@SteamboatW]

​@@AodericNo, we use "spisa" for "to eat".

[@markunderwood912]

As an english man that loves history i love that english and the evolution of it from italian(romans) Anglo-Saxon (german nordic(Viking)normans(french) all to evolve to into what we speak and most of the world

[@autumnphillips151]

@0:31 But the thing about that is that, if you were familiar with other Germanic languages, you’d realize that it’s the same with them as well. All Germanic languages loaned fancy words like that from Latin-it’s not an English thing-but people are generally far more familiar with English than they are with other Germanic languages, and that leads them to think it is. English: mentality. Afrikaans, Dutch, Limburgish, and West Frisian: mentaliteit. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian: mentalitet. German: Mentalität. Hunsrik: mentaliteet. Luxembourgish: Mentalitéit. Faroese, Icelandic, and Yiddish are the only Germanic languages I can find that have a different root for that one.

[@Twisted_Logic]

You should check out "Your first Old English lesson with Ōsweald Bera" by Colin Gorrie. He teaches the whole lesson in Old English relying on common words and visual aids. It was really cool

[@pokeman747]

English is Germanic by way of Denmark and the Netherlands. Old English and Scots are very similar to the Friesian Dutch

[@roseonrift]

really interesting insights, thank you! would love to hear your thoughts on Welsh too!

[@praetoriancorps]

Isn't Frisian the closest language to old English? Maybe you can make a video like that as well?

[@michaelchen8643]

West Friesen followed by modern Dutch sounds like funny speaking English to me and of course there’s going to be words that are uttered that I won’t understand and then they’re going to be cognates that I can definitely understand and they will be false friends At a very simple element level, I can follow along Even modern standard German, there’s even fewer number of cognitive, but occasionally my ears pick up and I can follow certain words and phrases The same goes for modern Nordic languages like Norwegian, Swedish and Danish For me, it’s a matter of the phonemes And can I recognize them when put together or are they distractors and confusing? Certain French dialect that are spoken in North America are easy here for me to understand basic words, then metropolitan French

[@jaysterling26]

Yes, where was Frisian? Also, I need to say ' adorable ' to young ladies, or anyone, like Metatron - non creepy& non patronising.

[@michaelchen8643]

@ Frisia, at least the part that’s in the Netherlands is the province of Friesland. It exists in the north part of the country. This version of the Friesian language is the most robust and probably has at least 400,000 speakers. But wait, it gets better. Frisian is a family of languages of which two of them are in Germany. One of them is Saterland and the other is known as another “ wait for it” family of languages North Frisian. These smaller versions of freezing are literally like on a village level and might have few hundred speakers at most. They say that a language is a dialect with an army in the Navy. Well, these are languages without an army and a Navy. They’re not national languages.

[@KarlKarsnark]

Germans tend to use the hard, rhotic-R more than other Germanic languages, but there are sort of 2 kinds. One in the back of the throat and one that is on the tip of the tongue, like in Spanish.

[@highks496]

Standard High German doesn't have rolled "r" like in Spanish. But there are dialects that use it exclusively, like Franconian. I know more than one Franconian-born German who literally cannot pronounce a correct German "r" because they never learned it as a child.

[@aliceberethart]

I'm Swedish and I find Italian very nice to learn. We may have more French loanwords, but Italian has a cadance and rhythm my swedish brain just agrees with.

[@jaysterling26]

I heard on a language podcast ( years ago), a test by a university (where?)that to foreigners ( inc. Chinese participants) Italian & Swedish were rated the most beautiful sounding. Danish , well, er...

[@TuaTeMauAkauAtea]

Swedish for my heart 💜❤️ and ears is singing joyfully idiom trully ❤❤❤❤

[@DimitrisTziounis]

To my ears the swedish language sounds very close to the german one. Can Swedes and Germans understand one another? I've always been curious about that.

[@aliceberethart]

@DimitrisTziounis Not really. A few words here and there. I understand as much french as german due to the amount of loanwords. The grammar makes more sense in german.

