Hey, just to be clear, Viggo isn't speaking Norwegian in that clip.. he's speaking Danish, which makes sense seeing as he is half Danish and has a Danish name.
@@javiermoretti1825 No. He is Danish-American he was born in New York and the original comment is indeed correct he moved to Argentina with his family in the 60s. He has also lived in Venezuela and Denmark for short periods of time in his childhood. He even has a degree in Spanish.
16:55 "Norwegian" is zooming across the background when Viggo is speaking Danish... The languages are very closely related, but it's very clearly Danish for anyone who knows the Scandinavian languages.
I made the mistake of watching a spanish interview with him and within a minute of the interview they explained he was from Argentina. I didn't get the joke until that moment 😅
A beloved European joke... "What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages... Trilingual. What do you call someone that speaks two languages... Bilingual. What do you call someone that speaks one language... American."
@@culinarynerd Polyglot means speaking more than 1 language but doesn't say how many languages. While bilingual, trilingual and all similar ones make reference at how many languages does the ployglot speak.
14:42 the expression Willem Dafoe uses to answer in Italian is actually a very advanced one and since he's naturally and casually answering I'd say his command of Italian is actually good.
Yeah, it’s the instructions on the bottle of bleach for if someone has swallowed it type of vocabulary that suddenly becomes important. That’s what should be priority for teaching in schools too, where’s the loo, I’ve got food poisoning, where’s the embassy. I’ve been accused of XXX, I’ve accidentally swallowed XXX , someone stole my papers. , I didn’t see the lady in the big hat, etc, I’m sure kids would pay more attention than endlessly droning on about social issues in other countries, which is all my language teacher did. We got enough of that in the news and our other classes.
I feel the point Olly was making is that these are British, Irish, and American actors, which know other languages. Christopher Waltz's English is miles better than any of their second languages.
@@SmaragdaKalfopoulos Viggo is half-'murican, was born there and, at least to some extent, spent formative time there. That's probably it. I always considered him Danish first, but I had never read up on his development before now.
Olly I've been following your channel for a few years. There's a saying that goes: "Quality is never an accident but the result of intelligent effort". Thanks for the immeasurable quality of the content you have made available to everyone on this platform. You're providing much insight towards mankind's spoken words! Assuming you have a production team, please at some point consider putting together a video to give us a behind-the-scenes glimpse as to what it takes to put your amazing productions together. Full kudos, and keep up the good work!
Correction, at 16:55 Mortensen speaks Danish. Maybe a bit modified, as the pronunciation is very clear, unlike many common Danish accents. But is is not Norwegian.
Not from todays actors, but I miss Peter Ustinov, who was british and spoke fluently english, spanish, french, german, italian, russian, turkish and greek Anyway, no female actors like Natalie Portman?
One last actor who seems to be extremely overlooked by this kind of videos: Sir Christopher Lee. As a former secret agent (and inspirer of the most famous fictional spy ever), he speaks fluently several languages including French (he even played in a French movie without being dubbed), Spanish, German (though he claimed he never learnt it), Italian and many of Tolkien's made-up languages.
If I remember correctly Sir Christopher has dubbed King Haggard in the Last Unicorn in most languages... and he's downright scary in the German version... and as a native speaker I don't find German in itself scary. Best regards Raoul G. Kunz
Sir Lee, Jean Reno and Xavier Bardem have one point in common. They all dubbed themselves a lot of dubbed versions of their movies, including Reno dubbing himself for the French version of Leon. It's actually harder than you think dubbing yourself in your own language!!
Tom Hiddleston being worried that he's offended an entire nation by butchering their language Meanwhile, we're just geeking out over the fact that he's even making an attempt to sing in Norwegian
Daniel Brühl (Baron Helmut Zemo in the MCU, Inglourious Basterds, Good Bye, Lenin!...) was raised trilingual (German, Catalan and Spanish) and Is fluent in Catalan, English, French, Spanish and German.
Tony Revolori of Wes Anderson's the Grand Budapest Hotel fame learned fluent Hindi to co-star in the Bollywood film "Umrika" in just 6 months! Incredible! I read about it in an online article about the film, but I can't find any interviews on how he did it. I wish you guys'd interview him about how he did it....
Tim H.’s voice is so calming and intelligent. When he narrates, such as in nature films, his voice makes me focus on the subject, without getting board. He is really very good, just like Benedict Cumberbatch and Zachary Quinto. 3 in my group of favorites from their generation of narrators. 😊
As someone who speaks Russian, I honestly always only understand the first 2 words Mickey Rourke says, no matter how many times I watch. Rest sounds like gibberish to me. So excuse me if I don’t find it too impressive (tho his performance was great as a villain)😅 Sebastian Stan did a way better job speaking it and ofc Viggo.
Freddie Highmore (The Good Doctor) speaks several languages, including English, Spanish, French, and German, with varying levels of proficiency. Raised bilingual, he fluently speaks English and Spanish, while his dedication to learning languages has led him to explore Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Arabic.
This doesn’t involve evil characters, but there is a 2017 movie called Young Karl Marx, almost all of the lead actors are trilingual, naturally speaking German when they’re in Germany, French when they’re in France, and English when they are in England.
