111–120 of 173 posts
I've only been there on holidays but it doesn't sound right to me, perhaps it's just the low quality of the sample but the phonemes seem far more 'Eastern' to me.
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Hi, great game. A little suggestion. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian languages are too similar to differentiate for non native speakers. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian . Basically, the division is more political than linguistical.
(Disclaimer: I am a native croatian speaker.) There's a significant difference between croatian and serbian language: croatian language is composed of three dialects and a standard language which are not found in serbian. It was a political movement to merge one of those dialects (shtokavian) with serbian language. So, serbian is somewhat similar to shtokavian but not to other dialects that compose the rest of the cr…
While the difference exists, calling it significant is just... untrue. For non-speakers, it is barely noticeable.
1400 but that's only because I'm interested in languages. I speak English, Swedish, German, Romanian, can read the other roman languages ( French/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish) can read and write Farsi. I have no problem differentiating between Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean. The quiz is most difficult when presenting me with choices between slavic combinations (Ukranian/Polish/Russian) and far east weirdness:…
What's so weird about those languages? All three languages you mentioned are linguistically very different and have long histories (particularly Tamil).
I wouldn't call them far east either. These languages are predominantly spoken in South and South-east Asia.
(I am from Singapore where Tamil and Malay are official languages)
Hi guys, I'm the author. Here's a related blog post I did introducing the game: http://quietlyamused.org/blog/2013/09/01/introducing-the-gre... Feedback's much appreciated, and if you encounter any bugs, please report them via email to lars+glg@yencken.org If there's a language you'd like to see that's missing, consider helping out by finding some good quality language samples or news podcasts in that language and em…
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Volume's been normalised using mp3gain. I manually screen all the snippets for English, music or other noise, and obvious giveaways. Looks like a Ukraine case slipped through -- it's in my todo list to remove. Thanks!
The Portuguese one also had a word sounding like "portuguese" in it that made it trivial for me.
1400 but that's only because I'm interested in languages. I speak English, Swedish, German, Romanian, can read the other roman languages ( French/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish) can read and write Farsi. I have no problem differentiating between Cantonese, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean. The quiz is most difficult when presenting me with choices between slavic combinations (Ukranian/Polish/Russian) and far east weirdness:…
Could you elaborate a bit on the part where you mentioned "far east weirdness: Tamil / Burmese / Malay". What's so weird about those languages? All three languages you mentioned are linguistically very different and have long histories (particularly Tamil). I wouldn't call them far east either. These languages are predominantly spoken in South and South-east Asia. (I am from Singapore where Tamil and Malay are offici…
And they ARE far east, if you're European. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Disclaimer: I am a native croatian speaker.) There's a significant difference between croatian and serbian language: croatian language is composed of three dialects and a standard language which are not found in serbian. It was a political movement to merge one of those dialects (shtokavian) with serbian language. So, serbian is somewhat similar to shtokavian but not to other dialects that compose the rest of the cr…
I, as a native Serbian speaker, have a 100% understanding of what is being said on Croatian national TV, and 100% understanding when reading websites in Croatian. While the difference exists, calling it significant is just... untrue. For non-speakers, it is barely noticeable.
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I got 550 on my first try. It's kind of fun, kind of impossible. Serbian versus Croatian versus Slavic is just a shot in the dark.
Well, distinguishing standard Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian is impossible even for native speakers, as it is in fact one language. The division being merely a political one. One can only distinguish accent subtletlies in certain words. It would improve fairness of the game and avoid a lot of confusion not to allow these languages appear in the answers together.
Also, Croatian and Serbian can only be distinguished by words. You can't recognize the intonation because it's the same. If you don't know words specific to these languages, you won't be able to tell the difference.
It would be best to have a filter that prevents them being in the same question.
I think that Czech and Slovak languages are incredibly similar to each other. often times, when reading the instructions on some product in both languages, they differ by one word here and there. I would be willing to guess that no speaker of these languages would be able to differentiate one from the other. A cool variant on this game could be "guess where this English accent is from."
("I would be willing to guess that no speaker of these languages would be able to differentiate one from the other" – I highly doubt that. Dialects/languages differ more and more the closer they are to your own; I can tell if someone grew up a 15 minute drive away from me, but if the choice is between a place that is e.g. >3 hrs north vs >4hrs north I have a really hard time placing them.)