[@futurew0782]

@@DimitrisTziounis No, we only understand Norwegians and sometimes Danes depending on the accent

[@tamasmarcuis4455]

A Scots speaker would have a much better chance. When I lived in Scotland for seven years I made the effort to learn Scots and was surprised at just how many words were similar to Dutch. The written versions have a lot of similarities in spelling as well. They don't write the stresses though such as the past tense stress on the first consonants where Dutch would have "ge-" but the always use the "-t" ending. I also noticed they use more late medieval and early modern French like the Dutch loan words from French and less Latin.

[@ArmandoBellagio]

Generally German and Dutch are closer to each other and the Scandinavian languages to each other I'd say (besides Finnish of course). Which one is closer to English is hard to tell. Yeah, the Anglo-Saxons originated like from Northern Germany and Denmark. But in German there also was a vowel shift at some point and of course you also have some Viking influence in English.

[@turkoositerapsidi]

Suomi (Finnish) isn't a Scandinavian language.

[@TuaTeMauAkauAtea]

Finnish is a finnic uralic idiom Asian language related to Estonian and Samus idioms as well.

[@SteamboatW]

​@@turkoositerapsidiIt's still a language officially spoken in Scandinavia, so, yes, it's technically a Scandinavian language, but it's not a Norse language.

[@doncarlodivargas5497]

Back in the 90'ties my company used some German consultans in our projects, me and my colleagues are Norwegians, and sometimes we just spoke Norwegian in-between us, and the thing is, those Germans understood that we had been taking about, it was quite funny, i some times starting to give them a referee in English and they interrupted me, saying, "we got it, what you talked about"

[@smievil]

9:27 you could say "bira" in swedish, although there are quite a few words for it which probably has different implication

[@aramisone7198]

Thats a slang word.

[@SteamboatW]

​@@aramisone7198No, it isn't. It is a bit dialectal, and older, but not a slang word per se.

[@SteamboatW]

You cpuld also say "bärs", which deceptively look a bit like "beer", but that's a false cognate since "bärs" comes from "Bavarian" and not "Bier".

[@johnshepherd1342]

Hi I come from the UK specifically North East of England a lot of our slang words are of germanic or Scandinavian decent Our slang word for a tic or flea is a "lop" and the Scandinavian name for a flea is lop or loppa Bairn is another slang word for a young child which is Scandinavian as well Buy we also have old French words that are slang words as well depending what area you are from

[@GenuineCelticViking]

Try Frisian once. It is an old language still spoken mainly in the north of Holland and some islands in Germany by hundreds of thousands there

[@andreasbach5142]

In german another word for "essen" can be "speisen", which then sounds very similar to the nordic languages. But that word is very rarely used and when it is sofisticated.

[@noahjaybee]

I've been leaning Norwegian as an American English speaker for about 4 months and it's been fun. Just enough challenge but so much similarity. Also Danish and Norwegian bokmål are the same written, so it's mutually intelligible... It's the spoken language that differs and Nynorsk is thrown into the mix in Norway.

[@purdysanchez]

"Welcome" is just basically a variation of the same phrase in all western European languages regardless of whether they are Roman or Germanic in origin.

[@purdysanchez]

In English you could think about "welcome" as "well coming" which is the same as "bien venido" or "ben venutto" or "wil kommen" but all these terms have been combined into one word over 1000 years.

[@ScandzaVaeringjar]

It's mindblowing to me when people can't distinguish languages AT ALL. I'm pretty sure I can distinguish like 80% of languages at least. Sure, there's some obscure languages spoken by some small tribes in places which is difficult to know but the larger languages of Europe, Americas, Asia, Middle East etc is pretty easy.

[@kevboard]

if you like the sound of Swedish, give the song "Vi seglar mot miklagard" by the german (yeah, lol) power metal band Rebellion a listen. (they made a trilogy of albums about Norse culture, one of the guys in the band was a history teacher)

[@smievil]

or the swedish song "herr mannelig" by the german band "in extremo" based on classic swedish story

[@panzrok8701]

German metal has a lot of Scandinavian influences. Metal in general to be fair.