I lived and worked in East Java, Indonesia for three years and learned the language. I worked with Indonesian guys who could speak English, so every day I would look up 4 new USEFUL words and asked the locals how to use them in context and then I would practice using those words in conversation with my Indonesian colleagues and tell them to correct me if I was wrong and explain why/how I was wrong. Thet helped increase my vocabulary. AND - this was most important, at least 3 times per week I would strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. I was based in the countryside, not the city, so the people I spoke to were what you might term 'peasants' so there was no filter or artifice with them . . I sometimes had to ask them to slow down or simplify their speech but for the most part it was pretty good. . It forced me to LISTEN closely to understand and the grammar fell into place easily.
Yes ...!! Im greek ...i live in France and im speaking fluently 5 languages: Greek French English Arabic Italiano I think those not enough as european? 😢
Would you please do a segment on the Locust Valley Lockjaw accent? It’s very unusual and I don’t know if anyone speaks with it now. Examples-Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island or Gloria Upson from Mame.
that chart has to be for someone in their teens - 20s cause as a 40+ yr old American who never got to learn another language well, 30 weeks to learn Norwegian is a LAUGH and a half... i'm trying and struggling and i've been here for 3 years - the language and grammar is challenging as all get out
My husband speaks some French from growing up in Canada and continuing his studies through high school in the US. The funniest Fench idiom (imo) is the equivalent to the English “it’s raining cats and dogs”. I can’t say/write it in French as I don’t know it, but I know the literal translation. Basically, “raining like a pi$$ing cow”
Hi, French here, and the idiom is "Il pleut comme vache qui pisse" which means exactly what you said 😆 However, the more accepted equivalent to "It's raining cats and dogs" would be "Il pleut des cordes" (="it's raining ropes"). The "pissing cow" variation, while also correct, is more familiar language.
In Texas the somewhat crude saying is “it rains like a cow pissing on a flat rock”. This comes from a Swede som bodde i Texas sju år, in the US 30 years et en France depuis cinq années…
13:09 interesting that almost all Chinese influenced languages (with exception of Arabic) are in category 5. Cantonese being the original/traditional language and mandarin the more modern. I guess although Vietnamese was originally a Chinese influenced language, they adopted French so easier for English speakers?
10:00 I must add the other expression for "Tenir la chandelle", that is quite similar to the english counterpart: "Être la troisième roue du carrosse". Rings a bell?
Someone who appears to do accents etc very well is Johnny Depp. His Irish in Le Chocolat and is British accents are so good you would never know he was American. Of course he cans speak French but seems shy about it. I would really love to see an analysis of his linguistic skills.
Why has nobody mentioned a villain not speaking in a specific language, but instead in a very difficult accent to master? Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue in Black Panther is one of the best South African accents I've heard on screen! Please do a video on English accents derived from languages from around the world :) Add in some regional specifics as well! #excitednewsub
Alba Baptista! She plays Ava Silva in "Warrior Nun", and speaks five languages fluently: Portuguese, English, Spanish French, and German. (She even got to show them off a few times in the show!)
As someone, who has only had standard US beginning language classes, I find that I need 1.5 hours in the language at one time to really switch off thinking in English.
Very impressive. It is hard to learn a new language as an adult. I am Norwegian, and almost by default I also understand Swedish and Danish. We started learning English in school at the age of 10, I also had French at age 14 and German at age 16. I would say that I am fluent in English, but my German and French are very limited, because I did not continue to use them after finishing school. The last couple of years I have travelled a lot in France, so I decided to take lessons in French. It is so hard, even if the basics are stored somewhere in my brain!
Yeah, we kind of get some "free languages" as Scandinavians. Starting out with Swedish, then adding English (I'm older so I started learning English at 12), then French from age 13 and Spanish from age 16 and Latin from age 17. At uni I had to learn Norwegian and Danish as several textbooks were written in these languages, and when I studied Literature it was easier to get Ibsen and Holberg etc in their native languages. I also studied Icelandic and Italian just for fun. Yes, I ended up as a Language teacher. I also take great joy in trying to learn to speak different Swedish dialects perfectly; I just find the nuances and differences between the dialects to be fascinating.
Impressive. I speak fluent german (mother tongue) and english. But I also speak almost every german dialect fluent, some of them have completely different grammar rules and many strange words. I don't know why I enjoy leaning all these dialects, because there is almost no use for it (I'm not much into travelling around). There was one guy, we played a MMORPG for many years together and I spoke with him in his dialect (Austrian). Time passed by and we talked about many other things and when it came up, where I was from, he told me, that he would have bet much money that I am living in Vienna instead of South Germany. I still enjoy talking to others in their dialect.
The secret to speak different languages in movies is that when the viewers don't know the language they don't hear your mistakes. My first language is russian and I didn't understand a word people in the video said. Don't even recognise it as russian. In many movies russian isn't even a language. It's just random letters in random order
Stellan Skarsgård has skills too allthough not being an evil character (in Marverl universe he plays Dr. Erik Selvig). He speaks fluent Swedish, English, Danish, Norwegian and German... and that's just the absolute fluent ones.
As for Mickey Rourke, as Russian, I need subtitles for his attempt in Russian from Iron Man because I barely understood a word from his speech. Scarlett Johansson's Russian, while not perfect, was way better.
I studied French and Russian at O level in the 1970s and we didn't start Russian until aged 12. I feel quite smug that the FSI think Russian is considered so difficult. We had to learn to write cursive in Russian too.
