Also, the Portuguese needed to be faster - a lot faster.
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Swedish sounds like “gibberish Italian”
As a native Italian speaker, and a struggling Swedish learner, I cannot wrap my head around the concept.
After 12 years, I get more Japanese from the anime I watch than Swedish from TV programs…
As for the impressions, I would say they are average, I have a very diverse work environment, so some first hand knowledge on how all of these languages sound like, the ones I have hears-on experience I did not comment.
The Italian is really too pushed to comedy (OK, I’m biased here).
The French is meh (but I also speak French)
The Japanese sound very different from anything I have heard.
Mandarin and Hindi sound quite strange and very different from my experience.
Spanish sounds fine, I would say.
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Same here except rather than speaking in fake Italian, I learned Italian.
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I studied Arabic, and it sounded spot on to me, complete with pharyngeal consonants. This guy’s phoneme game is strong.
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Really good ear. I’m impressed. The Japanese was like listening to a program playing faintly in another room.
I seem to recall this being a thing on Monty Python sketches (or maybe I’m thinking of John Cleese in “A Fish Called Wanda”) where they use this weird southern US amalgam accent that doesn’t sound like any actual region of the American south, as if someone put the voices of John Wayne, Slim Pickens and Foghorn Leghorn into a blender. I imagine this is a mirror image of what it sounds like to Brits when a Yank tries to speak with a British accent.
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There’s a scene in “After the Fox” where Peter Sellers (a master at mimicking foreign accents) passes himself off as a non-bilingual American, and part of a tour group visiting an Italian restaurant. He never speaks English at all – nothing even sounding like a word – but instead makes guttural noises that hint at American English. Pure genius!
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good video, but the whitte subtitles blend in with the “overexposef” video.
That really was great. I’m partial to the classics, myself.
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How could be not? He’d have to, to be able to fake them so well.
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The dude is talented but the British accent bugs me because there is no such thing as a British accent, what he’s doing there are two very specific English accents. The second of which you’re likely to hear on Made in Chelsea. I’m sure if i was from any of the other countries i’d be saying the same and complaining he’s just doing a regional accent.
Romanized Korean looks like English fed through a word scrambler.
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The portuguese part sounds like a mix of two accents: carioca (from Rio de Janeiro) and manezinho (from Florianópolis).
I was just going to bring up Sid Caesar! As a kid he developed the talent to mimic accents and languages from living in a working class neighborhood with people from many nationalities.
At work his father would take him from table to table where workers of a given background were eating lunch and he would mimic their language.
At first they’d try to understand his gibberish before they figured out what he was doing and then they’d start laughing.
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Maybe it’s because my family are military interpreters that I find his impressions incredibly off for Asian languages. And the woman’s, too.
I’m trying and failing to get over my kneejerk bigotry against French anything after being forced to learn it due to 1.) they were our colonizers. Must learn it first before my real language and 2.) My dad was a Francophile and rarely spoke anything else unless we explicitly asked him to stop or he’s working.
I deliberately forgot it as soon as I could but this guy sounds good. I think. I mean, the French I knew wasn’t “real French” anyway. Like how Mexican Spanish sounds like “real” Spanish to me compared to European Spanish when it should be the other way around.
He opens his mouth too much for Japanese. The tongue shouldn’t be seen that prominently and his mouth doesn’t need to be that exaggerated to create the correct sounds. It looks like he learned Japanese (or how to make Japanese sounds) from anime and ONLY anime.
The Vietnamese is too much hard dips, there’s more nuance there that he doesn’t have. Yet. He’s getting there though. Probably not what he’s going for but his fakes hilariously sounds an awful lot like Viet-Khmer. The ones living further into Cambodia along the Tonle Sap lake and river region. AKA the accent used for our equivalent of “rednecks/country” in dubbing.
The “East Asian” fake language should really be called a wretched attempt at Chinese sounds. Maybe she assumes that people who don’t recognize Chinese will also not recognize the nearly zero attempt at faking the tonal differences. (Chinese dialects are infamous for being tonal. Vietnamese and Thai are also very tonal. They both obviously know the languages well enough to imitate the sounds but is either too lazy to incorporate the tones or deliberately being as obtuse as possible) It sounds much more Central or West Asian, nothing like any of the ones I’m familiar with such as Hokkien, Mandarin and Cantonese.
Then again, I’m told my English, when speaking, is way too “formal”, “technical” & does not have a “natural” flow. I don’t use much slang or idioms and that immediately alerts native speakers, despite my flawlessly bland Midwest accent, that it’s not my 1st or even 2nd language. I just don’t know if I’m even using the idioms in the correct context so I don’t even try in the first place. So much easier when typing.
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Never understood why they had him speaking with a southern accent when he could’ve done perfectly nice British accent
Because his Joe Bang character was memorable?
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Thank you for this post, I am Italian and did not know this (cough).
I might point out another quality in Italian and similar-sounding languages (including Japanese, strangely enough): the very frequent use of simply constructed syllables, consonant+vowel, consonant+vowel and so on. This probably eases listening, and helps to differentiate sounds. Of course actual comprehension is another matter entirely, alas.
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I’ve not seen Knives Out but someone mentioned that Daniel Craig’s American accent was awful and I was surprised because I totally bought in to his accent in Logan Lucky in a way I don’t often do when a Brit is doing an American accent (eg. Matthew Macfadyen in Succession).
I’d be interested to know what Americans made of Craig in Logan Lucky?
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