I'm glad I went from Slavic languages through German to English. A lot easier than the other way around... Funny tidbit about Czech. We pronounce everything as it is written. There are distinct sounds for every letter in the alphabet and you just put them together and that's it. So, Spelling Bee is something that is completely unknown for school kids in Czechia;)
hungarian is actually surprisingly logical and hungarian cases are NOT like slavic languages because there's no gender in Hungarian and many hungarian cases correspnd to prepositions in other languages
I don't speak Hungarian, but I've learned vowel harmony in Finnish and Turkish, which are logical and very pleasant to hear. Another thing: Those two languages and Hungarian don't have genders. So, they have left out the categorization and sexism that most other European languages demand. Stress: I have a feeling that the stress almost always falls on the first syllable. The stress will change if the vowel is long but in Hungarian the long vowel is always shown. It's totally different from Russian where the stress can fall anywhere and worse, it's NOT shown...
@@lutchbizin6420 you are way off on the gender and sexism thing regarding Hungarian. Every single profession has the word nő (woman) tacked on to it. you do not call your female doctor simple doktor, but doktornő... your female teacher is tanárnő, female police officer rendőrnő so forth and so on....
During WWII, the U.S. Marine Corps (with the assistance of 29 Navajo marines) created a code based on the Navajo language. The code is said to have been critical to the victory at Iwo Jima, and the code remained unbroken at the end of the war. The Navajo "Code Talkers" could translate 3 lines of English in 20 seconds ... as opposed to the 30 minutes it took to translate the same material using a code breaking machine to translate from a standard code.
The idea of using the Navajo language came from an American who grew up with the Navajos when his parents were missionaries. Very few, non-Navajos can speak that language. The code-talking language was derived from Navajo words but even natives couldn't understand it without training. The Japanese tried but they never cracked the code.
I have a course on Cherokee that i have been trying to learn. So honestly Navajo just seems mind blowing. Thank you for including an American indigenous language in your list.
Sign up for Ed Fields free online Cherokee lessons. They’re the best! If you can’t attend live, you can watch the replay and still get certified. The sign up is at the main website for the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)-check for the “language” tab at the top header.
It's amazing how the children learn these "difficult languages" just like we learn English. I like Seth Meyer pronouncing "volcano". He's good at languages 🙂
A travel author was having lunch in a Hungarian cafe when a group of schoolchildren aged about 7 years came in. He was amazed that they spoke Hungarian so well!
@@ktipuss I'm from Texas. Several years ago I was in France on a business trip. At the mall I saw little kids with their parents speaking French! Amazing !
As a hungarian, I would rather say that sentence as "tehénként" for "as a cow" instead of "tehénül". From the latter, I associate to their language, so that would mean "in the language of cows".
Finnish fits in with Hungarian; The same family, and just as confusing. I don't know if I'll ever be completely fluent. 😅 I'm still hoping you'll make a dedicated video about it soon... Also, a Finnish singer I like posted a picture once of a sign in Welsh while his band was on tour in Wales and asked if that's how Finnish looks to foreigners. One of of the responses was "Finnish is what happened to all the missing vowels in Welsh."
@@ktipuss The vocabulary is not the same, that's true. But the grammar and certain other features like the vowel harmony are extremely similar, and they are still in the same language family, however far they've diverged from each other, just like English and Russian; same family, different branches.
@@jeryndavelauan2453I dabbled in learning a bit of all three. Finnish was, to me, the easiest but still super difficult. Finnish, pretty logical and straight forward, but a lot of that seemed to have been thrown out the window in Estonian 😂 (despite their pretty close relation). Hungarian was an absolute nightmare that soundly defeated me
Even more interesting fact about that is, that Karel Čapek originally thought about a word "labor" which basically is the same as English word "labourer" and would sound same mechanic and foreign to Czechs as the word robot (as we ourselves do not get naturally its etymology and relation to the word "robota" meaning a hard slavery work). Had his brother Josef not convince him to use the neologism robot instead, this widely known term might be very different now and Czechs would lose an international word of their own.
@@tamaslukacs3173 Thanks for the perspective, great to know! I believe it used to be similar in the Bohemian Kingdom as well, with the noun "robota" and also related verb "robotovat", perhaps after some time turning into the colloquial use I mentioned before (the word robota is still in use nowadays, though fading).
Hungarian is unbelievably fascinating for someone learning languages btw. I love it, its my favorite language, but I don't have time to dive into it anymore. Strongly recommend.
I also like Hungarian, I love how it is one of that more "purist" languages that rather come up with its own words instead of simply borrowing modern terms from mainstream languages. It has also some nice features like separate conjugation for verbs with indefinite and definite object, vowel harmony similar to that in other Uralic or Turkic languages etc And generally I like its characteristic sound, all these short and long vowels and especially the "é" - sound. It's also interesting to see how much Hungarian has been influenced by Turkic and Iranic languages when Magyars were still a nomadic group as well as how many Slavic borrowings it has absorbed
@@mareksagrak9527@mareksagrak9527 Elég sok szláv eredetű szó épült be a magyarba az idők közben, és nemcsak szó, de a becezés, mint olyan, a kicsinyítő képző használatával: -ka, -ke (cute kitty=cicusKA). Szeretem az anyanyelvemben, hogy különlegesen hangzik, de úgy érzem, hogy elég harsnak hangozhat másoknak. Kíváncsi lennék, egy külföldinek hogyan hangzik, mire hasonlít. Az pozitívum, hogy elég egyszerű megtanulni olvasni, ha tudod az ábécé-t, mivel fonetikus nyelv. És igen, tényleg ötletes és logikus a főnevek elnevezése, például "számítógép" (computer). Pont amiatt, mert nagyon elszigetelt nyelv, nemcsak angolszász embereknek nehéz megtanulni magyarul, de a magyarok is megszenvednek az angollal. A másik, ami számomra logikus, hogy a magyarban az általánostól megyunk a sajátos felé, például vezetéknév (family name) -> keresztnév (given name): Kovács Lajos (Louis Kovács [Smith]), illetve a dátum írása, év, hónap, nap - 2024 május 5. Örülök, hogy vannak, akiknek tetszik a magyar nyelv és szívesen tanulják. Sok sikert!
I always wondered, how would a person learning Hungarian learn how to pronounce "gy" correctly? I've always heard foreigners say it as "dzs". There are some weird ways to learn how to pronounce sounds you don't have in your language, for example I'm learning Russian, and I was told that in order to pronounce ы correctly, you have to bite down on a pen so that your mouth is in the shape as if you were trying to say "ee" (as in sleep), and pronounce a Hungarian "ü". Is there some exercise that learners use for gy?
@@nymroadonlaptop3185I could be totally wrong but I feel 'gy' can be similar to 'дь'. We pair gy with g (they сome after each other in the alphabet), but it would work with d, like in Russian д/дь. T/Ty - т/ть. We have dzs only because of the loan words like jacket (dzseki), as our j is like y in 'young'. We have letters for each sound, but English uses the same letter for multiple sounds.
Native American languages are on another level. Many of the Algonquian languages have a similar complexity to Athabascan languages--Ojibwe and Potowatomi are two languages that code various levels of meaning into a word, so much so that a single consonant change can alter the entire meaning or grammatical function of a word (or sometimes both)
Consonant mutations aren't all that complex. In the various Celtic languages, it's usually because at some point a preceding word ended in a nasal (nasal mutation) or a vowel, but that final sound got lost, but its echo persisted in the word that followed it. This later got grammaticalised. In a way, you can see something similar happening in French over time via liaison. It hasn't developed into a system of initial mutations yet, but it could do under the right circumstances. Anyhoo, the really weird thing Welsh has is singulatives, where the singular is marked by an infection and the plural is the root form. A good example would be coed/coeden, where the former mean "group of trees; wood" and the latter means "tree".
Singulatives. That's an interesting one. I wonder if certain things in English count as singulatives. For example cattle/head of cattle; staff/member of staff; team/team member; crew/crew member.
its not a miracle. i know some languages have easier grammar some have harder grammar but we all learn our native language automatically and dont think if its complex. im slovak (the video mentioned czech so i can talk about slovak) and all these different forms, declensions, conjugations are a pattern, you hear all the words since you are a kid and its just natural to speak correctly, but to be honest we make some mistakes, for example people confuse "svojim" with "svojím", "naň" with "naňho", you should say "v maile" not "v maili" etc. but i think natives make mistakes in every language
Icelandic has some fun features, but it feels a little bit out of place on this list. It has tons of English cognates, phonology that's mostly pretty accessible, mostly phonetic spelling, SVO word order (often, not always), and phrasal verbs that often resemble those in English. It’s entertaining to see native speakers rolling out the long compound words, though. Glæsilegt myndband!
Of course, even being that exotic, Icelandic is still a Germanic language. In this family, English is more exotic without grammatical cases and genders and almost without vowel changes in plural (like foot-feet).
I started learning Hungarian this year. I was NOT surprised by how different it is in structure because I was expecting that. I was also expecting the vocabulary to be very different. I was expecting all this because people always talk about it. What I was not expecting was how regular and predictable it is. Having learned Russian I find the verbs a lot less irregular in Hungarian. I also find the many cases to be more like just adding a preposition to the end of the word. In Russian you have to learn the preposition and then what case it takes. In Hungarian the case plays the role of the prepostion so there is only one thing to learn. Also there are no genders and adjectives only have two possible forms. So is Hungarian impossibly difficult? No. It's different and takes a lot of practice but it's just so logical.