(14:00+)People who speak English will always switch to English as soon as they notice or assume that someone isn't native. It doesn't even have to be conscious. Whatever it is, they think it's beneficial when a lot of the time it isn't (my wife isn't good at English, she's way more familiar with my native language - she speaks it every day, after all, for English she needs to "warm up" before she can communicate). And some people have a Really Hard Time switching to their own native language even after a) they realize that the other person can speak their native language pretty well, or b) they've actually been asked to switch. Some seem unable to do so. They may try, but then before they know it they switch to English again.
Paul Robeson Actor Singer TOP Athlete whom had a Law Degree I believe spoke 13 languages He was wonderful saw him Playing Othello at Stratford upon Avon that was cool
Idk about the others, but as for Tom Hiddleston speaking Russian- frankly, I hardly could understand the words he said on a 3rd or a 4th attempt. Although Russian has very different phonetics, in my life I met only two foreigners who speak it clearly.
Hang on , scholars have been arguing for ages about how certain words were spoken in Latin because in spite of being written down there are no examples of how it was pronounced! Hard C and v or w!!
I know Tom studded Classics as I also studied Classics and Latin and Attic Greek are a must and you get a bit of a difficult kick over whichever you get first. Greek does not have Ablative case and Latin does - Latin assigns bits and bobs of grammatical functions from the Greek Genitive and Accusative cases to Ablative whiiile also still having genitive and accusative keep other functions - so the Greek Genitive absolute becomes Ablative absolute in Latin - among other things. Whichever you learn first will make the other more difficult due to the absence or presence of the ablative creating grammatical duties of cases inconsistent from one to the other. I got Greek first.. Also modern Greek vs Ancient feels a bit like old English vs modern only with fewer extinct letters like the thorn. Though modern Greek can also have that feel when you look at the extinct letters from Byzantine Greek. Classics puts you through a linguistic ringer and you still have to have a bit of Spanish, French, Italian, and German to have access to the scholarship of Classical scholars who don’t have their works put to English as anyone that deeply into Classics likely already knows the peripheral languages of most intense secondary scholarship. United States founders were also Classists who easily navigated Greek, Latin, and many languages on the continent. My own study of Classics has infected me with a voracious appetite for linguistic acquisition. I prefer grammatical mechanics first - see the moving parts and gears before the overlay of interactive relevant vocabulary. I almost certainly prefer this because of looking at declension and case charts for Greek and Latin … and the absolute unhinged mayhem of ancient greek participles - if you don’t collect those like your a-team Pokémon, you will be set adrift to perish in the Aegean with out even decent tools for a dramatic, woeful death speech. Anyway Tom amuses me for Classics, participating in a favourite past time of opening doors like a velociraptor, and my 15 year old cat who predates the Thor movies is named Loki - I got him the year before Thor came out and his previous name had beed Cicero when I adopted him. My Classics cat turned Nordic mythological deity right before those movies still amuses me. He is a cute playful ginger-cat with puss in boots sparkly eyes. My other cat Ronin always turns up when I have my nose in Thucydides - the speeches of which are the most difficult in antiquity because he treats grammar like a trick-shot gymnastics show and still has the most amusing arrogance “I wasn’t actually there to hear Peracles speak but this is what he could of said *insert difficult and eloquent speech* - “my recounting is a possession for all time” … the he goes to like in self-imposed exile in Sparta admiring Brasidas for taking down his rival Athenian general while also dying. The hero cults for Brasidas and the implied political affinity are fascinating.
@ My highschool had neither. I had ancient Greek in university- the class was quite full because the professor was popular and it was a 5 week course. Greek 2 was a semester Nd there were 10 of us. Only three were in the Greek 3 class. Small class sizes were common at the small private university since student to professor ration was about 11 to 1. My professor would troll me over my Lakedaimonian affinity when reading Xenophon.
@kristinrburkett interesting. Well I had some friends that went to Classics in college too. As for me I took a modern languages major (french + Spanish + Turkish) but quit a few months in and switched to history. I'm currently learning Russian. Oh I had no experience of such a small class. In my country doesn't matter if it's public or private... usually we have 20 to 50 students per subject (depending on which ones you take)... I'm in Portugal. Well it is very interesting to hear about people with some common educational background.
@ The small class size is incredibly unusual here. I went to a small private university founded in 1780 - Transylvania - maybe 1,100 students - smaller than many high schools. Classics was established as a major my 2nd of 4 years. I studied Spanish before uni and lamented having no latin. My school only had two classics professors save for the history and philosophy dept covering a couple of courses. My chem and organic chemistry courses had more like 40 people because of the lab auditorium and it being a common requirement. For the most part class sizes were between 12 and 30 in most cases. This cultivated a personal relationship with professors and lots of personal guidance - several of my professors are still dear friends to me. Graduate school was a large university of California school which was massive and cold in comparison even though grad schools programs are smaller with closer professor relationships the undergrad. My school was just small and odd. I study Japanese, Ancient Attic Greek, Classical Greek, Modern Greek, Doric Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, and need to work on Mandarin. I adore languages and new alphabets.
I tried to learn German. I got the duolingo app. I gave up as it seemed to be teaching me that bears don't like to go hiking and the dog doesn't surf on the weekends 😅. It doesn't explain the differences and why and when to use Ein or Eine. Then i asked my German mother in law about the word for menu and she told me that no one would use that unless they were in a very high end restaurant lol. So time to find another option
This is a very interesting channel. It goes the usual way though, grammar exercises, oh the horror. And what if other people do like doing them and search for resources about it, then what - forever condemned to listen how people berate their interests...
