It’s interesting how speakers of different languages have different perceptions about what is a difficult and inconceivable language. This is primarily shown in how they describe something they find difficult to understand. While English speakers use the phrase “it’s all Greek to me” to mean that they can’t understand something, speakers of other languages use the same analogy but they reference other languages, not necessarily Greek. So, we’ve asked our followers at The Language Nerds about the equivalent of “it’s all Greek to me” in their languages and they were generous enough to provide highly valuable responses that we summed up here for you. Have a good read ?
1. Cantonese (Hong Kong)
It’s all chicken’s intestines to me.
2. Mandarin
It’s all Martian to me.
3. Portuguese
It’s all Chinese to me.
It’s all Greek to me.
4. Bulgarian
It’s Greek and therefore unreadable.
5. German
It sounds like Spanish to me.
I only understand train station.
6. Greek
It’s all Chinese to me.
7. Moroccan Arabic
It’s the language of the ghosts to me.
8. Italian
It’s all Arabic to me.
9. French
It’s all Chinese to me.
10. Czech
It’s a Spanish village to me.
11. Polish
It’s Chinese to me.
It’s all black magic to me.
12. Danish
It’s Volapyk to me. (Volapyk is the first auxiliary language ever created).
It’s all Russian to me.
13. Egyptian Arabic:
Is this the hieroglyphics?
14. Turkish
It’s all French to me.
15. Finnish
It’s all Hebrew to me.
16. Swedish
It sounds like Greek to me.
17. Croatian
It’s like you’re speaking Hungarian.
It’s all Turkish villages to me.
18. Burmese
It looks like fried bean sprouts.
19. Syrian Arabic
This is Sanskrit to me.
20. Thai
It’s an alien language to me.
21. Catalan
It sounds like Chinese.
22. Icelandic
This is Hebrew to me .
23. Japanese
This is Gibberish to me.
24. Latvian
It’s the Chinese alphabet.
25. Persian
I don’t understand Greek.
26. Macedonian
That’s a Spanish village to me.
27. Punjabi
Am I speaking Farsi?
28. Yiddish
It’s Aramaic to me.
Here is an illustration that sums up the above:
German also: It looks like Bohemian villages.
In Polish also:”I’m sitting as at the Turkish mass” meaning “I don’t understand a word”
German also also: Am I speaking Chinese? (But only in this very context)
When I was studying French in college during the 60s, we had a reading excerpt that contained the assertion: “C’est a moi, l’hebreu!” It’s all Hebrew to me! I see that the Finns and Icelanders feel the same way. My guess is that nearly all these expressions are making reference to the use of alphabets other than the Roman one to express people’s confusion. I did notice Hungarian was also in the list. This language uses Roman letters, but also employs several diacritics and has some very long “agglutinative” word/expressions. As for the difficulty a non-speaker may have with understanding a spoken language, that always stems from how different the foreign language is from his own. Thanks for posting all these expressions. It made for some amusing reading.
“Greek” for Bulgarian is simply wrong. We use “Chinese”.