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[Twiggie]

Yeah I too much prefer German to French. I can't stand the sound of french....

[Skyrunner]

Mandarin really does sound like "shi shi shur shi shao shi" to me With varying tones, of course. Up and down and round and round...

French, all those nasal sounds D: ãẽõ...

[DJ]

German is the best sounding language, hands down.

[RedKing]

Yeah, I don't really know how to characterize Korean. Especially when I know just enough to recognize that Korean and Mandarin have sort of a "distant cousin" relationship, like Dutch and German. If I listen hard (and have subtitles), I can recognize a fair bit of it as really-badly pronounced Mandarin 

Examples:

dog (M. gao / K. gae)
king (M. (guo)wang / K. gukwang)
mountain (M. shan / K. san)
evolution (M. jinhua / K. jinhwa)
horse (M. ma / K. mal)
Korea (M. Hanguo / K. Hanguk)
thousand (M. qian / K. cheon)

Hmm....now I'm wondering if I should try to learn Korean. It's got a lot of the same vocabulary as Mandarin, without all the tones.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Honestly? I like Russian. I don't know why. I can't understand any of it, but it sounds cool.

[Skyrunner]

Korean is not really a cousin of Chinese: it's a different family. Korean is more related to Japanese than it is to Chinese. It's grammar and honorifics are almost exactly the same.

Also, the words for river, lake and sea are all mixed up in Korean and Chinese.

Ho, Hae, and Ha, they were.

Korean = Alataic, Chinese = ...something else

[RedKing]

Honestly? I like Russian. I don't know why. I can't understand any of it, but it sounds cool.

I think it's the high number of fricatives (zh, v, sh, etc.). Still the only language I know of where "shch" is a single consonant.
Plus, decades of pop culture equating Russian-speakers with bad guys, which makes them inherently more interesting. 

But it's a BITCH to learn beyond just basic grammar and vocab. The declensions and verb conjugations are on par with Latin in terms of difficulty. I still have nightmares of the verb tables in my high school Russian textbook. I was pretty good at basic Russian for a while, till it got seriously rusty.

Korean is not really a cousin of Chinese: it's a different family. Korean is more related to Japanese than it is to Chinese. It's grammar and honorifics are almost exactly the same.

Also, the words for river, lake and sea are all mixed up in Korean and Chinese.

Ho, Hae, and Ha, they were.

Korean = Alataic, Chinese = ...something else

Sino-Tibetan. But what happened is that centuries (millenia really) of close cultural contact and using the Chinese writing system meant a ton of loanwords, to the point where even if the grammar is still distinctly Korean, the vocabulary is heavily influenced by Chinese. (Sea in Mandarin is hai, river is ho, lake is hu). So perhaps Dutch and German wasn't the best example. Maybe English and German?

Although English is even more mixed up because it has a mixture of Germanic and Romance grammar (SVO word order like Romance languages, adjectives before nouns like Germanic) AND a mixture of Germanic, Latinate and classical Greek vocabulary.

[DJ]

a "distant cousin" relationship, like Dutch and German.

Distant? Dutch is basically German with a speech impediment.

[Ancre]

Hey, french sounds cool ! I especially like the french spoken in quebec and the french accent of the maghreb folks. France's french sounds mundane, but that's probably because I lived in it all my life.

Arabic sounds really awesome though. It's really too bad that it's a nightmare to actually pronounce.

[Seriyu]

On the asian languages discussion, isn't japanese fairly closely related to chinese as well? It seems like china basically made the base for most of the asian languages. Maybe that's why they start with writing in Civ.

[Il Palazzo]

On the asian languages discussion, isn't japanese fairly closely related to chinese as well? It seems like china basically made the base for most of the asian languages. Maybe that's why they start with writing in Civ.

Well, the Japanese definitely appropriated the Chinese writing system, modifying it to suit their needs(i.e.the addition of the two kanas). The languages are very much distinct in everything but the writing.

Regarding the "best sounding language" shout out - there's too little love for Welsh.
It sounds like elven poetry declaimed by a drunk bulldog. I bloody love it to bits despite not knowing the first thing about it.

[Seriyu]

Yeah, I seem to recall japanese took chinese, and used it for kanji or something of the sort, maybe I'm misremembering. As for my favorite language, I honestly haven't heard too many of them so I can't talk.

[Sir Finkus]

On the asian languages discussion, isn't japanese fairly closely related to chinese as well? It seems like china basically made the base for most of the asian languages. Maybe that's why they start with writing in Civ.

Kind of.  They grafted the Chinese writing system onto their spoken language, then developed to what we have now with a mixture of Chinese characters and Kana. 

Japanese and Korean (and oddly, Turkish) have more in common with each other than with Chinese.

[Mr. Palau]

Japanese and Korean (and oddly, Turkish) have more in common with each other than with Chinese.

any proof for the Turkish bit?

[Sir Finkus]

Japanese and Korean (and oddly, Turkish) have more in common with each other than with Chinese.

any proof for the Turkish bit?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic
That's the best you're going to get out of me at the moment, also, my friend is learning Turkish and the grammar is very similar to Japanese.