[@brainwashed1232]

High German is very close to Danish, although I can hardly speak a word of Danish, but I find it relatively easy to read Danish. I myself speak the Bavarian dialect of German, and I am often told that this dialect sounds more like Nordic languages such as Swedish or Norwegian than German itself. That is extremely interesting 🙂

[@SteamboatW]

While Swedish is more similar to low german.

[@martinricardo4503]

The Scandinavian word for beer sounds like the German word for oil. Water might also be similar. Wasser for German. The German I learned (Baden Wurtemburg and Bavaria) was very guttural.

[@smievil]

11:31 as a swedish person i find "spise" a bit odd, it sounds similar to "spis" which could be stove or some sort of fireplace, maybe it's relevant though

[@knieperkohl]

Spisa would be the swedish equivalent. It's an old term for äta

[@SteamboatW]

​@@knieperkohl... or for 'consume', since you can "spisa" both food and music.

[@debrickashaw9387]

the Norwegian/danish word "spise" the same word in swedish for "stove"

[@brittakriep2938]

Scandinavian Öl is in english Ale or german Alt ( which is drunken only in Ruhr area).

[@livedandletdie]

Spis is from German Speise meaning meal, it's originally a loanword from Latin, Expensa. You know that word Metatron, in Italian as Spesa, or in Sicilian Spisa... Speisen und Getränken is Food and Drink in German.

[@Markus-sk4jr]

Viennan German/Wienerisch, for example, is a very softly spoken variant of German.

[@tubekulose]

"Viennese" 🙂

[@Markus-sk4jr]

@tubekulose thx 🤗

[@tubekulose]

@@Markus-sk4jr Gern geschehen! 😊

[@doderdo1]

I am Danish and i understand both Swedish and Norwegian if it is slow, but i am from the northern part of Jylland and i think because of the accent we have its make it easier ❤ From Denmark 🇩🇰

[@SteamboatW]

I think it's hard to compare. 40% of English is perhaps from romance languages, but it also matters a lot *which* words... and the grammar is it germanic or romance?

[@Hadewijch_]

The Dutch speaker had a very strong foreign accent, maybe slavic? She was very hard to understand for me as a Dutch person because she does not clearly pronounce any consonants.

[@sststr]

But the burning question regarding the German and Dutch: are the Dutch actually swamp Germans, or are the Germans really mountain Dutch?

[@YamnayaSintash]

They used a germanic extract designed for all germanic speakers to understand

[@stephencrompton4352]

An interesting reaction would be to "Universal Germanic Dialogue". I forget the name of the channel. The video is bland in appearance, though it's very interesting.

[@ryanpangilinan5803]

Yes, King Ming Lam I believe ^

[@stephencrompton4352]

@ryanpangilinan5803 yep, that's the man.

[@LynxLord1991]

What do you want to learn of the Nordic languages Metatron

[@vladimirmihnev9702]

As someone that grow up in German but not a native German speaker, I say knowing German helps greatly with English and I understand about 80% of Dutch

[@AFLOVEable]

Now, if you go back in history and leave the "modern high" German language and look at the lower and middle German language, spoken, let's say 1000 years ago, you'll find, that German was way closer to dutch and the Scandinavians as today. German changed way more than these. You'll find remnants of these older language versions still wide spread in the coastal regions of North Sea and Baltic Sea. Especially in Frisia stretching from the Netherlands over Germany to Denmark, you might think they speak the same language - in Germany at least the older generations when speaking dialect. As a German, having lived for 2+ years in Sweden, I found it rather easier, to decipher written Swedish, so much in kommen with German and sprinkles of English. Though official, bureaucratic texts are something special.

[@MrRabiddogg]

the Germanic roots of English came from the area roughly near Denmark and the Netherlands. the Dutch languages, Frisian specifically, would be closest

[@martinjackman2943]

If I had to guess I'd say the "Dutch " girl was Moravian Czech from her facial features..

[@Dlf212]

I've read that Norwegian grammar is basically identical to English. ....

