Ever encountered an undercover language?

General discussion about learning languages
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Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby rdearman » Fri Apr 28, 2023 3:11 pm

I was just reading one of the threads and someone noticed that a chapter of some Spanish video was actually in Italian. This reminded me of a time when I started reading a book and I thought to myself that this was the most difficult Italian book I'd ever read in my life. It wasn't until chapter 2 that I realized that the book was in Spanish.

Anything like that ever happened to you?
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Apr 28, 2023 3:50 pm

Yes. Tuned into TV to watch 'Dutch news', was aghast and depressed that I couldn't understand it properly after almost a year of learning. Then realised with relief -after being told - that I was watching Omrop Fryslân, in Frisian.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby tastyonions » Fri Apr 28, 2023 4:14 pm

Le Baron wrote:Yes. Tuned into TV to watch 'Dutch news', was aghast and depressed that I couldn't understand it properly after almost a year of learning. Then realised with relief -after being told - that I was watching Omrop Fryslân, in Frisian.

Funny, I just discovered their YouTube channel the other day. I don't think I could understand what this dude was saying no matter what language he spoke (starts around 1:00):



He's all vowels!
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Apr 28, 2023 5:04 pm

tastyonions wrote:Funny, I just discovered their YouTube channel the other day. I don't think I could understand what this dude was saying no matter what language he spoke (starts around 1:00):



He's all vowels!

:lol: I hope that's not his real speaking manner. Bloody hell. I can actually understand a bit of what he says, with help from the subs. I'm astonished how much of the rest I can understand these days. I have a friend (ex girlfriend) who speaks it and she says (and her mother says) a lot of Frisian now has a Dutch sound and many displaced words. Certainly the general prosody is practically identical.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby vonPeterhof » Fri Apr 28, 2023 5:37 pm

Something similar sometimes happened to me on Twitter, but in reverse (confusing a more familiar language for a less familiar one and wondering why it was so easy). For example I would see a tweet by Forverts, confuse it for one by Haaretz because of the similar logos and think "whoah when did I get this good at understanding Hebrew?! oh wait, never mind, it's just Yiddish". The same thing would also happen for TRT's tweets in Afghani Uzbek because their logo used to be a lot more similar to the Dari- and Pashto-posting TOLO News before the former switched their color scheme from red to blue.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby Herodotean » Fri Apr 28, 2023 6:43 pm

A few years ago, I started to worry that I had suddenly developed receptive aphasia. I was on a Scandinavian Air flight from Chicago to Copenhagen and couldn't understand the pilot's first announcement, even though his intonation patterns sounded just like English. Of course, after a moment he switched to what really was English and I realized he'd previously been speaking something else (Danish, I assume). I don't know whether Danish always sounds so similar to English or whether it was some combination of that pilot's accent and tinny airplane speakers. I am often reminded of that moment when speaking with my three-year-old, who is often unintelligible despite her perfect English intonation.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby Iversen » Fri Apr 28, 2023 6:46 pm

Normally I have no problems at all understanding Norwegian. I can read Norwegian with both spellings, and I can understand everything in Norwegian on TV - even things like Eides Språksjov which is at least partly spoken in one of the dialects from the Vestland and game shows where several people speak each his/her own dialect.

Here is the problem: I have a Langenscheidt Norwegian <-> German dictionary, but also a Norsk-Dansk ordbog from Paludan. I know most of the words in the German one, whereas the other seems to have collected all the words I don't know - you wouldn't believe that it actually was the same language. And no, it's not just a New Norvegian->Danish dictionary, because at the end there is a tiny New Norwegian-> Danish wordlist, and it's not harder to understand that part than the rest. So maybe the Norwegians have a secret incomprehensible language, which one maverick printing house for some reason decided to reveal for the entertainment of a few Danish readers .. :mrgreen:
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby sporedandroid » Sat Apr 29, 2023 3:40 pm

When I was visiting some family they were watching some “Spanish” movie. I could understand it decently, but it was super exhausting. Turns out it was Galician.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby leosmith » Sat Apr 29, 2023 11:17 pm

I was watching Birth of the Dragon on Netflix last night. It's English, but I had the subs turned on for some reason. They would occasionally speak Chinese, and the subs said "speaking Cantonese" whenever that happened, so I just kind of tuned it out. Eventually it dawned on me that I understood what they were saying, meaning the subs should have said "Mandarin". If you like well orchestrated martial arts and historical accuracy I highly discourage you from watching this film.
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Re: Ever encountered an undercover language?

Postby golyplot » Sun May 07, 2023 4:10 am

rdearman wrote:I was just reading one of the threads and someone noticed that a chapter of some Spanish video was actually in Italian. This reminded me of a time when I started reading a book and I thought to myself that this was the most difficult Italian book I'd ever read in my life. It wasn't until chapter 2 that I realized that the book was in Spanish.

Anything like that ever happened to you?


What a coincidence! This actually did happen to me recently. I watched Die Pfefferkörner s19e1, a German kid's series, and some parts were completely unintelligible to me. I wondered how I had suddenly got so bad at German and whether it was a weird accent or something, and it took me a while to realize that the characters were actually meant to be speaking Vietnamese in those parts.
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