Agglutinative languages are generally really regular because one piece of inflection only ever does one thing, and you just add bits of inflection on the root like building lego. They're pretty much like small helper words in English that just get appended to the root instead. Makes for a lot of cases, but stupidly regular compared to fusional languages like Romance and Slavic ones.
As an American who has learned Czech to a pretty good level, I can say that it's not as terrible as people claim. Learning the case endings can be tricky, but they are generally pretty logical and follow consistent patterns. I managed to memorize the whole table of model words in just under a month. The only part that really still gives me occasional trouble is identyfing the gender of words that I've not encountered before. But even then, you can usually use context clues to make an educated guess about the gender (adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, verbs that agree with the noun, etc). What's also amazing about the lanaguge is that the words are constructed in a modular way. I can look at a word that I've never seen before and still usually figure out what it means by putting the pieces together.
@@akl2k7 i think what makes Czech seem so hard is the accessibility. There simply aren't that many people that want to learn it. I think Czechia is big enough that people know it, but the demand to learn the language isn't so high. For some other smaller states like Slovakia, any of the Balkan countries etc it would be even more challenging
For the Hungarian part at 9:15, I give a correction: it's tehénként, that means "as a cow", and tehénül can either mean: 1) in cow language (compare: angolul=in English) 2) as/like a cow, cowly (compare: rosszul=badly) 3) a not too real-life verb meaning: gets more like a cow (compare lassul=gets slow, hülyül=gets stupid)
Love the video ! Have to say though, I am a french english-speaker, currently learning latin and ancient greek, as well as other languages. And i swear that changing letters, cases, not being able to find a word if you don't know the original form, prononciation, etc., are all things I've struggled with, and are honestly much more complex than for some of the languages in the video. But that's my experience
Being a native speaker of Swahili 🇰🇪, it is also agglutinative especially the verbs with the conjugations and agreement with the tense and noun cases, a bit like Hungarian
@@lcolinwilson8347Na! It's a video about complex Languages so it may appear prejudiced. It's a compliment to this great language. As andrewwoodgate said it's not that hard once you master the mutations and plurals.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 : Welsh isn't a complex language, though. It has its quirks, like every other, but isn't that hard. "Glyndyfrdwy" isn't difficult to pronounce, although he implies that it is. Really, he should know better.
@@lcolinwilson8347Diawn. It's just the w which if it was an e or an a he wouldn't have bothered putting it there. I wish they would stop implying pronunciation is hard. It's not.
I enjoy your videos! For some decades now, I've been 'learning' Hungarian on and off. Much of it does stick in my mind. Love it, but I know I'd never truly 'get' it.
I’m learning Hungarian. I think if you take an approach of ALL grammar and understanding the intricacies, yes, it’ll be very difficult, but if you learn the simple basic stuff, then get right to reading, you’ll learn them in context and it won’t seem bad overall And if native Germans can mess up genders on occasion, I can only assume native Hungarians mess things up too, at times, so as a learner, I’m allowed more leeway ;) .
I'm Polish, we have only 7 cases and I sometimes cannot decide on conjugation of a certain word. Today, I was unable to pronounce: najpoczytniejszy. And it's my native language... XD Compared to Hungarian, though - it's easy.
@@banana53358 just a tad bit, really :) But Hungarian with its pronunciation, helluva long words and no relation to any of theEuropean languages? Boah, a lot to take in.
@@marikothecheetah9342Hungarian is easier than Polish, because most of the cases mean in, on, near etc. But for me Polish is much easier, I speak Russian and Belarusian
Same. The flashbacks of just trying to rattle off 1~10 was...unpleasant. I mean one (jedna) and two (dva) is fine. Then you get to three with the ř and it all starts going downhill from there. 😅😭
0:53 there is no such thing as "one of the oldest languages", neither in Europe nor anywhere else. What can happen is for a language to retain the same name along the centuries (like Greek) or to be especially conservative in its traits (take written - but not spoken - Icelandic). Welsh, as a language, goes back to the early middle ages - linguists don't agree to a single dating -. 11.24 Icelandic, is grammatically conservative, but its pronunciation has greatly evolved and has little to do with Old Norse. Hearing a modern Icelander reading is not close to what we would have heard 900 years ago.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 every language descends from and older version of itself. That's how language change happens. All Celtic languages derive from a proto Celtic spoken many ceturies before. And proto Celtic descends from proto Italo-Celtic that descends from Indoeuropean... 4.000 b.C. more or less. This doesn't mean that Welsh is 6.000 year old.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 Lo sé, por eso menciono a idraote. Pero es que la Alta Edad Media va desde el siglo V (aprox 476) al X (aprox 1000), o sea que creo que idraote no se merecía tu corrección.
Nah, Welsh is easy. I'm sure our intelligent neighbours can get their heads around a few rare sounds and slightly strange grammar. Don't put yourselves down, Tolkien was practically fluent in Middle Welsh, Old English, Breton, Finish and so on. And, belive it or not, Welsh can indeed be spoken about without making tired jokes. Seven vowel letters: a e i o u w y, consonant mutation (a feature of English, see Knife > Knives, Hoof >Hooves). Easy peasy, stop being scared of it.
It's the consonant mutation at the FRONT of the word that throws people. Knife to knives is recognizable, though people still have to learn it through memorization and kids screw it up all the time. There isn't an example that I can think of in English where the beginning of a word changes and it's still considered the same word.
I think a part the problem is with the way the language is written. It's simply too phonetic. For example they can use ċat for instead of gat and ĉat instead of chat so the learners can understand that they are related to "cat".
That's why I've been learning Welsh for 650 days straight. It's a good language to learn, highly regular and phonetic. I love it for it's simplicity which is disguised by so-called difficult mutations which are mostly soft mutations and the plurals you eventually get the gist. Great language to learn first. Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd a mwynhau hi fawr iawn. I probably butchered that sentence but I'll work it out. Hwyl.
საქართველოს გაუმარჯოს! Actually Georgian sounds P-ფ T-თ K- ქ are similar to english aspirated P,T,K(C). Without aspiration Georgian have letters P-პ,T-ტ, K-კ.
Welsh: Keyboard smash language Czech: Strč prst skrz krk language Hungarian: Easy mode ithkuil Icelandic: Old norse but remastered Basque: Unknown alien language Georgian: Gvprtskvni language Navajo: Tonal language in North America
Welsh: Gwynedd i'm cywrydd yn ywysog an Llandrob, elven language Czech: A jsou czesi w nasim kraju, nas dom je tu, normal slavic language Hungarian: A imaszog nagy amraszsetag mastasz, steppe language Icelandic: Ar kradd oinaar dvakras maddeskyiodd, nordic remastered Basque: Prehispanian language Georgian: gvprtskvni pharnavi valakas mevatstvacatani, one of 3 Kingdoms Navajo: Yee idiłło ansa diine łłalay wałasagiitiłłała utuni nałółłi, language from America
a lot of sounds she mentioned in czech are also present in Indian languages. except for word order, grammatical structure is also similar especially with Sanskrit like cases, being said that there are differences.
In Mvskoke, the word order is subject-object-verb-verb. The first verb refers to the subject, the second to the object. Many sentences are one word only in practice, though. You apply a prefix and a suffix to the verb, like in Latin, that shows the direction the action of the verb is taking. Cherokee is a bit easier because it has less Latin style verbs, but it’s a syllabary (no Latin letters) and it took me a year to learn that. I’m syllabary deficient and need to see if it’s a /d/ or a /t/.
Ancient Greek? Verbs? Active Middle, Passive voice? ✓ Infinitives? How about 3 voices and 5 tenses ✓ Ditto for participles. ✓Verbal tense, aspect, and mood? ✓4 moods indicative, subjunctive, optative and imperative ✓ 3 genders ✓ 3 numbers singular, dual and plural ✓Lots of articles and prepositions ✓ Complex grammar. Just saying.
Navajo verbs are actually fairly regular. But the rules that demonstrate their regularity are quite complex. Probably every phoneme has a meaning. And Navajo speakers, like the speakers of other languages, tend to alter the way a word is spoken. So some of those sememes disappear over time, hiding the verb's regularity, effectively making it irregular to all but the initiated.
Icelandic is pretty cool. I recently watched a film called "Fusi" in Icelandic and I was able to understand parts of the dialogue thanks to learning Norwegian, which IMHO is the best the starting point with Scandinavian languages and possibly all the Germanic languages.
@@anires1195 I speak both Polish and Czech and its the same difficulty in terms of grammar: extra letters/sounds, 7x2 noun cases, 3 genders, small size noun form, 3 verb tenses + imperatives + participles + conditionals + imperfectives + reflexives, prefix changes to verbs, formal form, stress is different I would argue that Slovak is a bit harder to pronounce because they have more soft sounds and long sounds: extra PL sounds: cz, ć, sz, ś, rz, ż, ź, ł, ń, ą, ę, ó extra CZ sounds: č, š, ž, ř, ď, ť, ň, ch, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ě, ů extra SVK sounds: č, š, ž, ď, ť, ň, ľ, ĺ, ŕ, ch, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ä, ô
@@janchi_stephanchi im slovak and id say slovak spelling is harder than czech because for example the "t" in "ten" is hard but in "teplo" it's soft, "ä" is pronounced "e" or "a" depending on dialect and words, "káv" is actually pronounced more like "káu", western slovaks dont pronounce the soft "ľ" at all
@@janchi_stephanchi Czech changed its orthography (actual letters) around the 19th century but Polish did not. So Polish has "CZ" instead of "č" for example.