[@letoarundale1741]

As a native norwegian speaker, I would say it depends. It certainly can seem like that though from a purely grammatical perspective, but languages are more than just grammar at the end of the day ^^

[@Hooga89]

It pretty much is but what makes it different is that Norwegian has 2 distinct features English doesn't have, grammatical gender and post-possessive nouns. E.g we say "the car mine"(lit. "Bilen min" and not "min bil"(my car).) "The house mine"(huset mitt) and not "mitt hus"(my house) etc. Swedes do the latter most of the time, which makes them slightly closer to English actually.

[@TuaTeMauAkauAtea]

Hodiern English follows Normands in grammar,logic and redaction construction. English abandoned Norwegians ways of grammar, logic, sintaxis and redaction more than a millenium only 1.100 years ago in fact. Just see Anglophones searches and studies of English it's not my view it's the reality of idiom today.

[@lgzster]

No, it's not identical to English. To give just a small example, "the car" is "bilen". The word "bil" means car and the article "the " is the suffix -en that is attached to the noun.

[@peterjohnson1091]

I'm fascinated by Dutch numbers being a mix of English and German Een, twee, drie, vier, vijf, zes, zeven, acht, negen, tien.

[@publicminx]

Dutch has much more harsher sounds (also Swiss German, Slavic languages etc.) than German. Too many Germans copy-paste themself without brain those wrong stereotypes (and because stupidity comes always with a lack of knowledge they even dont know where this stereotype came from: it was from the Prussian military and bureaucracy tone - had nothing to do with German in general). German sounds due to a high degree of academization much more 'neutral 'then all those others more dialectical standardized Germanic languages (and btw. also Romance languages). It depends much more on the speaker how it sounds than in most other languages. Dutch has much more combinations with 'ch' for instance (pronounciation). A good example weather people listen exactly to the reality or just believe into narratives without recognizing the reality (as the German here did without any awareness)

[@TheBarser]

As a dane I think german is pretty smooth actually and they speak very clearly in general. It is l just a hollywood stereotype. Dutch though sounds a bit harsh.

[@TaratraAvana]

Federal German is soft lovely 😍🌹 and smooth than others germanics idioms by far and respects all phonemes vowels and consonants. It's a fact , never a rhetorical talk 🦜. That's why others germanics peoples lives German to forever ♾️. German is clear smooth and clear in talk in spelling.

[@TadaNoEssai]

i'm studying Norwegian! the structure is reaaaally similar to English and you find similar words all the time. for English speakers it's probably one of the easiest language to learn, much easier than any romance language

[@panzrok8701]

For me as a German who also knows English it was even easier. Almost all words have a cognate at least in one of those two languages and the sentence structure is also basically a mix of German and English.

[@SteamboatW]

Swedish melody is very influenced by plattdeutsch, since we had a few hundred years of extreme influence.

[@lkjh861]

Danish and Norwegian DO actually have the word "eat", it is "æd" and also has the meaning of eating ~ but it tends to be used only for when animals eat something, or to say that you ate like an animal, so more like "to devour" or "to wolf down"... for example, if you ask your mom "what are we having to æde?", she will tell you off for using crass language ~ though it is not bad enough language for her to get properly angry, just annoyed with your lack of manners... likewise, saying "when are we going to æde" or "man, I need something to æde" is common everyday language in Danish to imply that you are starving. ☝🤓

[@slickmechanical]

Im an english speaker who started learning Norwegian so I could speak to my Danish friend. They're almost the same but Norwegian is easier to pronounce for English speakers.

[@virtualfroggy]

First off, the teams notification confused me so much at the beginning secondly, that dutch speaker... is not a dutch speaker...

[@matsv201]

English is basically french bastarisation of danish.. old danish. Scottish is the same for norwegan. But old norwegam. Modern norwegan is really danish with a swidish like pronuciatiom When going so close to the specifics. Diffrent regions of sweden change the pronunciation a lot. Like really a lot. And its worth saying that in finland they aslo speek swedish but the pronunication is again very diffrent. Norwegan is also split in two versiond that is really very diffrent.

[@SteamboatW]

Well.. Norwegian is split into at least 17 major versions, not just two.

[@tienshinhan2524]

Dutch for me is some bridge between German (from East) & English (from West).