I somehow expected christopher waltz to be named here. sure, his first language is german, but he speaks much more than that. and he dubs his voice in his films whenever possible.
The 13:05 chart... Is Finnish on category four just because of the book Finnish? Heh. Good luck learning fluent Finnish in 1100 class hours. A Turkish friend of mine has lived here for almost two decades and is a business owner and he still struggles with fluency when speaking.
I don't know if you take requests but I've always been curious about constructed languages, some took inspiration from other languages like how elvish sounds like finnish and na'vi sounds like mauri or other Polynesian languages. OH! Can you make how hard is greek (mondern greek) and do u have greek stories?
So what Loki sang that was supposed to be Norweigan?? 😂 I scrolled for some comments from Norweigans, but couldn’t find any. Would be great to hear if they understod a word of it. As from neighbouring Sweden I didn’t even get that it was supposed to be Norweigan at all. If they wanted to study some kind of ”Norse language” then Island is the place to go. Islandic is probably the closest one can get to how the Vikings may have talked. At least some of them. At the time of the Vikings there were no Nordic countries as we know them today, and the were not one ”Norse language”. Instead there were regional dialalects / languages that could be very different from each other.
I was listening to the video while going to sleep, then i heard my native language at 5:25 and thought that maybe an ad of some game suddenly showed up, because the accent sounded very ai like (still understandable tho with only minor mistakes)
Michael Fassbender does not nearly speak those languages. They let him give it a go, and then they play a real native speaker on top of it so that the combination sounds kinda passable. Thats usually how it works. Loki, however, is different. He is actually very good. Mickey O Rourke too. He makes an attempt at it, then a native speaker talks over him and they make it work with a mix of the voices.
Hey, just to be clear, Viggo isn't speaking Norwegian in that clip.. he's speaking Danish, which makes sense seeing as he is half Danish and has a Danish name.
Yeah, I was confused about that for a moment. I hardly understand spoken Norwegian, so I thought for a for a sec that I had suddenly improved 😅
Was about to write the same.
Yepp.. Was going to write the same comment.. But you beat me to it.
Yeah, I came to mention that.
I came here to say that.
Viggo grew up in Argentina, so he speaks impeccable Argentine Spanish.
And Italian with a beautiful Argentinian accent
@monicarollo2462 Viggo? No, he is Danish by birth.
@@javiermoretti1825 No. He is Danish-American he was born in New York and the original comment is indeed correct he moved to Argentina with his family in the 60s. He has also lived in Venezuela and Denmark for short periods of time in his childhood. He even has a degree in Spanish.
The reason why everyone loves Tom no matter what language he speaks is his voice!
Exactly, he sounds very relaxed and natural
Yeah, that too.
They don't love him that much anymore. Not after dating Taylor Swift...
16:55 "Norwegian" is zooming across the background when Viggo is speaking Danish... The languages are very closely related, but it's very clearly Danish for anyone who knows the Scandinavian languages.
Was gonna say the same. Danish guy here, cannot understand spoken norwegian at all, and that wasn't it.
For those who don't know, Viggo Mortensen's Spanish can fool Spanish speakers into thinking he is native. He is that good at it.
I made the mistake of watching a spanish interview with him and within a minute of the interview they explained he was from Argentina. I didn't get the joke until that moment 😅
Not that hard when you grow up in Argentina
Hes not fooling anyone. He IS native
Sigh, that’s because it is his native language …research.
He also speaks Catalan. His lady is a native speaker
A beloved European joke... "What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages... Trilingual. What do you call someone that speaks two languages... Bilingual. What do you call someone that speaks one language... American."
I can speak 5 languages🤔
Another two are japanese and chinese - just a little.😶
What about the UK?
I heard it starting with "What do you call someone who speaks many languages, polyglot"
@@culinarynerd Polyglot means speaking more than 1 language but doesn't say how many languages. While bilingual, trilingual and all similar ones make reference at how many languages does the ployglot speak.
Their new president can't even speak one 🫤
I adore that man.Tom,that is.And Loki.Mad respect for the other actors as well.Especially "No Ego Viggo".
The language that Viggo Mortensen spoke that was labeled as Norwegian was Danish
Dolf Lundgren is another unexpected multi-linguist. It's great!
Has an advanced Science degree, too. Just a brain
14:42 the expression Willem Dafoe uses to answer in Italian is actually a very advanced one and since he's naturally and casually answering I'd say his command of Italian is actually good.
I have several languages I call 'menu languages'. I can mostly understand menu items, ask for a toilet, contact police and emergency services, etc.
Yeah, it’s the instructions on the bottle of bleach for if someone has swallowed it type of vocabulary that suddenly becomes important. That’s what should be priority for teaching in schools too, where’s the loo, I’ve got food poisoning, where’s the embassy. I’ve been accused of XXX, I’ve accidentally swallowed XXX , someone stole my papers. , I didn’t see the lady in the big hat, etc, I’m sure kids would pay more attention than endlessly droning on about social issues in other countries, which is all my language teacher did. We got enough of that in the news and our other classes.
Tom Hiddleston speaking French is the sexiest thing I've heard in decades.
What? No Christoph Waltz?
I feel the point Olly was making is that these are British, Irish, and American actors, which know other languages. Christopher Waltz's English is miles better than any of their second languages.
