Duolingo, the popular language-learning service, has recently hit more than 300 million users, across all 195 countries. This is a huge user database that can reveal a lot about what languages people around the world are learning, and this is where things get interesting.
Languages have different phonetic inventories. Some languages use more sounds than others. A perceptually distinct sound unit is technically called a phoneme. Two sounds are different if they are perceived to constitute two distinct phonemes by native speakers. The following list ranks the most common languages by the number of sounds they use. It is …
These Are The Languages That Have The Most Sounds. Read More »
Words really don’t have any logic to them. You can’t just work out the meaning of words based on the sounds that make them up. That’s because words are arbitrary. So if you don’t speak Chinese, you can’t possibly figure out the words for, say, “breakfast” or “fridge”. Different people agree to give different combinations of sounds different meanings. …
5 Words That Sound The Same In Almost Every Language. Read More »
The following facts were gathered from the input that was provided by our followers at The Language Nerds. Enjoy!
Words are fun. They are what gets us, language nerds, turned on. When you speak more than one language, you realize that words mean different things in different languages. Sometimes an innocent word in a language can sound really bad in another, and that’s where the real fun is. Below are some words that are …
Innocent Words That Sound Completely Inappropriate In Other Languages. Read More »