Good old German Lols…

The European Commission has just announced that English will be the official language of the European Union. German, which was the other possibility, narrowly missed out. During negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and accepted a 5-year...

the longest word in the German language.

der Salto (n.)

- somersault 

For example learning German and Welsh at the same time results in every Welsh W, pronounced /u:/, being pronounced like /v/ instead.

Studying Welsh with any knowledge of German just ruins everything. F = /v/ in Welsh, but V = /f/ in German, U = /ɪ/ or /i:/ in Welsh, but /u/ in German. DD = /ð/ in Welsh, but in German (even though this combination wouldn’t exist except for in compound words) it’s pronounced /t/, /d/ or, /td/. TH in Welsh is /θ/, but in German it’s simply /t/. 

Welsh orthography is just terribly confusing when you have knowledge of any other language’s writing system. XD

German children write their wishes down and send them to the Christkind - the German Christmas angel (lit: Christchild). It’s Santa’s helper and brings the gifts on the late afternoon/evening of the 24th.

die Weihnachtspost = Christmas mail

der Brief = letter

einen Brief schreiben an = to write a letter to

der Wunsch (Wünsche) = wish(es)

This is the final piece for the word ‘Accents’. I’m quite happy with it, mostly because I had a lot of help from SJEyre with putting the video together.

Here’s the tongue twisters being said. Have a go, and maybe you’ll appreciate just how hard your tongue has to work a little more:

Finnish Hissi sihisi hississa Hissi sihisi hississa Hissi sihisi hississa

German Zehn zahme ziegen ziehen Zehn zentner zucker zum zoom. Zehn zahme ziegen ziehen Zehn zentner zucker zum zoom.

French Un chasseur sachant Chasser sait chasser sans Son chien de chasse

Polish W Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie, I Szczebrzeszynie z tego slynie

That happens when you’re exposed to many languages in a daily basis.

[submitted by polyglot-pix]

[submitted by helpimtrappedontheinternet]  

Some languages don’t have words for yes and no (Chinese languages and Irish, to name a couple). While “no” uses an n-initial in most European languages (no, nein, ní, non), Greek has to be weird and use the n-intial for yes (ne/ναι), and Japanese has about ten different words for each depending on formality (and two of the more informal ones are うん/un for yes and ううん/uun for no!) It drives me nuts!

French