@@Mikefizzled Viggo is literally half Danish
@@lukasrba1 That's a solid point. The split in my head is that Viggo and the others all started in American films.
Why?
@@SmaragdaKalfopoulos Viggo is half-'murican, was born there and, at least to some extent, spent formative time there. That's probably it. I always considered him Danish first, but I had never read up on his development before now.
These people made the best of their roles by diving into languages.
Olly I've been following your channel for a few years. There's a saying that goes: "Quality is never an accident but the result of intelligent effort". Thanks for the immeasurable quality of the content you have made available to everyone on this platform. You're providing much insight towards mankind's spoken words! Assuming you have a production team, please at some point consider putting together a video to give us a behind-the-scenes glimpse as to what it takes to put your amazing productions together. Full kudos, and keep up the good work!
Correction, at 16:55 Mortensen speaks Danish. Maybe a bit modified, as the pronunciation is very clear, unlike many common Danish accents. But is is not Norwegian.
Sir Christopher Lee also spoke multiple languages (RIP)
Not from todays actors, but I miss Peter Ustinov, who was british and spoke fluently english, spanish, french, german, italian, russian, turkish and greek
Anyway, no female actors like Natalie Portman?
They could have used Icelandic as Asgardian as that is closest to Old Norse.
When spoken, it sounds very close to Swedish. My Swedish husband was very surprised by that. He was able to understand quite a bit.
One last actor who seems to be extremely overlooked by this kind of videos: Sir Christopher Lee. As a former secret agent (and inspirer of the most famous fictional spy ever), he speaks fluently several languages including French (he even played in a French movie without being dubbed), Spanish, German (though he claimed he never learnt it), Italian and many of Tolkien's made-up languages.
If I remember correctly Sir Christopher has dubbed King Haggard in the Last Unicorn in most languages... and he's downright scary in the German version... and as a native speaker I don't find German in itself scary.
Best regards
Raoul G. Kunz
@@RaoulKunz1 Neither do I: I often listen to romantic lieder and it's beautiful.
Sir Lee, Jean Reno and Xavier Bardem have one point in common. They all dubbed themselves a lot of dubbed versions of their movies, including Reno dubbing himself for the French version of Leon. It's actually harder than you think dubbing yourself in your own language!!
Sorrell Booke, Dukes of Hazzard Boss Hogg spoke 6 languages fluently and another 6 languages to some extent.
@@darrellbedford4857I did not know that. Wow, look as Boss Hogg being a man of letters.
Tom Hiddleston being worried that he's offended an entire nation by butchering their language
Meanwhile, we're just geeking out over the fact that he's even making an attempt to sing in Norwegian
"Evil Actors"
Tom Hiddleston is typing...
he’s so hot as loki 💃🏻
😂
Daniel Brühl (Baron Helmut Zemo in the MCU, Inglourious Basterds, Good Bye, Lenin!...) was raised trilingual (German, Catalan and Spanish) and Is fluent in Catalan, English, French, Spanish and German.
All indogerman languages, it’s not that hard. Try Hungarian:D
Tony Revolori of Wes Anderson's the Grand Budapest Hotel fame learned fluent Hindi to co-star in the Bollywood film "Umrika" in just 6 months! Incredible! I read about it in an online article about the film, but I can't find any interviews on how he did it. I wish you guys'd interview him about how he did it....
Very interesting. I love to hear these actors speaking these different languages. You are inspiring me to get busy and try a different language.
Tim H.’s voice is so calming and intelligent. When he narrates, such as in nature films, his voice makes me focus on the subject, without getting board. He is really very good, just like Benedict Cumberbatch and Zachary Quinto. 3 in my group of favorites from their generation of narrators. 😊
Richard Armitage, too …
You've just left Christoph Waltz out!
And what Marvel / DC role did he play?
@@jmwild22 you dont need to play a marvel / DC role to be famous
@@jmwild22 "5 villains...."
I was waiting for him
As someone who speaks Russian, I honestly always only understand the first 2 words Mickey Rourke says, no matter how many times I watch. Rest sounds like gibberish to me. So excuse me if I don’t find it too impressive (tho his performance was great as a villain)😅 Sebastian Stan did a way better job speaking it and ofc Viggo.
my all time fave is still heinrich schlieman...an amazing linguist...impeccable learning method....and he discovered troy...pretty tidy
Freddie Highmore (The Good Doctor) speaks several languages, including English, Spanish, French, and German, with varying levels of proficiency. Raised bilingual, he fluently speaks English and Spanish, while his dedication to learning languages has led him to explore Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Arabic.
Impressive versality!
This doesn’t involve evil characters, but there is a 2017 movie called Young Karl Marx, almost all of the lead actors are trilingual, naturally speaking German when they’re in Germany, French when they’re in France, and English when they are in England.
I lived and worked in East Java, Indonesia for three years and learned the language.
I worked with Indonesian guys who could speak English, so every day I would look up 4 new USEFUL words and asked the locals how to use them in context and then I would practice using those words in conversation with my Indonesian colleagues and tell them to correct me if I was wrong and explain why/how I was wrong. Thet helped increase my vocabulary.
AND - this was most important, at least 3 times per week I would strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. I was based in the countryside, not the city, so the people I spoke to were what you might term 'peasants' so there was no filter or artifice with them . . I sometimes had to ask them to slow down or simplify their speech but for the most part it was pretty good. .
