COOL (NATURAL) LANGUAGES I LIKE

February 21, 2025 - Published

- last edited February 22, 2025

I talk a lot about conlangs, but what about natlangs? I don't get the chance to talk about them often (there's already so many places to hear about natlangs), so here's a random unstructured article where I get to talk about some of the natlangs I like.

While I was always interested in learning a few languages, my journey with conlangs had a big part in reigniting that interest. It helped me understand on a better level how languages fit together and how to study them, and my interest in identifying conlang features extended to learning about unique natlang features.

While I often talk about conlangs over natlangs, I consider the interests of mine to be tied together very closely, and many of the things I like in conlangs carry over to natlangs. Obviously, if a language isn't here, it's not that I dislike it, I just have a few languages I really like and particularly want to highlight. All languages are cool and awesome! I just prefer the ones that are more regular and have sounds that I can pronounce.

Anyway, enough preface, let's start!

-- JAPANESE --

As far as I know, Japanese was the first language I self-studied without the pressure of something like school or peer pressure. I know because I still have my notes from the time (which was from before I even knew what a conlang was), and even though there's no reason listed on why I studied Japanese, it's pretty easy to guess why!

A lot of the media I interacted with (games, anime, etc.) all came from Japan. The Pokemon anime, Digimon anime, PlayStation games, Nintendo games, etc. were all big parts of my childhood, and as I grew it only began to take up more of my life.

It's definitely biased from anime and not a particularly unique take, but I do consider Japanese to sound very cool and satisfying to listen to. The phonology is very easy to approximate for English speakers, and even though there's technically like 4 writing systems (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji), you can learn the 3 latter ones within a few weeks, if you're dedicated enough.

The grammar is difficult mainly because it's unfamiliar to English speakers, but it's actually rather simple and consistent once you get a handle on it. The honorifics can also be rather complex, but anime helped me grasp a lot of the basics early on (even if it obviously doesn't track 1:1 with real life).

Generally the most difficult part is the kanji, and it can be a bit of a pain. Learning Chinese (the source of the symbols) did help me gain a greater appreciation for them, since there's actually a lot of really cool logic built into them.

For one, the symbols carry over between a lot of Chinese languages, and some of these symbols have the exact same meaning in Japanese, creating a fascinating case of cross-linguistic writing. If I wrote "oiseau" then most English speakers wouldn't know it (even though French is closely related to English), but write "人" and both Chinese and Japanese speakers would know exactly what it means, even though they're pronounced completely different and are completely different languages. I think that's cool!

There's also the basic radicals that help build meaning, and the Chinese system of including radicals that hint at pronunciation, though the latter doesn't help as much with Japanese. Memorizing kanji is still hard, but definitely not the "memorize 2,000 random unrelated symbols" nonsense people tend to throw around.

My knowledge of Japanese is still something I very much like flexing a little bit, but it's one of those languages that you have to stay rather committed to to learn, so I haven't actively studied it for a bit. However, it's a language I have a deep fondness for and is still the one I have the strongest interest in committing to for fluency.

-- ITALIAN --

I started learning Italian much later, and most likely because it's the language Esperanto was compared to the most. I wasn't disappointed!

Its spelling is very consistent and the words are easy to pronounce, with a flow that's fun and intuitive. The words and sounds are similar to Spanish, a language I had learned in school, while still staying very distinct and equally (or possibly even more) romantic. I'm not the type to learn a language based on how romantic it is, but it still has that same type of "satisfying" that Japanese does, in a way I can't really describe.

I have less to say about Italian and the rest of the languages because I haven't studied them for nearly as long as Japanese, but out of all the Romance languages, Italian is the one that makes me the happiest for some reason, though I unfortunately don't know any Italian speakers to bounce off of. Still, it's very neat to have things from French and Spanish carry over very easily, and I enjoyed my time in Italy very much.

-- NORWEGIAN --

I poked at a number of the North Germanic languages, and found Norwegian to be my favorite! I most likely looked into the languages because I heard they were some of the easiest languages for English speakers the learn, and was too curious not to check them out.

Norwegian has a really nice and cheery vibe to it that felt more familiar to me than Swedish and Danish, to the point that I think it very much feels like English in a slightly different alternate timeline. I haven't done a proper deep-dive into the grammar yet, but minus the weird definite article thing, it's kind of really cool how many sentences can be translated nearly word for word between the languages.

It's also cool interacting with a language that has so many cognates -- you find them in Spanish and French, but I find they tend to not be super common unless you really look into them. Meanwhile, I put in "I like to drink milk" into Google Translate and it's just "Jeg liker å drikke melk" and I love it.

-- POLISH --

Polish is a really funny case because I was vaguely interested in it from Esperanto (Polish had a notable influence on the language), but only really started looking into it due to a meme -- an edited Wings of Fire panel making a pun about polishing scales.

I realized I never heard it before, so I searched up how it sounded and was like "wait, this language sounds really nice." It's not a language that people hear about very often (other than maybe Grzegorz memes), so exploring a language that I had next to no knowledge about was very fun. I also wanted to gain familiarity with a Slavic language, and Polish helped decrease the intimidation factor by using the Latin alphabet -- after Japanese, I was not interested in learning another writing system!

However, it turned out that another reason Polish seemed less intimidating was because it actually had a sizable influence from Romance languages, which was probably a part of the reason it sounded so appealing to me (some studies have shown that language appeal tend to be based moreso on recognizability!). Also, "bread" is "chleb."

Though, anyone who knows Polish might find these factors to be a bit ironic. That's because Polish is infamously difficult! Maybe a little exaggerated by some people, but the conjugations and cases are still a little bit unholy. Words can inflect for 7 different cases, 3 different genders, singular/plural distinctions, and sometimes whether or not something is animate or inanimate.

If I ever commit more time to Polish, I'll most likely just be focusing on the basics, because it has some surprisingly neat features, like a consistent sound-spelling relationship and lack of articles. It's a real nice and relatively niche language where Poles seem to appreciate anyone who learns it, but I have the same issue with Italian where I don't know anyone that speaks Polish either, unfortunately.

-- AMERICAN SIGN --

I was looking through languages I've studied, and despite knowing relatively little of it, I do feel the need to include a sign language here because sign languages are awesome!

I ramble about languages a lot with friends, who have the kindness to listen despite not being as interested in them as me. However, whenever I mentioned ASL, I could basically hear them all light up with interest. It's something that's very impractical for my online life, but feels like a very interesting and accessible skill to learn.

Yes, sign languages are a lot more complicated at a higher level from what I heard, but I think most people can agree that it's very simple from a starting point. Easy to learn, hard to master, and capable of expressing a lot!

Unlike what some people assume, sign languages are their own languages -- note how it's called "American Sign Language" and not "English Sign Language." Despite being regional and roughly tied to specific cultures, they're just as unique and complex as spoken languages with their own grammar and vocabulary, and are similarly as unintelligible with each other.

-- CONCLUSION --

So yeah, those are the natlangs I find the coolest at the moment! I may add to this list sometime, but learning even one of these could already be a lifelong project...