I have gotten behind on watching the latest videos made by Paul of the Langfocus YouTube channel!

To start to remedy this, I have watched the “How Different Are Standard German and Bavarian???" video.

Paul tells us about the Bavarian language, including the regions where it is spoken. He also talks about how the speakers often mix it with varying degrees of Standard German, for example depending on who they’re talking to. He also explains how Bavarian can be broken down further into different varieties.

He moves on to telling us about the pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical differences between Bavarian and Standard German. He does this by showing some examples.

Parts of this video left me confused because I don’t know much about linguistics or these languages, but I did learn a lot about the Bavarian language that I didn’t know before I watched this video.

Thanks for the video, Paul!

• Karl

I have watched an informative video entitled “Why Is English Spelling So Damn Weird?!" by Paul of the Langfocus YouTube channel:

In this video, Paul talks about why English spelling can be so unpredictable and weird at times. He gives some examples which include things like silent letters and character combinations that correspond to numerous different sounds.

He explains how English derives from numerous other languages, like various Germanic languages, French, Latin, Greek, and others. He tells how over time, and because of English’s origins, situations may have arisen that resulted in the unexpected spelling we see today. He also talks about the Great Vowel Shift, as well as hypercorrection by adding letters to words when they aren’t necessary.

While some other linguistics and language videos sometimes leave me confused, I found this video easier to follow and it made sense to me. It really makes it clear just how many other languages and factors have influenced the development of the English language over the centuries.

Thanks for the video, Paul!

• Karl

Today I watched the video “Norwegian! A North Germanic Language of Norway” from the Langfocus YouTube channel:

In this video, Paul gives us an overview of the Norwegian language. I found it to be informative because I didn’t know a lot about the Norwegian language before watching this video.

Paul explains the origin of the language, and how it has two standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk. He also gives us a brief explanation about the language’s grammar.

I don’t think I understood the grammar part very well, probably because I’m not a linguist. But I think the first part of the video was easy to understand, and I learned a lot from it. Overall, I think it was an interesting video.

Thanks, Paul from Langfocus!

• Karl