On the subject of accents, in case you missed her viral video the first-time around, the absolutely astounding Saara from Finland.
"What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners" https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw
"What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners" https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw
French and Spanish: I've heard them around but never spoken them. She sounded perfect.
Swedish: I used to be able to speak it but have forgotten. She sounded even more convincing than in French.
Japanese: I speak it now but not natively. She sounded pretty rough and not all that Japanese to me.
English: My native language. My brain tried so hard to make sense of it and pulled out snippets of words but there was no grammar there.
It still sounds a little bit Italian...
Funny thing: at the end she said "a huevo cabron" which is a Mexican expression but she was using a different accent.
In her next video, she completely nailed the (female version of the) Australian English. Really had to laugh out loud at how she captured that essence. Genius.
Edit: It's certainly not the only one, all Australian females don't sound like this; it's just that she got this particular version of the Australian ones so right. I'm actually somewhat confused as to how to place it; back home you'd have the geographical regions and that's it. So I wonder if this Australian one is more of a "sociolect". If anyone has any info / pointers I'd love to learn more.
Similar maybe to the "valley girl" American accent. Once perhaps a California only thing, now something you hear from teenage girls/women in their 20s all around the US (probably due to Hollywood, in part).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_in_Australian_Englis... #Sociocultural_variation
English: (my second, dominant language) See above.
And for languages with which I only have a passing familiarity...
Swedish, Estonian, French: Pretty convincing.
Portuguese: A bit off the mark. Sounded almost like Italian.
Japanese: Only sort-of convincing.
Spanish (Castilian): Her stress placement seemed a little off but most of the vowels were good. Sort of an Americanized version.
That was the point.
For fun I tried to transcribe it.
----
Asså de e ju man svarta man handlar jua
Filen man råd ostaglig kämpare
Me de sju mat trämpar me alla pluva som fan
Dessa fjortare plådar oss mot en botande mas hemma
---
In a somewhat related sort of humour, as a Swedish-speaker you might enjoy this piece of gibberish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5DCnSlWOc8
(It's the genuine Soviet anthem in Russian, with Swedish subtitles that will sound similar when you sing them out, and the hallucinatory Swedish sentences are then demonstrated in video. I just love it, though I don't know the guy who did this.)
And yeah I know it is gibberish. But she used so many real words I wanted to write the sentences down as well as I could.
The video I've seen before loads of times, and yeah it's pretty funny how it works out.
As an English speaker with a bit of German, that's how Dutch sounds to me: it sounds like English, only wrong somehow. I feel that if I just focused a bit harder, or they'd enunciate more clearly, I'd understand it.
Hooray for languages!
The Humble Brothers produced most of the Simlish tracks in the mid 00s and have an album of their impressive songs available on iTunes. "Upside" is a fine example.[1]
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/simlish-singing-the-music-behind-t...
She just crammed the Semitic sounds in a few made up words sparkled by some real Arabic words and that's it but she should have been making more effort in imitating the rhythm and intonation (prosody) [1] to fool the native Arabic speaker ears that what she speaks was actually Arabic.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29
...and note that she's genuinely fluent in only 3 of those!