What languages sound pretty to you? And what ones sound awful?

I have always found the Romance languages, cliché as it is, to be exceptionally attractive. (Hence my having studied a bunch of them.) There's that nice staccato consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel quality of Spanish or Italian, or the softer, fuzzier sound of French or Portuguese or Catalan or Romanian, but they all have something really appealing about them for me.

I've never even begun to study any of the Indic languages but when I've heard things like Sanskrit mantras, I find them really appealing, and I like the sound of Sanskrit's descendants -- Hindi et al. All those "sh" and "r" sounds just really work well together. "Samsara" and "Kshatriya" and "Dharma" and words like that just appeal to me.

I also find Russian oddly appealing, in a totally different way than other languages, due to its weird combinations of consonants. It may just be that I find Slavic men to be attractive, but there's something sort of sexy about those mouthfuls of sounds that Russian and Polish speakers make.

I find Mandarin Chinese pretty nice, too, but other, fairly similar languages are totally unappealing. Vietnamese and Thai (not related to Chinese, but similar in many ways) sound awful to me. I also just don't like the sound of German very much. And there's nothing appealing to me about, say, Arabic. I'm sure a lot of this is based on preexisting cultural concepts, though. It's not like it's a sheer coincidence that Americans tend to find Italian sounds nicer than Arabic.

What languages sound good or bad to my fellow Mellos?

I like German, Russian, and Irish. The German is probably because of childhood memories or something. Russian is like fire in the ear: dangerous, but you want to play with it. And I think there's just something magical about Irish - the pop-rocks of languages.

Languages that 'don't do it for me' personally are English, Spanish, Italian, Scandinavian languages, and the really nasal Asian ones.

Well, like you, I do find that the Romance languages do sound more appealing than many other language groups.

In particular German and the Germanic tongues all sound incredibly harsh and angry to me, even when used to pass on sweet nothings.

Russian, and Polish to a lesser extent, is something I find both attractive an vaguely unsettling. I'm going to blame that on Crime and Punishment.

Chinese and Japanese both sound interesting to me, but they don't either really trigger a *cool* or *eww* reaction from me.

I don't know much about the languages per se but the local place names that are from the Algonquin tribes that used to live in this area have a really pleasing, sibilant quality: Assabet, Neponset, Naragansett, Cochituate, etc.

I wouldn't say any language sounds awful to me, but I have always thought Icelandic sounded pretty rough. Not enough vowels. I love Björk, but even she doesn't make this sound good to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W693qCF_oI. I'll agree that German is not particularly appealing.

I've never been crazy about the romance languages the way some people are. They sound pleasant enough, but meh. I guess Italian is nice.

I love Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, especially when the speaker is a woman. And I find Lingala very pleasing to listen to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZoVSdOh1w8

(The links are to songs, and yes, that's a bit different than listening to the language spoken.)

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I love the sound of Italian and wish I had learned more than a handful of words. Spanish is a close second though it varies by dialect. Italian just flows so well and both the cleaner Northern Italian and the Southern Italian of my own grandfathers sound equally musical.

I have no love for German, Hebrew or Russian, they all sound harsh and terrible to my ears.

I hear quite a bit of Chinese (Cantonese?) around here. Unfortunately, I find it loud, harsh, and unpleasant.

Russian and Eastern European languages (i.e. Czech) flow nicely, and I really like Japanese.

Latin can be very beautiful, as can the Romance languages.

German sounds like grouchy English to me. And the Celtic languages (Irish Gaelic and Welsh) just sound garbled, like a record played backwards.