How surprised are the native speakers of your country’s language when a foreigner fluently speaks it?

25 comments

1. It depends.

   Someone from UK or US: Positively surprised.

   From the Netherlands: you have been here 6 months and cat speak Norwegian?

2. People would be quite surprised, even if someone Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese or Inuit spoke it fluently. Danish is one hell of a language to learn, it’s like German but harder due to our ending rules and countless silent letters. This is also why Swedes and Norwegians struggle to understand us.

3. When people from Germany / Austria / Switzerland realize I speak German they are surprised and happy I speak their language, especially when it is in friendly settings (I don’t mean speaking with random person on the street).

   I am working as technical support for German-speaking countries and it happened me that people offered to switch to English to make conversation easier for me which I refused as I want to practice my German.

4. If we’re talking about Irish – I’m surprised when an Irish person can speak it let alone a foreigner. I can’t even speak it myself but would like to learn.

5. Denmark: indifferent and we will likely just ask you to switch to English instead. No foreigners speaks Danish fluently and we don’t expect them to either.

6. About Czech – people very appreciate if you speak Czech even if with many mistakes.

   Actually speaking language is crucial to be accepted as local if you move here permanently.

7. Very surprised. Latvian language with all its nuances are quite hard to pick up. And there are many cases where even if everything is correct – native speaker would not say things like that or would consider something to be an error as things are implied.

8. I think if you can hear the accent I’m personally surprised, but if there’s no accent I think the person grew up and went to school here, no big deal, especially in a place like Helsinki. Edit: Unless of course someone tells me they moved here as an adult and have no accent, then I’m really impressed!

   My partner is Estonian, fluent and has a bit of an accent but a lot of Finns don’t notice it and assume he’s Finnish. Some Estonians do have an accent, but I think the languages are close enough that the accent can fade with time and just sounds like Finnish spoken in a different key/tone.

9. Pretty surprised here in the Netherlands, unless they are from a Dutch or Afrikaans speaking country.

10. > **UK**: completely unsurprised even in foreign countries

    TBF I’d be pretty surprised to find Welsh, Scottish Gaelic or British Sign Language spoken outside the UK.

11. Portuguese fluently with a native accent would be surprising for sure. Slavic people are usually the ones that can replicate the portuguese phonology. However since there are quite a lot of foreigners, in Portugal, that can speak portuguese in a fairly good way I don’t think it’s that special. But nonetheless it’s usually appreciated.

12. It’s basically impossible to speak Hungarian fluently **without an accent** if you’re not a native speaker.

    I’ve heard and met quite a few people speaking Hungarian as a foreign lamguage at a very high level, but all of them had accents.

13. Not surprised at all

14. I wanted to answer and then I saw you already did that in your post 😔

15. OP I’m french, and I’ve never seen in my entire life someone react this way to a foreigner speaking or learning french

16. It depends. Tourists/visitors, I would very surprised since Dutch is insignificant on the global stage. People who move here and live here; its exected they speak Dutch

17. If the foreigner isn’t Finnish, extremely. My husband is from Poland, he started learning at the beginning of our relationship, in his mid-twenties in 1998 and people genuinely told him not to bother, Estonian is useless, don’t waste your time. He’s completely fluent now, but you can easily tell that he’s not a native speaker. I like the way he sounds, it’s wonderful. But our language is really just too difficult. He’s not exactly happy to be mistaken for a Russian. But people are astonished that he started learning as an adult only because of a relationship.

    I’ve learnt Polish. You can also very easily tell that I’m not a native speaker. But when I started studying, Polish reaction was much more positive. People didn’t react in the “you’re insane, don’t do it” type of way like Estonians, Poles were excited to help, share fun phrases, talk to me about the language, recommend books and movies. So I have to admit, Poles are really more helpful to the language learners than we are. Perhaps Poles see it as an incredible thing, while Estonians feel like it’s an outright sorcery to learn our language and we don’t know how to deal with it.

18. French here : it would probably depend on the situation.
    – They are living in France for a while and have integrated : not surprising and expected to know french.
    – they are visiting for vacation : surprised and happy about it if they are very fluent ! Otherwise encouraging to b1-b2 learners (unless they are a server in a very touristic area). Usually angry/salty at people who are just saying “hon-hon baguette”, or if they have a strong english accent.
    – if the french is visiting another country : very surprised and very happy if meeting a foreigner that speaks french fluently ! However if the french are abroad and encounter another french person, they will usually avoid each other.

19. I’d be really shocked if I heard a non-Finn speak Finnish perfectly even with an accent. More so if without. And also question why if they’re not in Finland.

20. Very pleasantly surprised, Greek is not an easy language to learn and very different from any other.

21. Malta: It’s understandly very rare to meet someone who speaks or Understands Maltese, unless they’re North Africans, who then tend to Understand quite a lot and speak quite a bit too 🙂

22. in Italy we are always pleased when someone takes the time to learn some of our underrated language. A bit of foreign accent is preferred, though.

23. I would be quite surprised to be fair. Unless they were from Patagonia

24. Easy to pick up? “Un servesa per favohr” maybe. I’ve never seen someone who wasn’t raised here use all verb tenses correctly.

25. Spain: we aren’t surprised because it’s the second or third most spoken language, not because it’s easy to pick up. There are just a lot of speakers.