@Lucas88 is lucky since he is so passionate about Spanish language speaking countries, and I'm not unlucky either since a lot of African or Caribbean countries are fluent in English as a primary language even though they have many older languages, but if you're headed for East or South East Asia, most of those countries have their own distinct language, and few of them are mutually intelligible.
This makes them fascinating and they're a pleasure to study, but my theoretic plans to eventually sail around there mean I'll have a lot of basics to brush up on in more than one language for sure.
Which are your favorites?
These samples box the perception in to whoever was chosen to speak in these tiny clips, but subjective impressions, just for fun:
I like Tamil from Sri Lanka. (I had a long post awhile ago about the charms of a curvy Sri Lankan girl in another thread, but that was an Americanized girl and I never heard their interesting language before this.)
Hindi sounded pretty appealing from this short clip...
Mongolian sounds OK but shares those obvious horse barbarian roots that made Mandarin the unfortunate ghastly Frankenstein-like creature it is...
Korean is interesting! Like with Vietnamese, I met a number of people from there and liked them, but never heard their native language until later. Interesting (subjectively) how it has some similarities with Japanese, but still very different...
The Japanese guy here sounds strangely docile and like an android, though as I've said elsewhere, I love Japanese.
I also think it's the ultimate sexual dimorphism language, possibly second to Lucas88's Spanish: It has the potential to be totally masculine when the men speak it at their best, but also totally feminine when the women speak it.
Mandarin as usual is just like being tortured to be forced to hear it even if hot chicks are speaking that utterly awful nasal locust language... But like I said before, I honestly really don't dislike anyone who was cursed with the unfortunate fate of having to speak that god-awful un-Chinese mongol horse barbarian language at all, and good luck to Emperor Xi in smashing the Anal Empire and ZOG Bankers!
Maybe if they achieve a crushing victory against the ZOG bankers and become the saviors of us all, then later they can get back in touch with their real Chinese roots and come to the realization they should be speaking Cantonese, but anyway: Shanghai, well there's stunningly beautiful girls from there, and it's one of the most amazing places in the world, but yeah, it's about as bad as Mandarin...
Taiwanese is the one where they delude themselves into thinking it's not as bad as the other forms of Mandarin, but it's still at least 90% as bad. @Winston what do you think about that, by the way? I actually think Taiwanese people and Mainlanders are wonderful people, unlike you who get denounced widely by them for your outspoken views, yet the language... well, all I can say is I did enjoy hearing ultra-girly Taiwanese chicks speak it while giggling and balling their fists in the air, but it still sounds a bit too much like Mandarin for comfort...
Teochew sounds like the mixed offspring of Mandarin and something vaguely more Chinese and more palatable, but still sounds too much like Mandarin to deny it's still a form of auditory torture.
Hakka isn't quite as bad. A lot of people who speak that claim it's closer to the old Chinese, but my guess is they're full of it and Cantonese is the one that actually really is closest to that...
Cantonese sounds like pure gold, there's just no language like it, it's the best! This has to be the actual language closes to the classical/middle Chinese, since the Tang poetry and other old poetry rhymes so beautifully in Cantonese, but sounds totally out of whack in these other Chinese languages.....
Thai is cool!
Khmer (Cambodian) has a slightly iffy example chosen here but I still think it's pretty cool. I'll get more clips later.
Laos has a really cool interesting language that has an interesting softer edge to it. I love it!
Vietnamese is an awesome language, I'm very into it and am even thinking about learning it since it is such an appealing country. I wouldn't regret it even if I never travelled there. It's also way easier to learn vs many other languages depending on either traditional characters (漢字) or unique scripts, since they just use that handful of diacritics on top of the so-called Latin script.
Filipino (tagalog) I like, but don't think this particular vid had the nicest examples, so I'll try another later...
Malay/Indonesian sounds cool, but that's a totally new one on me. They throw in a lot of English "loan words" in that sample, like "Kongish" (Hong Kong Cantonese loaded with English loan words).
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