Any plans on some Greek storybooks? Popular holiday destination and many brits retire there so could be a good addition. Also as a Greek learner, I can attest that it is pretty hard to get any decent readers.
Ježíši Kriste, ten přechod z toho, jak čeština hrozně nedává smysl, na to, že ti máme dát odběr, byl úžasný! A jinak ano, to s tou češtinou je všechno pravda a jako Čech chci ještě říct, že miluju když se lidé z jiných zemí snaží říct "ř", protože jim to vlastně nikdy pořádně nejde a je strašně vtipné jak to prostě nedokážou vyslovit a vlastně vždycky místo toho říkají spíš "ž" :D
Is Icelandic middle voice anything like English passive voice? Your excellent example looks mighty close to it. (My reaction, "At last!") Oh, and the Storylearning book for Icelandic is pretty good. Thanks.
I'm learning Hungarian and some of the things aren't terrible once you get your head round them, like vowel harmony. There's quite a lot of patterns in the conjugations and suffixes for verbs so although it's a headache it's OK once you've sussed those out. Plus only 9 irregular verbs which isn't bad. For me one of the hardest parts is remembering how all the bloody vowels are sounded and the fact dzs sounds like J....
@@LangXplorerSzeretem az anyanyelvemben, hogy különlegesen hangzik, de úgy érzem, hogy elég harsnak hangozhat másoknak. Kíváncsi lennék, egy külföldinek hogyan hangzik, mire hasonlít. Az pozitívum, hogy elég egyszerű megtanulni olvasni, ha tudod az ábécé-t, mivel fonetikus nyelv. Szavakat sem lehet tul nehez tanulni, mivel a főnevek elnevezése tobbnyire otletes es logikus, például "számítógép" (computer). A másik, ami számomra logikus, hogy a magyarban az általánostól megyunk a sajátos felé, például vezetéknév (family name) -> keresztnév (given name): Kovács Lajos (Louis Kovács [Smith]), illetve a dátum írása, év, hónap, nap - 2024 május 5. Örülök, hogy vannak, akiknek tetszik a magyar nyelv és szívesen tanulják.
“Full of archaic words” (re: Icelandic). I’m not sure what this means (in this context). If a word is used in the modern language, in what way is it archaic?
It means words that are no longer in general use, but are still heard in Icelandic. Which is pretty wonderful. 'Archaic' doesn't only mean obsolete; it can also mean old-fashioned, and I imagine this is what Olly is going for. Icelanders like to express themselves using poetic or archaic vocabulary, and there's a strong drive to keep loanwords out of the language and preserve the beautiful old language. They go so far as to try to resuscitate terms from Old Icelandic. Isn't that lovely?
I would definitely put Arabic there. They can, but don't have to write down vowels, have dual form (as opposed to singular and plural), multiple strange t/d/h/g sounds, they use suffixes and prefixes so much that you can say a complex sentence using one short word. Also they write from right to left.
Then there are the "dialects", which are as different from the standard language as Spanish is from Latin while being as different from each other as the Romance languages..
Czech is so complicated that even it's own video of all it's confusing, hard and interesting rules and querks would be extremly long. But Czech is an extremly beautiful language
As a Silesian speaker, I'm so glad I finally see that Euskara is mentioned on this channel. Really beautiful and hard language. Some say it is even impossible to master it if you're non-native. I still hope it is!
Was enjoying that first bit, as a Welsh resident learning Welsh is mandatory and even after like 14-15 years of learning English and Welsh (since I spoke not a word of English when I moved here, I supposedly only just learned the Polish alphabet) and I still have no idea what's going on Mutations are a nightmare, 'it makes the sentence flow better' no it doesn't, it sounds the same! It's just annoying I would not be able to have a conversation with a native or even just a fluent speaker unless it was written or it was something very simple like introducing ourselves Edit 1: My least favourite mutations are these two where one letter (I can't remember which one since I literally never spoke Welsh outside of lessons and I've graduated high school now) becomes a g and another where the g disappears, so unless you understand the context, you have no idea which mutation it is Edit 2: Czech sounds kinda similar to Polish, it's probably cuz they're both slavic languages but still, I wonder if Czech people feel the same about Polish Edit 3: Three in Czech sounds identical to the Polish word XD Edit 4: Polish has about 15 words for the same thing English has 3 of (i.e. run, ran, running). And that's cuz Polish has not only the tenses in the word but also masculine, feminine, neutral, and singular and plural versions of every verb. Biegał/Biegł - He ran Biegała/Biegła - She ran I forgot Polish even had 2 almost identical words for the exact same thing whoops. Also the negatives bit, Polish has that too. Using the same example as in the video we get I'll never tell anyone - English Nikdy nikomu nic nereknu - Czech (almost) Nigdy nikomu nic nie powiem - Polish Nie = no/not Powiem = tell Translated literally: Never no-one nothing no tell Edit 5: I had no more noted about the languages. I enjoyed the video, it was interesting I have been editing this as I watched which is why theres so many edits
I live in the basque country and I am learning the language, despite their never ending number of auxiliar verbs the language is quite logical and in same cases almost mathematical, still having an extreme hard time with it
Correct me if I'm wrong, but cases in Hungarian are easy thanks to its agglutinativity. Once you learn the affix (or two) for a case you can start using it with any root, just follow the vowel harmony. Slavic langs (like the mentioned Czech, but that applies to most of them) are much more complex in that regard (remember that a root may change when you inflect a word!). You should mention Ubykh language. It combines agglutinativity/polysinthetism, ergativity, and one of the biggest consonant inventory which leaves Georgian far behing.
9:16 That would be "Tehénként" actually (🤓👆). The "ül" part at the end could mean "speaks X language", so "Speaks in German" would be "Németül beszél", or it could also mean "In the process of transforming to something else", so "it's becoming prettier" would be "Szépül" (that's without a subject in this case). And I'm pretty sure there are other ways you could use it, I swear Hungarian is so difficult that not even we fully understand it....
A form of middle voice exists in English, as in the sentence 'The word translates badly into French'. Obviously the word itself hasn't done the translation, nor does the sentence mean that someone has translated the word badly.
Welsh initial word sound change being random is because we only look at today's language and not at its history and evolution. "Fy" comes from Brythonic '*mene' > old Welsh 'mi', this is why it triggers nasalization on the next word. *min and *brọdr, from proto-brythonic (min mrọdr). With time min became mi, and somehow vy (fy) but the initial mutation remained.
Olly, I am German and many, many years ago I spent two terms as a foreign student at Aberdeen university and - not really knowing what I was doing - I registered for Scottish Gaelic (besides English Literature and English Language). Never before and never after had I learned anything so weird as this language. Our teacher took us from zero knowledge to O-Level-standard in just about six months, which was crazy. This was more than 35 years ago and apart from asking "How are you? and answering "Thank you, fine" I have forgotten everything. But what you are saying about the structure of Welsh is what I also remember from Scottish Gaelic. I really got twists in my brain when learning this language - and it was really interesting to learn it "via English". Shortly after returning home I could never translate Gaelic to German directly - I always had to go via English.
In Hungarian, we can make long words, "hátsó hajtóműves repülőgép" would be written in three words though. However, one can make use of the so-called moving hyphen rule to crumple them into one: "hátsóhajtóművesrepülőgép-szerelő". Also, the example sentence is slightly incorrect. First, it should be "Tehénként" (since "Tehénül" would mean in the language of cows). Secondly, the verb megtart should be conjugated in the indefinite conjugation (because of "minden"): "tartsunk meg". Finally, it should start like "Tehénként azt kell mondanom, hogy..."
Welsh isn't that difficult once you get over the fear of mutations (notice I said the fear of and not the mutations themselves). In fact, you won't be misunderstood at all if you don't mutate something correctly.
