What makes languages ugly or beautiful

Language Learning Chinese
21

Well sure, my opinion of Taiwanese is affected by living here. So I slightly don’t like it. But when I first arrived in fact up until only recently I had no opinion of it, I liked the sound of it.

Which is more than I can say for my first impressions of mandarin. When I lived in China (before Taiwan) I had no interest in learning Chinese. It just sounded rough and had zero appeal compared to something like Italian or Japanese… although better than Cantonese. (which I now quite like the sound of)

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22

It’s dependent on the speaker and largely subjective.

23

Same principle behind why a woman is ugly or beautiful.

24

Presentation can matter there as well, but I think it has more of an effect on the impression created by language.

25

I’ve seen it written as 嘿啊 once by a girl I met. Fun way to learn a bit of taiyu. She was awful for making conversation with tho :sweat_smile:

26

That’s a phonetic transcription using the Mandarin pronunciation of Hanji, but yeah, at the current state of Taigi dying out, 嘿啊 is more common.

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27

The most common description of Mandarin is “vinegar and piss.”

For Vietnamese, it’s a “duck in distress.”

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28

The best thing about Tai yu are those medicine adverts on tv. They all look they were filmed 30 yrs ago and the sound is always super loud, basically a bunch of shouting. I love those.

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29

Books from the 19th C usually referred to German as a musical, romantic language. Somehow it became guttural and abrasive in the 20th. Can’t figure that out,

30

Easy