Always wondered what Greek sounds like to non-Greek speakers?

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Misanthropist

To me, it sounds like Spanish with an intonation that resembles Italian. Speedwise, I actually think it may be faster than Spanish. The letter L is what I heard the most, don't know about everyone else.

MaCeDonIan PhaLanX

No matter what kind of problems we have with this country, I will be hounest about your question!
Greek language sounds lovely, specially when you listen to some greek song!

Lady S

I'm glad you asked that question. Well, I like the sound of Greek language. When I first heard it, my first impression was that you guys speak soooo fast... LOL :) I was asking myself: "How can they move their tongue and lips that fast?" Now I understand some Greek (not a lot) and it doesn't sound THAT fast to me anymore... LOL :) The good thing is that there are a lot of ancient Greek words that you can find in other languages as well. One more thing, I can read Greek (written in the Greek alphabet), which means that I know how the words are pronounced, even if I don't know what most of them mean. I think it would be interesting to learn Greek, especially because you have great music and I would love to understand all the songs.

A lot of foreigners complain that Greek language has a very hard grammar, but what I have seen didn't seem that hard because my native language (Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian) has even more complex grammar... LOL :)

TO GREETING_LOSERS: You're saying that Slavic languages have only 3 tenses? Come on! Well, I don't know about Russian, but Serbo-Croatian has 7 tenses (4 past, 1 present and 2 future). The nouns have 7 cases and the form changes depending on the sentence. To compare its grammar with Greek, I have to say that even the verbs in Serbo-Croatian change depending on the gender of the person who is speaking (depending if it's male or female), and I don't think that happens in Greek.

Ivan M.

Complicated :P

GREEK BARBiiEâ™¥

I posted a similar question like this in the Language section from my old account.

Here are the answers from foreigners.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AjSEtFMzvormZYxDkeYgwCkjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20071126082513AAr5zEH

ol' dirty bingo caller!

sounds nice

zoltan

Asai....ti na pou me...emastai theoi stin glossa mas.... we have one of the most if not the only language in the world that not only is emotionall expressive but is extrmeley articualted to the point and beyond..music loves our language .orators are scrambling for the best words..crowds are in awww when they hear it.and the grammar its unstopable it goes on and on..BUT i must say the sweetest form of greek is KATHAREVOUSA if you lucky enough to get a higly educated greek and speak to you in continueos katharevousa you will be god smacked .it is devine.. but its intresting this question...i know my sister cant stand the sound of italian ..i love italaian..yet i cant stand philipino..but i love spanish go figure..but i must say the funniest language i ever heard was the south african pygmie tribesman...thier language is a sound of clicks and claks.. strange but humoures..

Think with your dipstick!

Confusing, to say the least. I have often wondered the same thing about English.

Greek Cali Blonde

even tho ur q.? asks wut it sound like to NON greeks, i just answered it, b/c i love greeks! go me!!!! =)=p=p=D It's awesome!!!! i love it and i am glad i know it!!!!

(Î’Ï…Ï„Î¹ÎºÎ¹) vas vas o paraskeuas

Some friends of mine had told me that It likes spanish...
But we speak with a lot of expression, with the heart, some people think that we are fighing sometimes even we are not.. We speak fast and strong, some people think that it's rude language but we know that it's not, that it's a really sweet language. filia.

greetings_losers

A lot of S's and it's a very musical language lovely to listen. The most musical language to me was English in American accent tho, that's when I knew no English when I was a kid. I know Ancient Attican Greek though I can still rate Modern Greek since I hardly ever understand it. It sounds cool and no wonder Greeks are always talkative people. The language looks good on them. About grammar, since I'm a linguist I can say grammatically no Indo European language is strong enough compared to Ural Altaic languages. Not sure about Serbo Croation-Bosnian but I can show Russian as a reference that Slavic languages are the weakest when it comes to grammatical abilities (only 3 tenses, gerunds are not strong enough and no particular present and future modal auxiliary verb for "would")
Cutting to the chase Greek sounds really nice

Yoyo29

To me it sounds like:

Buru-buru-buru

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