Being a native speaker of Swahili 🇰🇪, it is also agglutinative especially the verbs with the conjugations and agreement with the verb tense and noun cases, a bit like Hungarian
Thank you for making videos about our beloved Georgian ! But there are some mistakes in the video . 1 18:37 there is written გვპირწყნი and should be გვითხარი tell us and next word ვეფხისტყაოსანი. Also მყავს( I have) we use to animated nouns such as humans and animals and მაქვს(I have) to inanimated nouns such as book,money,time, feelings and etc . Whenever you will decide to make again about Georgian please let me know and I'll help you in whatever you need 💪💚 btw I am one of your fans
Actually all the stuff you said about in regards to Hungarian is quite easy. Cases are super easy to wrap your head around and they work in a much less complex way than the slavic ones. Normal verb conjugations are also pretty regular, to make sth like a "phrasal" verb you just add a prefix, which again tends to be much more regular than in the case of slavic languages. What makes the Hungarian language difficult imo is the vocabulary
When I saw the title, I knew there would be my native language in it 😀 Czech. And yeah - tykání and vykání is nothing! But let's talk about the spoken and the written form 😀
I'm curious (I know I could just google, but this way other people might learn too!), is Navajo one of the Indigenous languages that doesn't technically have a written form? As in, there is a way to write it, for things like learning in contemporary classroom settings and whatnot, but it's really only a spoken language? I believe Ojibwe is one like that and wasn't sure if Navajo was too. Fun fact: Welsh is probably the closest to what folks spoke in now-England before Old English. Torchwood actually made me want to learn Welsh. Just seeing it written on signage and stuff made me curious. I gave it a solid effort and I'd like to try it again, but it's tough when there are like 4 people within 100 miles that speak it reasonably well enough to help out! It's interesting for me, though, because I do describe it as "like a little kid playing with a computer" but as soon as I started learning it, even if I didn't know what the words said, I could instantly see them as words instead of a jumble of letters. Also, the "sometimes w" part of English vowels comes from the two Welsh words that have been incorporated (though no one really ever uses them). Icelandic is also quite a lot like Old English. Obviously it is closest to Old Norse, but there's a lot of crossover since they have the same root.
I'm trying to learn Welsh right now actually. I've got a lot of relatively difficult languages I want to learn: I. Welsh II. Armenian III. Czech IV. Icelandic V. Basque VI. Georgian VII. Navajo VIII. Polish IX. Vietnamese X. Greek And more harder languages. though, there's also easier languages I want to learn too though. After Welsh, should I go to an easier language? Or should I tackle another hard language?
Interestingly, Irish has a sound a lot like the Czech ř, which is the slender "r", such as in the verb "abair", meaning "speak". It's notoriously the most difficult sound for people to get, but you can get pretty close with a "zh" [ʒ] sound with some r-colouring, and even mispronouncing it as a [ʒ] is better than using the English "r".
I've learned quite a lot of Welsh and the word order in the sentence about the cat seems out of order. I've never seen I like anything written or heard it spoken that way
From my second language extent of knowledge of hungarian i'm pretty sure Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért accually means something along the lines of "for your undeholifiable acts" like my favorite sentence: "Megkelkáposztásítottalanítottátok a megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" which means: "You unkaleified it for your undeholifiable acts."
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 Don't worry, most of my Hungarian friends don't even know wtf that even means. Btw another fun sentence is "Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese." which means "You did this pretended act, you enactor of pretended acts.", but it can also be interpreted as "You did this pretended act, you culprit of pretended acts."
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 most of our words/sentences are not that scary but yes, those make words make sense and they're the easiest and grammatically correct way to say them
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 But ok, seriously, a real useful sentence: Bedobtam egy lyukba hetvennégy kismacskát és asztat a lyukat feltöltöttem mustár gázzal, hogy a kismacskák soha többé netalálkozhassanak a családjukal.
Czech is not harder or more confusing than any other Slavic language. I bit the bullet and learned Russian, which has most of the same characteristics you complain about. Once you get used to it, it's not confusing at all. And I think any Czech (or Russian) speaker would say that all the English uses of "the" are just as confusing and totally pointless. Which would be correct! 😉
When you hear how native English speakers pronounce place names and personal names from other countries, you get the impression that all languages except English are confusing for English speakers.
5:14 All the times, no? At least in the video "Na zdraví" is literally phonetic and consistent. (I just understood that we have rules on when to write the light "i" or the hard "y", which both make the same sound, and many other rules, so you're probably right about that one, lol) But as a Slovak myself, whenever they mention our Czech siblings, which we are mutually intelligible with, I feel so pwoud :') Good for you Czechia, good for you (although nobody ever mentions us Slovak - I guess because Czechs are bigger and more successful - however, we are one of the most closest languages, if not the closest, so when you're talking about Czech you're also mostly talking about Slovak - dialect continuum mutual intelligibility).
Haha, as a Hungarian, I feel embarrassed as I saw that, in Icelandic language, somehow a T sound gets into the word while we read wrote LL. WHY gif placeholder here. 😁 How that T came to there? Why not just writing TL? Why not just emphasizing an L when there's an LL? It's similar to the logic of Imperial Measurement System. Fun (or rather useful) to know that Hungarian writing is phonetical which means we write what we say and say what is written (excepting some simplifier assimilation, the opposite of saying TL when LL is written), so our writing is an actual visual encoding of the spoken language.
How about these impossible languages? 👉 th-cam.com/video/2rxA-GBYJb0/w-d-xo.htmlsi=MvvwxCzG9n1KJ8x8
How about a hungarian short stories book? If you can do a welsh one I'm sure hungarian won't be much trouble.
How about Malayalam language official language of state of Kerala
9:15 Did you use Google translate? That sentence is incorrect. And _tehénül_ doesn't mean _as a cow._ I have other problems with this video too.
@@gabor6259, If "tehénül" is not translated to "as a cow", how should "tehénül" then be translated?
@@riddick7082 _Tehénül_ means 'in the cow language'.
'As a cow' would be _tehénként._
I'm glad I went from Slavic languages through German to English. A lot easier than the other way around...
Funny tidbit about Czech. We pronounce everything as it is written. There are distinct sounds for every letter in the alphabet and you just put them together and that's it. So, Spelling Bee is something that is completely unknown for school kids in Czechia;)
The Icelandic guy is reading a Moomin book😃That was of course originally written in Swedish by the Finnish author Tove Jansson.
Yes! I noticed that, too! :)
Well la dee da
Yes, of course. Why the need to state the obvious?🤷♂️
I'm still hoping Olly will make a dedicated video about Finnish.
@@nicholasschroeder3678might not be obvious to everyone
hungarian is actually surprisingly logical and hungarian cases are NOT like slavic languages because there's no gender in Hungarian and many hungarian cases correspnd to prepositions in other languages
Yes, their cases are more like postpositions glued to the nouns.
I don't speak Hungarian, but I've learned vowel harmony in Finnish and Turkish, which are logical and very pleasant to hear. Another thing: Those two languages and Hungarian don't have genders. So, they have left out the categorization and sexism that most other European languages demand. Stress: I have a feeling that the stress almost always falls on the first syllable. The stress will change if the vowel is long but in Hungarian the long vowel is always shown. It's totally different from Russian where the stress can fall anywhere and worse, it's NOT shown...
no gender? it almost makes me want to learn it. if i could speak hungarian i'd be eligible for citizenship from my hungarian grandmother
@@gmalcolms you should seriously consider it
@@lutchbizin6420 you are way off on the gender and sexism thing regarding Hungarian. Every single profession has the word nő (woman) tacked on to it. you do not call your female doctor simple doktor, but doktornő... your female teacher is tanárnő, female police officer rendőrnő so forth and so on....
During WWII, the U.S. Marine Corps (with the assistance of 29 Navajo marines) created a code based on the Navajo language. The code is said to have been critical to the victory at Iwo Jima, and the code remained unbroken at the end of the war. The Navajo "Code Talkers" could translate 3 lines of English in 20 seconds ... as opposed to the 30 minutes it took to translate the same material using a code breaking machine to translate from a standard code.
It is a great and true story. It's Iwo Jima, btw.
@@nicholasschroeder3678 Doggone autocorrect!
The idea of using the Navajo language came from an American who grew up with the Navajos when his parents were missionaries. Very few, non-Navajos can speak that language. The code-talking language was derived from Navajo words but even natives couldn't understand it without training. The Japanese tried but they never cracked the code.
th-cam.com/video/mtkFpEB90qI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=51STtbrcOnaK19FV - Olly's video about the code talkers is great.
th-cam.com/video/mtkFpEB90qI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=51STtbrcOnaK19FVn- Here's the Navajo code talkers full story from Olly.
Hungarian and Georgian are such beautiful languages
Love from Sweden
I have a course on Cherokee that i have been trying to learn. So honestly Navajo just seems mind blowing. Thank you for including an American indigenous language in your list.
Sign up for Ed Fields free online Cherokee lessons. They’re the best! If you can’t attend live, you can watch the replay and still get certified. The sign up is at the main website for the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)-check for the “language” tab at the top header.
whats the name of the course
@@schoolingdiana9086 is it the adult immersion classes or the online classes?
What was this person using before?
Šináglegleǧa iyapi khilí!
I find it a Beautiful language! ❤
It's amazing how the children learn these "difficult languages" just like we learn English.
I like Seth Meyer pronouncing "volcano". He's good at languages 🙂
A meta joke on his part, maybe? :)
That was very funny.
He nailed that hard C for sure. 👍
A travel author was having lunch in a Hungarian cafe when a group of schoolchildren aged about 7 years came in. He was amazed that they spoke Hungarian so well!
@@ktipuss I'm from Texas. Several years ago I was in France on a business trip. At the mall I saw little kids with their parents speaking French! Amazing !
As a hungarian, I would rather say that sentence as "tehénként" for "as a cow" instead of "tehénül". From the latter, I associate to their language, so that would mean "in the language of cows".
yeap
És a mondat második fele se jó. Vagy "tartsuk meg a bőgést", vagy "tartsunk meg minden bőgést".
Finnish fits in with Hungarian; The same family, and just as confusing. I don't know if I'll ever be completely fluent. 😅 I'm still hoping you'll make a dedicated video about it soon...
