What does Afrikaans sound like?

Monday, February 09, 2009

For some reason sometimes the hardest part when first becoming acquainted with a language is just finding a good sample of the language being spoken, with no frills, no stupid humour, just a good sample of the language being used as you would hear it if you lived in the country it's used in. I had a similar problem a while back in trying to find a sample weather forecast (request from a friend of mine) in English, and the first five pages of the search results on YouTube were things like "weatherman gets hit by falling rafter", "cat walks on stage during weather forecast", "weatherman gets chewed out by anchor" but just finding a single weather forecast with no frills took forever. The first search result on YouTube is this video, admittedly hilarious but still no good for someone that just wants to hear some Danish.

So in that light, here's a video of an interview in Afrikaans with a CEO of a company called www.booksaonline.com (a site about booking accomodation online in South Africa apparently) with absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Here's what Afrikaans sounds like.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Goeien Avond!
Ek vrees dat iets met jou blog skort!
Ek kan die video nie kry nie!
Kan jy dit regmaak, asseblief?

Dankie

Olivier van Lotharingen

Me said...

Ek dink dat die problem is met jou computer. Er...die video het nie problem nie vir my.

How's my Afrikaans?

Anonymous said...

Thanks Dave!

That's really strange, because nothing appears (except a blank space)on the page (and my computer is only six months old!)
I'm not a big specialist of Afrikaans, but remember that in subordinates, the verbs must go at the end (In another post, you speak about the difficulty of German but, in fact, Afrikaans shares the difficulty of syntax with German!)
I suppose that the second "nie" must go at the end of the sentence, and that the first "nie" should be replaced by "geen".

Olivier van Lotharingen

Anonymous said...

It sounds like Dutch with a twang.

Anonymous said...

It sounds like Dutch with an Aussie accent.

Anonymous said...

It sounds like Dutch with an Aussie accent.

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