What languages sound best to you?

There is a certain musicality in Finnish which I find very pleasing to the ear. The fact that it's not an indo-european language and thus has some very alluring foreign elements to it might also be a factor. About finnish sounding like backwards japanese though, I'm not sure I can agree at all :P. The way I see it, japanese is big on the consonants while Finnish is big on the vowels.

French, Italian and Sim Language

Those are just the ones you know

3 and 4

Do you know what Estonian sounds like? As a language it's pretty close to Finnish. I don't know if I agree with the Japanese point either but I find it funny. I'm surprised that you would think of Finnish as musical as I've always thought of it as a very flat language with little intonation. On the other hand, Swedish spoken in Finland and Swedish spoken in Sweden sound different, Finnish Swedish having Finnish intonation and from what I've heard, at least some Swedes seem to think that Finnish Swedish sounds musical and pretty. Many native Finnish speakers who speak Swedish well think that Swedish spoken in Sweden is beautiful while Finnish Swedish is horrible. So in conclusion, I have no idea.

I've never heard spoken estonian but I do know they are closely related! a Finnish friend of mine once told me that estonians can understand bits and pieces of finnish but not the other way around :P Oh well. I didn't know the swedish in finland was different from Swedish from sweden! Maybe 'finnish' swedesh lacks the pitch accent?

As far as I know, Finnish always has the emphasis on words on the first syllabus but it varies in Swedish (spoken in Sweden). Maybe it has something to do with that, I don't know. For me, as a Finnish speaker, Estonian sounds like Finnish gone mad. It's hilarious! Maybe Estonians understanding Finnish has something to do with the fact that many Finnish people travel to Tallinn and at least there many of the locals speak Finnish.

Edit: Just adding that Finnish has next to no pitch variations which I think has lead many Finnish speakers to believe that Finnish doesn't sound that nice.

'Finnish-gone-mad' LOL. Sounds just like the relationship between Mainland Greek and Cypriot Greek. If you're a greek speaker and go to Cyprus it's all "AFHGHDNjgkrejtijfnlnldfdkgf Douze Points!" :P

As far as the musicality in Finnish goes, I guess it comes less from the actual pitch, and more from the alteration between clustered consonants and long stretched vowels. You might have a double 'aa' or an uu or 'yy' here and then something like 'lsk' or ''ksk' following. Can't think of any examples since I don't speak the language but I hope it makes sense :P

I guess after further thought I get where you're coming from. The language in Kalevala (it's a work of epic poetry involving Finnish folklore and all sorts of things, google it if you're interested) sounds somewhat musical and rhythmic even to me. Finnish is also very different from English and French and other commonly spoken languages and only after studying several languages I understood how different it actually is. All those weird looking double vowels and the words being really odd. A case in point, number nine: Swedish: nio, French: neuf, Finnish: yhdeksän. Like if you've seen those things floating around on the internet saying that English is weird because in twenty other languages people say "ananas" and it's still "pineapple" in English. Finnish is like that with almost every word.

Yeah! That's mostly because all these commonly spoken languages in europe belong to the Indo-European family. Which all makes them distantly related to eachoter, and even more distantly, to hindi and sanskrit! That isn't the case with Finnish which is part of the Finno-Ugric language family so it's pretty much set appart from all common european languages. The only languages Finnish shares ancestry with is Estonian, all those Karelian dialects, and, even more distantly, with hungarian!

Fascinating stuff :P. This uniqueness that finnish has is also one of the reasons I like it!

No we call it fus7a. The formal ( and original ) arabic; not the different dialects in slang.