Also, a Finnish singer I like posted a picture once of a sign in Welsh while his band was on tour in Wales and asked if that's how Finnish looks to foreigners. One of of the responses was "Finnish is what happened to all the missing vowels in Welsh."
A Finnish author was once asked how similar Finnish is to Hungarian. His response was : "As similar as English is to Russian".
@@ktipuss The vocabulary is not the same, that's true. But the grammar and certain other features like the vowel harmony are extremely similar, and they are still in the same language family, however far they've diverged from each other, just like English and Russian; same family, different branches.
don't forget Estonian too
@@jeryndavelauan2453I dabbled in learning a bit of all three. Finnish was, to me, the easiest but still super difficult. Finnish, pretty logical and straight forward, but a lot of that seemed to have been thrown out the window in Estonian 😂 (despite their pretty close relation). Hungarian was an absolute nightmare that soundly defeated me
Missed opportunity to mention that the word "robot" itself is of Czech origin. Thanks for the interesting video, though! :)
Even more interesting fact about that is, that Karel Čapek originally thought about a word "labor" which basically is the same as English word "labourer" and would sound same mechanic and foreign to Czechs as the word robot (as we ourselves do not get naturally its etymology and relation to the word "robota" meaning a hard slavery work). Had his brother Josef not convince him to use the neologism robot instead, this widely known term might be very different now and Czechs would lose an international word of their own.
From a play by a Czech writer (Capek)
cool!
@@pohlpiano In the territory of the Hungarian kingdom, the word robot meant work performed in the form of tax to the landlord.
@@tamaslukacs3173 Thanks for the perspective, great to know! I believe it used to be similar in the Bohemian Kingdom as well, with the noun "robota" and also related verb "robotovat", perhaps after some time turning into the colloquial use I mentioned before (the word robota is still in use nowadays, though fading).
Hungarian is unbelievably fascinating for someone learning languages btw. I love it, its my favorite language, but I don't have time to dive into it anymore. Strongly recommend.
I also like Hungarian, I love how it is one of that more "purist" languages that rather come up with its own words instead of simply borrowing modern terms from mainstream languages. It has also some nice features like separate conjugation for verbs with indefinite and definite object, vowel harmony similar to that in other Uralic or Turkic languages etc And generally I like its characteristic sound, all these short and long vowels and especially the "é" - sound.
It's also interesting to see how much Hungarian has been influenced by Turkic and Iranic languages when Magyars were still a nomadic group as well as how many Slavic borrowings it has absorbed
@@mareksagrak9527@mareksagrak9527 Elég sok szláv eredetű szó épült be a magyarba az idők közben, és nemcsak szó, de a becezés, mint olyan, a kicsinyítő képző használatával: -ka, -ke (cute kitty=cicusKA). Szeretem az anyanyelvemben, hogy különlegesen hangzik, de úgy érzem, hogy elég harsnak hangozhat másoknak. Kíváncsi lennék, egy külföldinek hogyan hangzik, mire hasonlít. Az pozitívum, hogy elég egyszerű megtanulni olvasni, ha tudod az ábécé-t, mivel fonetikus nyelv. És igen, tényleg ötletes és logikus a főnevek elnevezése, például "számítógép" (computer). Pont amiatt, mert nagyon elszigetelt nyelv, nemcsak angolszász embereknek nehéz megtanulni magyarul, de a magyarok is megszenvednek az angollal. A másik, ami számomra logikus, hogy a magyarban az általánostól megyunk a sajátos felé, például vezetéknév (family name) -> keresztnév (given name): Kovács Lajos (Louis Kovács [Smith]), illetve a dátum írása, év, hónap, nap - 2024 május 5. Örülök, hogy vannak, akiknek tetszik a magyar nyelv és szívesen tanulják. Sok sikert!
Also, a big plus is, that we don't have gender specific nouns etc., we don't even have he or she, just "ő", which can be anyone. 😊
I always wondered, how would a person learning Hungarian learn how to pronounce "gy" correctly? I've always heard foreigners say it as "dzs". There are some weird ways to learn how to pronounce sounds you don't have in your language, for example I'm learning Russian, and I was told that in order to pronounce ы correctly, you have to bite down on a pen so that your mouth is in the shape as if you were trying to say "ee" (as in sleep), and pronounce a Hungarian "ü". Is there some exercise that learners use for gy?
@@nymroadonlaptop3185I could be totally wrong but I feel 'gy' can be similar to 'дь'. We pair gy with g (they сome after each other in the alphabet), but it would work with d, like in Russian д/дь. T/Ty - т/ть. We have dzs only because of the loan words like jacket (dzseki), as our j is like y in 'young'. We have letters for each sound, but English uses the same letter for multiple sounds.
Native American languages are on another level. Many of the Algonquian languages have a similar complexity to Athabascan languages--Ojibwe and Potowatomi are two languages that code various levels of meaning into a word, so much so that a single consonant change can alter the entire meaning or grammatical function of a word (or sometimes both)
Wašičhu-iyapi tȟawáčhiŋ-napȟóbye, Lakȟótiyapi oókaȟniȟ wašté❤ imho.
>>>-------->
English is mind blowing, Sioux is easy to grasp❤ imho.
Consonant mutations aren't all that complex. In the various Celtic languages, it's usually because at some point a preceding word ended in a nasal (nasal mutation) or a vowel, but that final sound got lost, but its echo persisted in the word that followed it. This later got grammaticalised.
In a way, you can see something similar happening in French over time via liaison. It hasn't developed into a system of initial mutations yet, but it could do under the right circumstances.
Anyhoo, the really weird thing Welsh has is singulatives, where the singular is marked by an infection and the plural is the root form. A good example would be coed/coeden, where the former mean "group of trees; wood" and the latter means "tree".
Singulatives. That's an interesting one. I wonder if certain things in English count as singulatives. For example cattle/head of cattle; staff/member of staff; team/team member; crew/crew member.
It's amazing how people can grow up and be fluent in these complex languages. Even that seems like a miracle.
Ever tried chinese?
its not a miracle. i know some languages have easier grammar some have harder grammar but we all learn our native language automatically and dont think if its complex. im slovak (the video mentioned czech so i can talk about slovak) and all these different forms, declensions, conjugations are a pattern, you hear all the words since you are a kid and its just natural to speak correctly, but to be honest we make some mistakes, for example people confuse "svojim" with "svojím", "naň" with "naňho", you should say "v maile" not "v maili" etc. but i think natives make mistakes in every language
@@jyrkilehtinen9886 Nah
Icelandic has some fun features, but it feels a little bit out of place on this list. It has tons of English cognates, phonology that's mostly pretty accessible, mostly phonetic spelling, SVO word order (often, not always), and phrasal verbs that often resemble those in English. It’s entertaining to see native speakers rolling out the long compound words, though. Glæsilegt myndband!
Of course, even being that exotic, Icelandic is still a Germanic language. In this family, English is more exotic without grammatical cases and genders and almost without vowel changes in plural (like foot-feet).
@@watchmakerful Dutch has mostly shed its genders, too, over the course of the 20th Century.
19:03 You can find that sound and other ejective consonants in Amharic.
I started learning Hungarian this year. I was NOT surprised by how different it is in structure because I was expecting that. I was also expecting the vocabulary to be very different. I was expecting all this because people always talk about it. What I was not expecting was how regular and predictable it is. Having learned Russian I find the verbs a lot less irregular in Hungarian. I also find the many cases to be more like just adding a preposition to the end of the word. In Russian you have to learn the preposition and then what case it takes. In Hungarian the case plays the role of the prepostion so there is only one thing to learn. Also there are no genders and adjectives only have two possible forms. So is Hungarian impossibly difficult? No. It's different and takes a lot of practice but it's just so logical.
Agglutinative languages are generally really regular because one piece of inflection only ever does one thing, and you just add bits of inflection on the root like building lego. They're pretty much like small helper words in English that just get appended to the root instead. Makes for a lot of cases, but stupidly regular compared to fusional languages like Romance and Slavic ones.
As an American who has learned Czech to a pretty good level, I can say that it's not as terrible as people claim.
Learning the case endings can be tricky, but they are generally pretty logical and follow consistent patterns. I managed to memorize the whole table of model words in just under a month.
The only part that really still gives me occasional trouble is identyfing the gender of words that I've not encountered before. But even then, you can usually use context clues to make an educated guess about the gender (adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, verbs that agree with the noun, etc).
What's also amazing about the lanaguge is that the words are constructed in a modular way. I can look at a word that I've never seen before and still usually figure out what it means by putting the pieces together.
TBH, from what i've seen, there are things that make other Slavic languages such as Russian worse. At least Czech has consistent stress, for instance.
I learned some Polish a few years back and I saw a number of similarities between what he was saying about Czech and what I remember about Polish.
@@akl2k7 i think what makes Czech seem so hard is the accessibility. There simply aren't that many people that want to learn it. I think Czechia is big enough that people know it, but the demand to learn the language isn't so high. For some other smaller states like Slovakia, any of the Balkan countries etc it would be even more challenging
@@benseac learning Polish now and yes they're fairly similar. Its a lot if it's your first language but nothing you can't get a hold on
Can i ask you about your pronounciation level? Do you struggle with ch, ž, š, ř, c,..?
