Cold reality shower

The coloured words into flags is creative!

EDIT - Wow guys! That's my most upvoted comment from being here in two years! Nearly doubled my second most-upvoted!

@SpikeylovesSatW Oh, I just noticed that!

Some people figured out that if someone doesn't understand your language you just have to repeat what you said REALLY LOUD.

@comrade_Comrade And SLOOOOOOWWWWWLLLY

'@Akamar' feels like eternity, doesn't it?

@Akamar But the people who you actually don't understand BECAUSE they speak so fast don't speak more slowly.
Another thing people like to do is repeating using the exact same words. Like it didn't cross their mind that maybe you just didn't know some of the words they used. Or that just speaking more clearly would help. Some people mumble just enough so that you can't understand everything even though you speak their language.

@comrade_Comrade
Isn't that an English thing?

'@AussiePengwin' it's universal, as far as I can tell.

@AussiePengwin And American.

To be "fair" - English is by far the dominant world language at present (depending on how you count, about 25% of the world's population either speaks it as a first or second language, or understands at least some), so it's been an easy - if extremely patronising and rude - trap to fall into.

I spent a fortnight in Sweden a few years ago. At the time I hadn't learnt any Swedish (other than maybe numbers, "please", "thank you" and a few simple tourist phrases). Two things were fascinating. Firstly, that there was a distinct generational divide between people who could speak English and people who couldn't. Secondly, that, even so, there were enough words in common that - if I just paid attention and was patient - I could mostly get by without an actual shared language. For example, my wife and I managed to have a long conversation with an elderly lady in a shop somewhere up near Dalarna about the embroidery kits she was selling, despite the fact that none of us spoke a word of the other's language.

We went on to a wedding (the reason we were there); I spent most of the time boring people rigid with all the similarities between Swedish words and Northern English/Lowland Scottish dialects...

@Doghouse
English-speaking, I mean. It's quite common here too.
But Australians just can't be hearsed to learn other languages past 'hello' and 'how much for the beer?'.

@Doghouse Interesting that you brought up the lowland Scottish thing. My first English teacher, way back in third grade, told us that the Swedish accent most commonly gets compared to the Scottish lowlands one, at least among Londoners/People living south of Yorkshire in England. Does this hold true or is that something that she cooked up? I've also heard that we sound like Americans who moved to Glasgow in time for elementary school when speaking English (ie a somewhat garbled mix of SoCal (standard Hollywood) and lowland Scottish). Mostly due to most movies/TV shows being from the US while most one-on-one interactions we get with native English speakers are from the UK. Any credibility to that claim?

@AussiePengwin At least with Germans, that is very common as well.

@comrade_Comrade It alwo help if youwave your arms in big and confusing gestures.

'@Rogers' weird facial expressions obviously increase effectiveness.

@comrade_Comrade Ah, I see you've met the English.

'@hikariuk' Russians do that too, seen just that in Finland recently.

@comrade_Comrade And repeat really often. Preferredly raising your voice a little more each time.

I love these moments where Denmark is the voice of a reason.

@MrSaukko It's so weird though. Like something is wrong.

Camelåså!

As a dane who have worked with a lot of swedes and norwegians, I have always found that everyone was able to communicate by speaking their own language (with the exception of the danish numbers), as longs as you take care to speak clearly and not too fast. Obviously it depends a lot on dialects as well, but honestly there are danish dialects I find harder to understand that swedish or norwegian. However, my experience is that younger scandinavians, meaning below 25 tends to switch to english rather than make the effort of understanding each other.

We understand Danish fairly well as long as you don't start counting :P

@Mountain_Monkey One, two, onetwo, twotwo, halften, onehalften... Do Danes say the year as thousandthousandtenfiveoneoneone?

Meanwhile, in Finland...

@ModernWhoFan Everyone knows Swedish while pretending not to.

@TheDungen And understands some Danish but are really angry about it because they only understand it due to being forced to learn Swedish.

@TheDungen Kinda like us with Mandarin, then...we all learned it compulsorily in schools, but not really happy to use it. Sometime when someone speaks it we might just keep replying in Cantonese to make them go away. >.>

@TheDungen Everyone here knows Swedish, true, but not always enough to actually communicate in it.

@TheDungen Not nearly everyone though. Not even close. I can speak some Swedish but can't understand even that much, which is totally fine since Swedish is one of the most useless languages to learn in the world. It's good if you travel in Sweden or if you work in the west-coast of Finland, but otherwise it's pretty useless. Remnants of the colonialization, and hopefully one day we can get rid of it

I believe this is because we can still read Danish but we can not understand when they speak it. In Sweden we usually joke that Danes speak Swedish but with a potato, tennis ball, fist or porridge in their mouth.

@ASlyMagpie So that's where the "Swedish with a potato in the mouth" comes from. That how we describe Danish also over here.

@Louhikaarme It probably comes from Gustav Vasa who supposedly said "spotta ut gröten innan du talar"-"spit out the porridge before you speak" to the danish king.

Roast of the century

My LAnguAgE iS BEAutIFul

For once, Denmark isn't the idiotic one.