It forced me to LISTEN closely to understand and the grammar fell into place easily.
John Malkovich spoke French in the movie The Sheltering Sky co-starred with Debra Winger
And in "Secretariat". I was having all kinds of fun with the things he was saying to "Ron Turcotte". He was great!
He lives in France.
@@traceythompson1092 I didn't know that, that's nice for him
Tom Hiddleston is awesome! He can speck multiple languages, can act, he can dance, is gorgeous looking and is extremely smart.
Finally I found a video where he talks about the Greek language If there’s another one let me know
Yes ...!! Im greek ...i live in France and im speaking fluently 5 languages:
Greek
French
English
Arabic
Italiano
I think those not enough as european? 😢
Yes interesting
I enjoy learning languages and know quite a few. Speaking has always been my weakness.
Would you please do a segment on the Locust Valley Lockjaw accent? It’s very unusual and I don’t know if anyone speaks with it now. Examples-Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island or Gloria Upson from Mame.
that chart has to be for someone in their teens - 20s cause as a 40+ yr old American who never got to learn another language well, 30 weeks to learn Norwegian is a LAUGH and a half... i'm trying and struggling and i've been here for 3 years - the language and grammar is challenging as all get out
My husband speaks some French from growing up in Canada and continuing his studies through high school in the US. The funniest Fench idiom (imo) is the equivalent to the English “it’s raining cats and dogs”. I can’t say/write it in French as I don’t know it, but I know the literal translation.
Basically, “raining like a pi$$ing cow”
Hi, French here, and the idiom is "Il pleut comme vache qui pisse" which means exactly what you said 😆
However, the more accepted equivalent to "It's raining cats and dogs" would be "Il pleut des cordes" (="it's raining ropes"). The "pissing cow" variation, while also correct, is more familiar language.
In Texas the somewhat crude saying is “it rains like a cow pissing on a flat rock”. This comes from a Swede som bodde i Texas sju år, in the US 30 years et en France depuis cinq années…
13:09 interesting that almost all Chinese influenced languages (with exception of Arabic) are in category 5. Cantonese being the original/traditional language and mandarin the more modern.
I guess although Vietnamese was originally a Chinese influenced language, they adopted French so easier for English speakers?
10:00 I must add the other expression for "Tenir la chandelle", that is quite similar to the english counterpart: "Être la troisième roue du carrosse". Rings a bell?
did you made a video about modern greek?
Someone who appears to do accents etc very well is Johnny Depp. His Irish in Le Chocolat and is British accents are so good you would never know he was American. Of course he cans speak French but seems shy about it. I would really love to see an analysis of his linguistic skills.
His Irish accent is alright but you'd easy know he isn't Irish
And Tom’s Japanese accent is wonderful ❤
Why has nobody mentioned a villain not speaking in a specific language, but instead in a very difficult accent to master? Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue in Black Panther is one of the best South African accents I've heard on screen! Please do a video on English accents derived from languages from around the world :) Add in some regional specifics as well! #excitednewsub
Alba Baptista! She plays Ava Silva in "Warrior Nun", and speaks five languages fluently: Portuguese, English, Spanish French, and German. (She even got to show them off a few times in the show!)
I was waiting for Viggo Mortensen!
Christoph Waltz and Daniel Bruhl should be on this list too.
As someone, who has only had standard US beginning language classes, I find that I need 1.5 hours in the language at one time to really switch off thinking in English.
I was bilingual as a child, but only with kitchen Hungarian. Now it took me 3 days in Hungary to unlock my to
I did not hear Viggo Mortensen speak Norwegian. He spoke Danish. And his name is Danish. And he has Danish family roots. So you didn't get that right.
Very impressive. It is hard to learn a new language as an adult. I am Norwegian, and almost by default I also understand Swedish and Danish. We started learning English in school at the age of 10, I also had French at age 14 and German at age 16. I would say that I am fluent in English, but my German and French are very limited, because I did not continue to use them after finishing school. The last couple of years I have travelled a lot in France, so I decided to take lessons in French. It is so hard, even if the basics are stored somewhere in my brain!
Yeah, we kind of get some "free languages" as Scandinavians. Starting out with Swedish, then adding English (I'm older so I started learning English at 12), then French from age 13 and Spanish from age 16 and Latin from age 17. At uni I had to learn Norwegian and Danish as several textbooks were written in these languages, and when I studied Literature it was easier to get Ibsen and Holberg etc in their native languages. I also studied Icelandic and Italian just for fun.
Yes, I ended up as a Language teacher.
I also take great joy in trying to learn to speak different Swedish dialects perfectly; I just find the nuances and differences between the dialects to be fascinating.
You should check out actor Brian Wiles, he also speaks other languages including Arabic, perfectly!
You're missing the Irish language for Michael Fassbender! Awesome video though!
Is there also a similar episode about multi-lingual female heros/actresses?
Could you do a vid about the languages of Papua New Guinea?
Hi guys what you think about short stories in Spanish for intermediate learners should i buy it
I would be very interrested to test the level in French in 30 weeks !!! As a French writer... I am still learning it everyday !
Actress Bitsie Tulloch not only speaks Spanish fluently, she incorporated it into her show Grimm.