For the Hungarian part at 9:15, I give a correction: it's tehénként, that means "as a cow", and tehénül can either mean: 1) in cow language (compare: angolul=in English) 2) as/like a cow, cowly (compare: rosszul=badly) 3) a not too real-life verb meaning: gets more like a cow (compare lassul=gets slow, hülyül=gets stupid)
Love the video ! Have to say though, I am a french english-speaker, currently learning latin and ancient greek, as well as other languages. And i swear that changing letters, cases, not being able to find a word if you don't know the original form, prononciation, etc., are all things I've struggled with, and are honestly much more complex than for some of the languages in the video.
But that's my experience
Being a native speaker of Swahili 🇰🇪, it is also agglutinative especially the verbs with the conjugations and agreement with the tense and noun cases, a bit like Hungarian
Welsh sounds beautiful
I'm a Welsh learner - it's not that hard and it's a great language
I can't help sensing a degree of prejudice in the video.
Diddorol iawn. Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd. Probably butchered that. Agree. It's a great language and it's phonetic and highly regular. Hwyl
@@lcolinwilson8347Na! It's a video about complex Languages so it may appear prejudiced. It's a compliment to this great language. As andrewwoodgate said it's not that hard once you master the mutations and plurals.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 : Welsh isn't a complex language, though. It has its quirks, like every other, but isn't that hard. "Glyndyfrdwy" isn't difficult to pronounce, although he implies that it is. Really, he should know better.
@@lcolinwilson8347Diawn. It's just the w which if it was an e or an a he wouldn't have bothered putting it there. I wish they would stop implying pronunciation is hard. It's not.
I already knew from the title that Hungarian would be here, yayyy.
Could you make a video about getting back to learn a language after a break?
As a French speaker welsh changing certain sounds just to make things flow better feels quite relatable 😂
The Navajo sentence "The man, the wolf chased him" is very similar to the general order of American Sign Language. ASL's basic word order is SVO too.
Isn’t this sentence OSV?
@@rosiebowers1671 you're right... it looks like I miswrote myself.....
I speak Irish, which is related to Welsh, so none of what you said about Welsh sounded that intimidating to me.
I enjoy your videos! For some decades now, I've been 'learning' Hungarian on and off. Much of it does stick in my mind. Love it, but I know I'd never truly 'get' it.
Once again, I’m so happy I learned Spanish as my second language. Ha de ser el idioma mas util del mundo. Y el mas facil de aprender.
Hungarian is so fascinating and also puzzling, so is Welsh
I’m learning Hungarian. I think if you take an approach of ALL grammar and understanding the intricacies, yes, it’ll be very difficult, but if you learn the simple basic stuff, then get right to reading, you’ll learn them in context and it won’t seem bad overall
And if native Germans can mess up genders on occasion, I can only assume native Hungarians mess things up too, at times, so as a learner, I’m allowed more leeway ;) .
I'm Polish, we have only 7 cases and I sometimes cannot decide on conjugation of a certain word. Today, I was unable to pronounce: najpoczytniejszy. And it's my native language... XD Compared to Hungarian, though - it's easy.
@@marikothecheetah9342 but your language has 3 genders and hungarian doesn t have grammatical genders it add complexity to the language
@@banana53358 just a tad bit, really :) But Hungarian with its pronunciation, helluva long words and no relation to any of theEuropean languages? Boah, a lot to take in.
@@marikothecheetah9342Hungarian is easier than Polish, because most of the cases mean in, on, near etc. But for me Polish is much easier, I speak Russian and Belarusian
@@pwzone3132 Maybe, I never went that far into Hungarian myself. And if you know Russian and Belarussian then yes - Polish will be easy for you. :)
this video really brings back intense memories i had trying to learn czech lol. I struggled so hard even with the basics
Was it your first foreign language?
Same. The flashbacks of just trying to rattle off 1~10 was...unpleasant. I mean one (jedna) and two (dva) is fine. Then you get to three with the ř and it all starts going downhill from there. 😅😭
@@gabor6259 no. czech ř is like r and ž combined
@@craftah Even after T and P?
@@gabor6259 after T and P its like r and š. it's never š or ž, you have to pronounce that r too
0:53
there is no such thing as "one of the oldest languages", neither in Europe nor anywhere else.
What can happen is for a language to retain the same name along the centuries (like Greek) or to be especially conservative in its traits (take written - but not spoken - Icelandic).
Welsh, as a language, goes back to the early middle ages - linguists don't agree to a single dating -.
11.24
Icelandic, is grammatically conservative, but its pronunciation has greatly evolved and has little to do with Old Norse. Hearing a modern Icelander reading is not close to what we would have heard 900 years ago.
Exacto, ningún idioma es más antiguo que otro.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 y ¿en qué estaba equivocado exactamente? yo creo que has dicho más o menos lo mismo que idraote
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 every language descends from and older version of itself. That's how language change happens. All Celtic languages derive from a proto Celtic spoken many ceturies before. And proto Celtic descends from proto Italo-Celtic that descends from Indoeuropean... 4.000 b.C. more or less.
This doesn't mean that Welsh is 6.000 year old.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 let's just say you have a peculiar way to express your ideas? Must be the Semitic origins of the Welsh...
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 Lo sé, por eso menciono a idraote. Pero es que la Alta Edad Media va desde el siglo V (aprox 476) al X (aprox 1000), o sea que creo que idraote no se merecía tu corrección.
Nah, Welsh is easy. I'm sure our intelligent neighbours can get their heads around a few rare sounds and slightly strange grammar. Don't put yourselves down, Tolkien was practically fluent in Middle Welsh, Old English, Breton, Finish and so on.
And, belive it or not, Welsh can indeed be spoken about without making tired jokes.
Seven vowel letters: a e i o u w y, consonant mutation (a feature of English, see Knife > Knives, Hoof >Hooves). Easy peasy, stop being scared of it.
It's the consonant mutation at the FRONT of the word that throws people. Knife to knives is recognizable, though people still have to learn it through memorization and kids screw it up all the time. There isn't an example that I can think of in English where the beginning of a word changes and it's still considered the same word.
I think a part the problem is with the way the language is written.
It's simply too phonetic.
For example they can use ċat for instead of gat and ĉat instead of chat so the learners can understand that they are related to "cat".
That's why I've been learning Welsh for 650 days straight. It's a good language to learn, highly regular and phonetic. I love it for it's simplicity which is disguised by so-called difficult mutations which are mostly soft mutations and the plurals you eventually get the gist. Great language to learn first. Dw i'n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd a mwynhau hi fawr iawn. I probably butchered that sentence but I'll work it out. Hwyl.
As Georgian, I felt strange satisfaction watching this 😀😃❤️
საქართველოს გაუმარჯოს! Actually Georgian sounds P-ფ T-თ K- ქ are similar to english aspirated P,T,K(C). Without aspiration Georgian have letters P-პ,T-ტ, K-კ.
Welsh: Keyboard smash language
Czech: Strč prst skrz krk language
Hungarian: Easy mode ithkuil
Icelandic: Old norse but remastered
Basque: Unknown alien language
Georgian: Gvprtskvni language
Navajo: Tonal language in North America
There are some theories that Navajo and the other Dine languages are distantly related to Chinese.
Welsh: Gwynedd i'm cywrydd yn ywysog an Llandrob, elven language
Czech: A jsou czesi w nasim kraju, nas dom je tu, normal slavic language
Hungarian: A imaszog nagy amraszsetag mastasz, steppe language
Icelandic: Ar kradd oinaar dvakras maddeskyiodd, nordic remastered
Basque: Prehispanian language
Georgian: gvprtskvni pharnavi valakas mevatstvacatani, one of 3 Kingdoms
Navajo: Yee idiłło ansa diine łłalay wałasagiitiłłała utuni nałółłi, language from America
I am Czech and I enjoyed the information about my native language. 😂 It's true, Czech is difficult. 😅
a to ani neřekl to nejhorší .. Že si upravujeme všechny možné koncovky na hubu...
a lot of sounds she mentioned in czech are also present in Indian languages. except for word order, grammatical structure is also similar especially with Sanskrit like cases, being said that there are differences.
In Mvskoke, the word order is subject-object-verb-verb. The first verb refers to the subject, the second to the object. Many sentences are one word only in practice, though. You apply a prefix and a suffix to the verb, like in Latin, that shows the direction the action of the verb is taking. Cherokee is a bit easier because it has less Latin style verbs, but it’s a syllabary (no Latin letters) and it took me a year to learn that. I’m syllabary deficient and need to see if it’s a /d/ or a /t/.
Ancient Greek? Verbs? Active Middle, Passive voice? ✓ Infinitives? How about 3 voices and 5 tenses ✓ Ditto for participles. ✓Verbal tense, aspect, and mood? ✓4 moods indicative, subjunctive, optative and imperative ✓ 3 genders ✓ 3 numbers singular, dual and plural ✓Lots of articles and prepositions ✓ Complex grammar. Just saying.
welcome to the small group of languages with dual form.
Well, at least it is Indo-European, in contrast to several of the here listed languages.
