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Do babies learn languages at different rates depending on how hard the language is?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Yes, to an extent, but I don't think it has to do with grammar as much as pronunciation. Norwegian (bokmål) and danish are almost indistinguishable when written down, but spoken Danish is pronounced very weirdly (a lot of swallowed and mumbled consonants that causes it to sound like the speaker has gotten drunk on their way back from getting a root canal and is currently struggling to eat a hot potato). Despite Norwegian having a massive range of regional dialects, Norwegian kids learn to speak a lot quicker than danish kids. Largely because danish kids just don't understand what they're hearing for longer. The Danes have to subtitle their own TV programmes because they don't really understand each other. It's a fucking mess. Norwegian kids understand Swedish before danish kids understand danish.
Here is a short documentary on the danish language
It sounds like what you said is a joke, but just wanted to underline that this has even been subject to scientific study, e.g. mentioned here: https://theconversation.com/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-interact-161143
This answers exactly what I was asking, thanks!
Also I remember reading a newspaper account of a danish supermarket that actually ordered 1000 litres of milk by mistake. And everyone in Norway found it hilarious, because it happened after the sketch was aired.
Apparently it's happened a couple of times
No one mention the Norwegian butter crisis!
That was rough. It happened right before Christmas too. People were scalping butter on finn.no and supermarkets had to import butter from France.
Didn't people smuggled butter from Sweden to Norway? Imaging having that on your criminal record.
Probably. I was living in Bergen at the time, so it wouldn't have been practical for me. I make British Christmas food anyway, which is a lot more heavily spiced than Norwegian Christmas food. So it works to just use baking margarine.
This has been my experience learning French. The written language and the spoken one are pretty wildly out of tune, with up to ~5 letters at the ends of some words either not pronounced at all, or heavily swallowed.
Learning the pronunciation of Castellano (i.e. a sister language) was vastly easier for me.
Maybe I have a little bias as a Spaniard, but I swear languages that lack a set of rules to correctly pronounce every word ever are mental illnesses.
I could give you any Spanish word you don't know and you wouldn't miss pronounce it.
Yeah, I don't know enough about French grammar and pronunciation rules, but I think part of the problem comes from them trying to maintain a written language that got left in the dust by the spoken language ages ago. So instead of updating the written one, they chose to 'preserve history' and add a landslide of little rules explaining separate cases, not just for pronunciation, but in a hugely systemic way. Native French-speakers have actually complained to me about that occasionally.
I love that about Castellano, just that some regions speed it up so much that I can barely catch it.
Oh, dialects not only sped it up, they skip parts of words too. Funnily enough, I'm from the region where our dialect is to over pronounce consonants, and thus the easiest to understand haha.
Like learning Norwegian (bokmål) while living on the west coast. French vocal r, secondary Norwegian language, one hour travel north or south can be regarded as a completely new language. Nice fjords, though.
In all honesty, I'd be absolutely terrified of trying to learn a Nordic language, which is absolutely NOT due to the lovely Nordic people I've met across the years.
It's a "me" problem, and case-closed, please.
Yes we make fun and talk about how bad it is, but in reality this got me curious, what is it with Nordic languages that is so off putting to you?
Well.. I mean... what later become "English" branched off from its West-Germanic roots, long ago, and never did become "High German." So theoretically, as an English-speaker, I have great familiarity with modern French, and we share the same basic sentence-structure as with modern German. Some of that is actually true. In practice, I could not be more of a complete dumbass upon those languages.
TBC, I can speak Castellano and Français like someone with heat-stroke, and I can vaguely understand Dutch and German.