One hundred words in different languages

Over the past few weeks I’ve travelled to China, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, listening intently and always surprised by the way language doesn’t always sound the way you think it will.

Estonian sounded more how I imagined Finnish would sound, but the Finnish deliver their language in a kind of way that makes it seem as if they are pulling the words back in, rather than letting them out. Sweden being right next to Finland I thought might sound similar but no! being a tonal language it was much more like Mandarin Chinese! Or is that just because I’m frantically learning Mandarin as part of ‘One Hundred Words’? I can write almost 100 charactors. Not that I could compose anything sensible by putting them together, but individually they look great.