Νέα ελληνικά Is far simplier 😅
@@barbaracadin6657 εντάξει
@@jeremiahreilly9739 I also studied ancient greek in High school 😉
Navajo verbs are actually fairly regular. But the rules that demonstrate their regularity are quite complex. Probably every phoneme has a meaning. And Navajo speakers, like the speakers of other languages, tend to alter the way a word is spoken. So some of those sememes disappear over time, hiding the verb's regularity, effectively making it irregular to all but the initiated.
Icelandic is pretty cool. I recently watched a film called "Fusi" in Icelandic and I was able to understand parts of the dialogue thanks to learning Norwegian, which IMHO is the best the starting point with Scandinavian languages and possibly all the Germanic languages.
CZECH MENTIONED! 🥳 The way you talk about my language is hilarious, Olly (And true! We do have all these crazy hard things and MORE 😂)
Polish is harder
@@anires1195 I speak both Polish and Czech and its the same difficulty in terms of grammar:
extra letters/sounds, 7x2 noun cases, 3 genders, small size noun form, 3 verb tenses + imperatives + participles + conditionals + imperfectives + reflexives, prefix changes to verbs, formal form, stress is different
I would argue that Slovak is a bit harder to pronounce because they have more soft sounds and long sounds:
extra PL sounds: cz, ć, sz, ś, rz, ż, ź, ł, ń, ą, ę, ó
extra CZ sounds: č, š, ž, ř, ď, ť, ň, ch, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ě, ů
extra SVK sounds: č, š, ž, ď, ť, ň, ľ, ĺ, ŕ, ch, á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ä, ô
@@janchi_stephanchi im slovak and id say slovak spelling is harder than czech because for example the "t" in "ten" is hard but in "teplo" it's soft, "ä" is pronounced "e" or "a" depending on dialect and words, "káv" is actually pronounced more like "káu", western slovaks dont pronounce the soft "ľ" at all
@@anires1195 As Czech who knows polish I would disagree
@@janchi_stephanchi Czech changed its orthography (actual letters) around the 19th century but Polish did not. So Polish has "CZ" instead of "č" for example.
Any plans on some Greek storybooks? Popular holiday destination and many brits retire there so could be a good addition. Also as a Greek learner, I can attest that it is pretty hard to get any decent readers.
Ježíši Kriste, ten přechod z toho, jak čeština hrozně nedává smysl, na to, že ti máme dát odběr, byl úžasný! A jinak ano, to s tou češtinou je všechno pravda a jako Čech chci ještě říct, že miluju když se lidé z jiných zemí snaží říct "ř", protože jim to vlastně nikdy pořádně nejde a je strašně vtipné jak to prostě nedokážou vyslovit a vlastně vždycky místo toho říkají spíš "ž" :D
Is Icelandic middle voice anything like English passive voice? Your excellent example looks mighty close to it. (My reaction, "At last!") Oh, and the Storylearning book for Icelandic is pretty good. Thanks.
Why doesn't the book of short stories in Welsh not show in the linked page? I was going to buy it...but it wasn't there
I'm learning Hungarian and some of the things aren't terrible once you get your head round them, like vowel harmony. There's quite a lot of patterns in the conjugations and suffixes for verbs so although it's a headache it's OK once you've sussed those out. Plus only 9 irregular verbs which isn't bad. For me one of the hardest parts is remembering how all the bloody vowels are sounded and the fact dzs sounds like J....
@@LangXplorerSzeretem az anyanyelvemben, hogy különlegesen hangzik, de úgy érzem, hogy elég harsnak hangozhat másoknak. Kíváncsi lennék, egy külföldinek hogyan hangzik, mire hasonlít. Az pozitívum, hogy elég egyszerű megtanulni olvasni, ha tudod az ábécé-t, mivel fonetikus nyelv. Szavakat sem lehet tul nehez tanulni, mivel a főnevek elnevezése tobbnyire otletes es logikus, például "számítógép" (computer). A másik, ami számomra logikus, hogy a magyarban az általánostól megyunk a sajátos felé, például vezetéknév (family name) -> keresztnév (given name): Kovács Lajos (Louis Kovács [Smith]), illetve a dátum írása, év, hónap, nap - 2024 május 5. Örülök, hogy vannak, akiknek tetszik a magyar nyelv és szívesen tanulják.
Plus we don't use gendered nouns, not even he/she 😊
“Full of archaic words” (re: Icelandic). I’m not sure what this means (in this context). If a word is used in the modern language, in what way is it archaic?
It means words that are no longer in general use, but are still heard in Icelandic. Which is pretty wonderful. 'Archaic' doesn't only mean obsolete; it can also mean old-fashioned, and I imagine this is what Olly is going for. Icelanders like to express themselves using poetic or archaic vocabulary, and there's a strong drive to keep loanwords out of the language and preserve the beautiful old language. They go so far as to try to resuscitate terms from Old Icelandic. Isn't that lovely?
Where can I get a copy of the Welsh storybook?
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 Diolch.
I would definitely put Arabic there. They can, but don't have to write down vowels, have dual form (as opposed to singular and plural), multiple strange t/d/h/g sounds, they use suffixes and prefixes so much that you can say a complex sentence using one short word. Also they write from right to left.
Then there are the "dialects", which are as different from the standard language as Spanish is from Latin while being as different from each other as the Romance languages..
Czech is so complicated that even it's own video of all it's confusing, hard and interesting rules and querks would be extremly long. But Czech is an extremly beautiful language
As a Silesian speaker, I'm so glad I finally see that Euskara is mentioned on this channel. Really beautiful and hard language. Some say it is even impossible to master it if you're non-native. I still hope it is!
Was enjoying that first bit, as a Welsh resident learning Welsh is mandatory and even after like 14-15 years of learning English and Welsh (since I spoke not a word of English when I moved here, I supposedly only just learned the Polish alphabet) and I still have no idea what's going on
Mutations are a nightmare, 'it makes the sentence flow better' no it doesn't, it sounds the same! It's just annoying
I would not be able to have a conversation with a native or even just a fluent speaker unless it was written or it was something very simple like introducing ourselves
Edit 1: My least favourite mutations are these two where one letter (I can't remember which one since I literally never spoke Welsh outside of lessons and I've graduated high school now) becomes a g and another where the g disappears, so unless you understand the context, you have no idea which mutation it is
Edit 2: Czech sounds kinda similar to Polish, it's probably cuz they're both slavic languages but still, I wonder if Czech people feel the same about Polish
Edit 3: Three in Czech sounds identical to the Polish word XD
Edit 4: Polish has about 15 words for the same thing English has 3 of (i.e. run, ran, running). And that's cuz Polish has not only the tenses in the word but also masculine, feminine, neutral, and singular and plural versions of every verb.
Biegał/Biegł - He ran
Biegała/Biegła - She ran
I forgot Polish even had 2 almost identical words for the exact same thing whoops.
Also the negatives bit, Polish has that too.
Using the same example as in the video we get
I'll never tell anyone - English
Nikdy nikomu nic nereknu - Czech (almost)
Nigdy nikomu nic nie powiem - Polish
Nie = no/not
Powiem = tell
Translated literally: Never no-one nothing no tell
Edit 5: I had no more noted about the languages. I enjoyed the video, it was interesting
I have been editing this as I watched which is why theres so many edits
I live in the basque country and I am learning the language, despite their never ending number of auxiliar verbs the language is quite logical and in same cases almost mathematical, still having an extreme hard time with it
Correct me if I'm wrong, but cases in Hungarian are easy thanks to its agglutinativity. Once you learn the affix (or two) for a case you can start using it with any root, just follow the vowel harmony. Slavic langs (like the mentioned Czech, but that applies to most of them) are much more complex in that regard (remember that a root may change when you inflect a word!).
You should mention Ubykh language. It combines agglutinativity/polysinthetism, ergativity, and one of the biggest consonant inventory which leaves Georgian far behing.
9:16 That would be "Tehénként" actually (🤓👆). The "ül" part at the end could mean "speaks X language", so "Speaks in German" would be "Németül beszél", or it could also mean "In the process of transforming to something else", so "it's becoming prettier" would be "Szépül" (that's without a subject in this case). And I'm pretty sure there are other ways you could use it, I swear Hungarian is so difficult that not even we fully understand it....
A form of middle voice exists in English, as in the sentence 'The word translates badly into French'. Obviously the word itself hasn't done the translation, nor does the sentence mean that someone has translated the word badly.
Welsh initial word sound change being random is because we only look at today's language and not at its history and evolution. "Fy" comes from Brythonic '*mene' > old Welsh 'mi', this is why it triggers nasalization on the next word.
*min and *brọdr, from proto-brythonic (min mrọdr). With time min became mi, and somehow vy (fy) but the initial mutation remained.
Olly, I am German and many, many years ago I spent two terms as a foreign student at Aberdeen university and - not really knowing what I was doing - I registered for Scottish Gaelic (besides English Literature and English Language). Never before and never after had I learned anything so weird as this language. Our teacher took us from zero knowledge to O-Level-standard in just about six months, which was crazy. This was more than 35 years ago and apart from asking "How are you? and answering "Thank you, fine" I have forgotten everything. But what you are saying about the structure of Welsh is what I also remember from Scottish Gaelic. I really got twists in my brain when learning this language - and it was really interesting to learn it "via English". Shortly after returning home I could never translate Gaelic to German directly - I always had to go via English.