Impressive. I speak fluent german (mother tongue) and english. But I also speak almost every german dialect fluent, some of them have completely different grammar rules and many strange words. I don't know why I enjoy leaning all these dialects, because there is almost no use for it (I'm not much into travelling around). There was one guy, we played a MMORPG for many years together and I spoke with him in his dialect (Austrian). Time passed by and we talked about many other things and when it came up, where I was from, he told me, that he would have bet much money that I am living in Vienna instead of South Germany. I still enjoy talking to others in their dialect.
The secret to speak different languages in movies is that when the viewers don't know the language they don't hear your mistakes. My first language is russian and I didn't understand a word people in the video said. Don't even recognise it as russian. In many movies russian isn't even a language. It's just random letters in random order
When you say that Viggo Mortensen speak Norwegian, he's actually speaking Danish.
A BUNCH OF LANGUAGES. (A bunch of flowers ) definitely vast room for improvement in your collective nouns descriptions on social media .
I am currently using Duo Lingo to learn Gaelic aka Irish
Stellan Skarsgård has skills too allthough not being an evil character (in Marverl universe he plays Dr. Erik Selvig). He speaks fluent Swedish, English, Danish, Norwegian and German... and that's just the absolute fluent ones.
Must be impressive for Americans. Most Eurpeans speak 3.
If the bar is Dafoe's Italian, I can speak 7 languages (all of them from Category I)
As norwegian i am impressed
As for Mickey Rourke, as Russian, I need subtitles for his attempt in Russian from Iron Man because I barely understood a word from his speech. Scarlett Johansson's Russian, while not perfect, was way better.
What about Christoph Waltz?
Patrick Bauchau from House and The Pretender is fluent in: English, French, Spanish, German, Itslan, Russian, Swiss and Friesian.
Excuse my ignorance 😂, since when is Swiss a language 🤔
Please make a video about languages in star trek and starwars ❤
Whee is Esperanto?
I studied French and Russian at O level in the 1970s and we didn't start Russian until aged 12. I feel quite smug that the FSI think Russian is considered so difficult. We had to learn to write cursive in Russian too.
(14:00+)People who speak English will always switch to English as soon as they notice or assume that someone isn't native. It doesn't even have to be conscious. Whatever it is, they think it's beneficial when a lot of the time it isn't (my wife isn't good at English, she's way more familiar with my native language - she speaks it every day, after all, for English she needs to "warm up" before she can communicate).
And some people have a Really Hard Time switching to their own native language even after a) they realize that the other person can speak their native language pretty well, or b) they've actually been asked to switch. Some seem unable to do so. They may try, but then before they know it they switch to English again.
4:38 is not Russian.
Paul Robeson Actor Singer TOP Athlete whom had a Law Degree I believe spoke 13 languages He was wonderful saw him Playing Othello at Stratford upon Avon that was cool
Idk about the others, but as for Tom Hiddleston speaking Russian- frankly, I hardly could understand the words he said on a 3rd or a 4th attempt. Although Russian has very different phonetics, in my life I met only two foreigners who speak it clearly.
Yeah I replayed it 3 times until I made out what he was saying
Fun Fact: Viggo Mortensen's native language is both English and Danish.
And Spanish. He spent most of his childhood in Argentina.
For ME PERSONALLY I ❤ Duolingo. Learning 6 language for over a year.❤
I thought Mads Mikkelsen might've made the list. He's only fluent in three languages but conversational in seven or eight.
I can’t remember the actress’s name, but she starred in a WWII film. Not only did she learn Polish for the role, but also Polish-accented German.
Meryl Streep in Sophie choice
- Thanks for the books about German and Danish .
- Trust me, it is so hard to find good books about these subjects ... ?
Hang on , scholars have been arguing for ages about how certain words were spoken in Latin because in spite of being written down there are no examples of how it was pronounced! Hard C and v or w!!
I know Tom studded Classics as I also studied Classics and Latin and Attic Greek are a must and you get a bit of a difficult kick over whichever you get first. Greek does not have Ablative case and Latin does - Latin assigns bits and bobs of grammatical functions from the Greek Genitive and Accusative cases to Ablative whiiile also still having genitive and accusative keep other functions - so the Greek Genitive absolute becomes Ablative absolute in Latin - among other things. Whichever you learn first will make the other more difficult due to the absence or presence of the ablative creating grammatical duties of cases inconsistent from one to the other. I got Greek first.. Also modern Greek vs Ancient feels a bit like old English vs modern only with fewer extinct letters like the thorn. Though modern Greek can also have that feel when you look at the extinct letters from Byzantine Greek. Classics puts you through a linguistic ringer and you still have to have a bit of Spanish, French, Italian, and German to have access to the scholarship of Classical scholars who don’t have their works put to English as anyone that deeply into Classics likely already knows the peripheral languages of most intense secondary scholarship. United States founders were also Classists who easily navigated Greek, Latin, and many languages on the continent. My own study of Classics has infected me with a voracious appetite for linguistic acquisition. I prefer grammatical mechanics first - see the moving parts and gears before the overlay of interactive relevant vocabulary. I almost certainly prefer this because of looking at declension and case charts for Greek and Latin … and the absolute unhinged mayhem of ancient greek participles - if you don’t collect those like your a-team Pokémon, you will be set adrift to perish in the Aegean with out even decent tools for a dramatic, woeful death speech. Anyway Tom amuses me for Classics, participating in a favourite past time of opening doors like a velociraptor, and my 15 year old cat who predates the Thor movies is named Loki - I got him the year before Thor came out and his previous name had beed Cicero when I adopted him. My Classics cat turned Nordic mythological deity right before those movies still amuses me. He is a cute playful ginger-cat with puss in boots sparkly eyes. My other cat Ronin always turns up when I have my nose in Thucydides - the speeches of which are the most difficult in antiquity because he treats grammar like a trick-shot gymnastics show and still has the most amusing arrogance “I wasn’t actually there to hear Peracles speak but this is what he could of said *insert difficult and eloquent speech* - “my recounting is a possession for all time” … the he goes to like in self-imposed exile in Sparta admiring Brasidas for taking down his rival Athenian general while also dying. The hero cults for Brasidas and the implied political affinity are fascinating.