In Hungarian, we can make long words, "hátsó hajtóműves repülőgép" would be written in three words though. However, one can make use of the so-called moving hyphen rule to crumple them into one: "hátsóhajtóművesrepülőgép-szerelő".
Also, the example sentence is slightly incorrect. First, it should be "Tehénként" (since "Tehénül" would mean in the language of cows). Secondly, the verb megtart should be conjugated in the indefinite conjugation (because of "minden"): "tartsunk meg". Finally, it should start like "Tehénként azt kell mondanom, hogy..."
That Rhod Gilbert clip had me dying hahahaha
Welsh isn't that difficult once you get over the fear of mutations (notice I said the fear of and not the mutations themselves). In fact, you won't be misunderstood at all if you don't mutate something correctly.
Mutations also don’t get used a huge amount in the spoken language. They really aren’t worth worrying about
@@Stoggler exactly! Most of the information in this video applies to written Welsh and not spoken Welsh
Unlike other tonal languages, Navajo has a way of distinguishing between tones when you write it out.
What's confusing about stressed first syllables?
Thank you for using Trio Mandili to demonstrate the sound of Georgian! ❤
Being a native speaker of Swahili 🇰🇪, it is also agglutinative especially the verbs with the conjugations and agreement with the verb tense and noun cases, a bit like Hungarian
A lot of the things talked about in the section about Czech can be found in all Slavic languages in some form or another
Thank you for making videos about our beloved Georgian ! But there are some mistakes in the video .
1 18:37 there is written გვპირწყნი and should be გვითხარი tell us and next word ვეფხისტყაოსანი.
Also მყავს( I have) we use to animated nouns such as humans and animals and მაქვს(I have) to inanimated nouns such as book,money,time, feelings and etc .
Whenever you will decide to make again about Georgian please let me know and I'll help you in whatever you need 💪💚 btw I am one of your fans
Actually all the stuff you said about in regards to Hungarian is quite easy. Cases are super easy to wrap your head around and they work in a much less complex way than the slavic ones. Normal verb conjugations are also pretty regular, to make sth like a "phrasal" verb you just add a prefix, which again tends to be much more regular than in the case of slavic languages. What makes the Hungarian language difficult imo is the vocabulary
I'd like to hear your take on Swahili. It's agglutinative, and the numbers have multiple versions depending on the nouns
It is quite agglunative, the verbs have conjugations depending on the action, the tense and the noun case
Trio Mandill are so cool 😍
When I saw the title, I knew there would be my native language in it 😀 Czech. And yeah - tykání and vykání is nothing! But let's talk about the spoken and the written form 😀
Czech shares in common with Slovakian and Polish, the sounds and vocabulary are similar, the cases are a bit complex
I'm curious (I know I could just google, but this way other people might learn too!), is Navajo one of the Indigenous languages that doesn't technically have a written form? As in, there is a way to write it, for things like learning in contemporary classroom settings and whatnot, but it's really only a spoken language? I believe Ojibwe is one like that and wasn't sure if Navajo was too.
Fun fact: Welsh is probably the closest to what folks spoke in now-England before Old English. Torchwood actually made me want to learn Welsh. Just seeing it written on signage and stuff made me curious. I gave it a solid effort and I'd like to try it again, but it's tough when there are like 4 people within 100 miles that speak it reasonably well enough to help out! It's interesting for me, though, because I do describe it as "like a little kid playing with a computer" but as soon as I started learning it, even if I didn't know what the words said, I could instantly see them as words instead of a jumble of letters. Also, the "sometimes w" part of English vowels comes from the two Welsh words that have been incorporated (though no one really ever uses them). Icelandic is also quite a lot like Old English. Obviously it is closest to Old Norse, but there's a lot of crossover since they have the same root.
4:14 Cab anyone please link me the song? I typed up the bottom and i couldn't find it.
There's a direct link to this song in the video description above. :) Look for ‘Adleisio’
@@lisamarydew Thanks I also looked there but I didn't find anything there at first.
The secret is not to study them just absorb them
13:08 an interesting fact is when you move to iceland you will have to change your name so it fits icelandic grammar rules
I'm trying to learn Welsh right now actually. I've got a lot of relatively difficult languages I want to learn:
I. Welsh
II. Armenian
III. Czech
IV. Icelandic
V. Basque
VI. Georgian
VII. Navajo
VIII. Polish
IX. Vietnamese
X. Greek
And more harder languages. though, there's also easier languages I want to learn too though. After Welsh, should I go to an easier language? Or should I tackle another hard language?
Who decides which languages are difficult? Everyone thinks their own language is easier than languages they don't know.
Welsh is not that hard. When you do Czech and other languages you'll realize that. Good first choice. It was my first choice. Pob lwc.👍🏴
@storylearning How about a short stories edition for Czech?
triple negation is not check particularity; same in other slavic languages
Interestingly, Irish has a sound a lot like the Czech ř, which is the slender "r", such as in the verb "abair", meaning "speak". It's notoriously the most difficult sound for people to get, but you can get pretty close with a "zh" [ʒ] sound with some r-colouring, and even mispronouncing it as a [ʒ] is better than using the English "r".
Polish historically had ř as well (written rz). But three centuries ago they simplified it to ż (a zh-like sound), still writing it as rz.
If pronounciation of "abair" i've found online was correct then that "r" is closer to czech "š", not "ř"
8:39 helyesen: hátsó hajtóműves repülőgép. 3 szó, nem 1. Nem összetett szó, hanem jelzős szerkezet.
I've learned quite a lot of Welsh and the word order in the sentence about the cat seems out of order. I've never seen I like anything written or heard it spoken that way
When I was in San Sebastian, a local guide told me that there are no "swear words" in Euskara. Everyone swears in Spanish and French. 🤭❤️
Hey Olly! Can you do a video about shrimps or krill next?
From my second language extent of knowledge of hungarian i'm pretty sure Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért accually means something along the lines of "for your undeholifiable acts" like my favorite sentence: "Megkelkáposztásítottalanítottátok a megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" which means: "You unkaleified it for your undeholifiable acts."
That's it. Cross off ❌ Hungarian on my language list after seeing this. 😮
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 Don't worry, most of my Hungarian friends don't even know wtf that even means. Btw another fun sentence is "Te tetted e tettetett tettet, te tettetett tettek tettese." which means "You did this pretended act, you enactor of pretended acts.", but it can also be interpreted as "You did this pretended act, you culprit of pretended acts."
Are you serious? All those T's. More tees than a golf course. That looks like someone trying to talk when it's - 40 degrees Celsius.🥶☃️
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 most of our words/sentences are not that scary but yes, those make words make sense and they're the easiest and grammatically correct way to say them
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 But ok, seriously, a real useful sentence: Bedobtam egy lyukba hetvennégy kismacskát és asztat a lyukat feltöltöttem mustár gázzal, hogy a kismacskák soha többé netalálkozhassanak a családjukal.
I could handle these. I speak Scottish Gaelic a bit. A lot of these sounds feel more common to me when it comes to pronunciation.
Czech is not harder or more confusing than any other Slavic language. I bit the bullet and learned Russian, which has most of the same characteristics you complain about. Once you get used to it, it's not confusing at all. And I think any Czech (or Russian) speaker would say that all the English uses of "the" are just as confusing and totally pointless. Which would be correct! 😉
Kannada is an amazing language. Anyone living in Karnataka who hasn't started learning Kannada is missing out!
16:24 Abeslariak gitarra hartu du
17:25 Mikelek
Magyar: *punches me in the gut*
Norsk: *gangs up on me*
日本語: *beats me up in mass*
He used an example from NativLang!!!!...love that channel
Yeah,definitely starting to learn Navajo !!!
How will you be doing it?
When you hear how native English speakers pronounce place names and personal names from other countries, you get the impression that all languages except English are confusing for English speakers.
Hæ vinir minir! Ég er frá Québec-fylki og er að læra íslensku. Þetta tungumál er alveg frábært!
Takk fyrir þetta myndband og bless bless! 🇮🇸
Gott hjá þér! Alls ekki auðvelt tungumál
Czech is totally logical and super easy… (said a Ukrainian man 😁😁)
I wish to learn Welsh, Navajo and of course - Icelandic.
5:14 All the times, no? At least in the video "Na zdraví" is literally phonetic and consistent.
(I just understood that we have rules on when to write the light "i" or the hard "y", which both make the same sound, and many other rules, so you're probably right about that one, lol)
But as a Slovak myself, whenever they mention our Czech siblings, which we are mutually intelligible with, I feel so pwoud :') Good for you Czechia, good for you (although nobody ever mentions us Slovak - I guess because Czechs are bigger and more successful - however, we are one of the most closest languages, if not the closest, so when you're talking about Czech you're also mostly talking about Slovak - dialect continuum mutual intelligibility).
Haha, as a Hungarian, I feel embarrassed as I saw that, in Icelandic language, somehow a T sound gets into the word while we read wrote LL. WHY gif placeholder here. 😁 How that T came to there? Why not just writing TL? Why not just emphasizing an L when there's an LL? It's similar to the logic of Imperial Measurement System.
Fun (or rather useful) to know that Hungarian writing is phonetical which means we write what we say and say what is written (excepting some simplifier assimilation, the opposite of saying TL when LL is written), so our writing is an actual visual encoding of the spoken language.