I took latin in highschool. Sadly there weren't enough students to open the Greek classes.
@ My highschool had neither. I had ancient Greek in university- the class was quite full because the professor was popular and it was a 5 week course. Greek 2 was a semester Nd there were 10 of us. Only three were in the Greek 3 class. Small class sizes were common at the small private university since student to professor ration was about 11 to 1. My professor would troll me over my Lakedaimonian affinity when reading Xenophon.
@kristinrburkett interesting. Well I had some friends that went to Classics in college too. As for me I took a modern languages major (french + Spanish + Turkish) but quit a few months in and switched to history. I'm currently learning Russian. Oh I had no experience of such a small class. In my country doesn't matter if it's public or private... usually we have 20 to 50 students per subject (depending on which ones you take)... I'm in Portugal. Well it is very interesting to hear about people with some common educational background.
@ The small class size is incredibly unusual here. I went to a small private university founded in 1780 - Transylvania - maybe 1,100 students - smaller than many high schools. Classics was established as a major my 2nd of 4 years. I studied Spanish before uni and lamented having no latin. My school only had two classics professors save for the history and philosophy dept covering a couple of courses. My chem and organic chemistry courses had more like 40 people because of the lab auditorium and it being a common requirement. For the most part class sizes were between 12 and 30 in most cases. This cultivated a personal relationship with professors and lots of personal guidance - several of my professors are still dear friends to me. Graduate school was a large university of California school which was massive and cold in comparison even though grad schools programs are smaller with closer professor relationships the undergrad. My school was just small and odd. I study Japanese, Ancient Attic Greek, Classical Greek, Modern Greek, Doric Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, and need to work on Mandarin. I adore languages and new alphabets.
I tried to learn German. I got the duolingo app. I gave up as it seemed to be teaching me that bears don't like to go hiking and the dog doesn't surf on the weekends 😅. It doesn't explain the differences and why and when to use Ein or Eine. Then i asked my German mother in law about the word for menu and she told me that no one would use that unless they were in a very high end restaurant lol. So time to find another option
This is a very interesting channel. It goes the usual way though, grammar exercises, oh the horror. And what if other people do like doing them and search for resources about it, then what - forever condemned to listen how people berate their interests...
I somehow expected christopher waltz to be named here. sure, his first language is german, but he speaks much more than that. and he dubs his voice in his films whenever possible.
Don't... Explain... What... The ... Odyssey... Is!
Who doesn't know, doesn't need to know.
The 13:05 chart... Is Finnish on category four just because of the book Finnish? Heh. Good luck learning fluent Finnish in 1100 class hours. A Turkish friend of mine has lived here for almost two decades and is a business owner and he still struggles with fluency when speaking.
I don't know if you take requests but I've always been curious about constructed languages, some took inspiration from other languages like how elvish sounds like finnish and na'vi sounds like mauri or other Polynesian languages.
OH! Can you make how hard is greek (mondern greek) and do u have greek stories?
So what Loki sang that was supposed to be Norweigan?? 😂
I scrolled for some comments from Norweigans, but couldn’t find any. Would be great to hear if they understod a word of it. As from neighbouring Sweden I didn’t even get that it was supposed to be Norweigan at all.
If they wanted to study some kind of ”Norse language” then Island is the place to go. Islandic is probably the closest one can get to how the Vikings may have talked. At least some of them. At the time of the Vikings there were no Nordic countries as we know them today, and the were not one ”Norse language”. Instead there were regional dialalects / languages that could be very different from each other.
Förstod alltihop
I was listening to the video while going to sleep, then i heard my native language at 5:25 and thought that maybe an ad of some game suddenly showed up, because the accent sounded very ai like (still understandable tho with only minor mistakes)
Right? His pronouciation wasn't bad but it lacked a natural flow
Michael Fassbender does not nearly speak those languages. They let him give it a go, and then they play a real native speaker on top of it so that the combination sounds kinda passable. Thats usually how it works. Loki, however, is different. He is actually very good.
Mickey O Rourke too. He makes an attempt at it, then a native speaker talks over him and they make it work with a mix of the voices.
To me Malkowich doesn't sound effortless in any language including English. 🤷
😂😂 So true
Willem Dafoe is good, but Willem Dafriend is even better.
Roger Moore spoke Italian, French and German fluently
12:36 the Green Goblin stole Captain America's line
I saw Viggo Mortensen in the Spanish film _Alatriste_ and I would never have guessed his first language is English.
Why did Olly not include Fassbender speaking Irish too?!
Doesn’t mean he can speak Irish.
Came here to say that.Fassbender acts in perfect Ulster Irish in "Kneecap". Think he said he's not completely fluent, but you would never know it.
He's very lucky to have the talent
Fassbender is quite good in German and in French, give yourself some credit guy!