Nice sounding natlangs

[Imralu]

Likes
Russian - sexy as fuck
Romanian - sexy as fuck
Turkish - beautiful and some people, particularly women, speak it very warmly, with an audible smile
Hungarian - sci-fi cool
Finnish - cool rhythm
Maori - cool
Hawaiian - cool
Saami - from what I've heard, it's got a touch of the sci-fi-ness of Hungarian
Mandarin - depending on how it's spoken, but can sound really beautiful

Dislikes
Thai - ugly, but endearingly cute at least
Vietnamese - ugly like Thai but not cute ... makes up for it by at least being interesting with implosives in some speakers
Italian - I guess I'm just reacting to the stereotype that it's supposed to be beautiful, but in practice, I often hear it spoken by people with incredibly annoying harsh voices ...

Weirdly enough, my favourite food nationalities are Italian, Thai and Vietnamese ...

[Viktor77]

I'm glad someone else finds Romanian pretty. I told a Romanian girl that Romanian is one of the prettiest languages in the world and I swear I think she just about was floored and then had a gigantic smile on her face. She'll probably be my friend forever now. That and I reminded her of Romanian pop songs from her youth which also floored her me being an American. It's cool. I love making friends from different places I only read about or experience online.

[Vijay]

I'm glad someone likes Malayalam. Maybe I shouldn't be glad they also don't like Tamil so much, but idk.

[Imralu]

I'm glad someone else finds Romanian pretty.

I didn't say pretty. I said sexy. But yeah, it can be pretty ... but this and [img=https://youtu.be/MJ8qVEfp810?t=30s]this[/url] are just pure sex for me ... maybe it's just the guy's voice, and the verses of these tracks are definitely better than the choruses, but yeah, damn!

I told a Romanian girl that Romanian is one of the prettiest languages in the world and I swear I think she just about was floored and then had a gigantic smile on her face. She'll probably be my friend forever now. That and I reminded her of Romanian pop songs from her youth which also floored her me being an American. It's cool. I love making friends from different places I only read about or experience online.

That's nice! Haha, and I have a feeling that one of the songs you know goes Vrei să pleci, dar nu mă, nu mă iei .... I think most people just say a language is pretty or ugly based on their pre-conceived ideas and there's a lot of prejudice against Romanians in Europe (partly from stupid racist people's confusion of "Roma(ny)" and "Romanian"). I find it really bizarre that so many people I know here in Berlin cannot tell the difference between Turkish and Arabic and they sound TOTALLY different, same with Mandarin and Japanese. People don't really listen to things. People think German is harsh and it gets repeated and I had a boss who once told me I should have learnt French instead of German because German's an ugly language and French is sexy ... and six months later, having forgotten that conversation, he heard me serving a customer in German and asked me later if we had been speaking French ... he doesn't even know how to tell the difference between them, but he's got an opinion. I think this is why Romanians probably don't hear anyone say that their language is beautiful.

[Chengjiang]

Likes

• RUSSIAN. I love the way this language sounds. I love the contrasting velarized and palatalized consonants and their allophonic effects on vowels, the distinctive way vowels reduce in unstressed syllables, the complex but onset-heavy syllable structure...everything.
• Relatedly, Irish. Has a number of the same or similar phonological features I like from Russian, albeit with funkier vowel allophony.
• Also relatedly, Polish. Sounds like someone mixed Russian with Italian.
• Japanese is pretty distinctive sounding with a limited inventory and a simple syllable structure, in contrast to a lot of conlangs I've seen that have these traits.
• Mandarin is probably my favorite syllable-timed language for sound. I especially love the apical/sibilant vowel. And erhua is pretty interesting.
• Romanian is pretty cool. Probably my favorite Romance language as far as sound is concerned.

Dislikes
There aren't a lot of languages whose sound I dislike. That said:

• Most other languages when pronounced with an Anglophone accent. Especially a heavy American accent. (I'm an American myself, if you're wondering.)
• Esperanto. I'm sorry, it sounds like a badly forced attempt to make a Slavic language sound like a Romance language, it has too little allophony specified for the variety of syllables allowed, and the ABSOLUTELY REGULAR PENULTIMATE STRESS NO MATTER WHAT is grating to listen to. It kind of sounds like bad Polish, honestly.
• Any language pronounced with unnatural precision, e.g. not reducing syllables/segments that are supposed to be reduced. This is part of why I dislike Esperanto.

Overrated
These aren't languages I actually dislike, just languages whose beauty I'm sick of hearing extolled.

• French. I'm fine with French, but outside of some rather dated national stereotypes I really don't get why people say it's a "sexy" or "romantic" language.
• Italian. I hear so many people calling it "musical" or "operatic" and saying it's beautiful. My overall assessment of it is "bouncy". Again I suspect stereotypes of the speakers are coloring what people say about the language.

Underrated
These aren't languages I necessarily love, but they don't deserve the constant insults they get.

• German. It gets called "harsh" all the time, and to me it just sounds like a dialect of English I can't quite understand. I honestly suspect portrayals of Germans in WWI and WWII to have created a linguistic stereotype in English-speaking countries.
• Danish. Maybe this is just because I don't speak Norwegian or Swedish and hence it doesn't sound like a "wrong" counterpart to what I speak, but it sounds fine to me. Yes, it does sound a bit slurred, but it's hardly alone in that respect.
• Cantonese. I don't like it as much as Mandarin, but again, I really don't get the "harsh" impression many people seem to have of the language.

[Quark8]

I'm glad someone likes Malayalam. Maybe I shouldn't be glad they also don't like Tamil so much, but idk.

If you are speaking to me, I fear that some personal feelings towards Tamil influenced my decision. Despite this, having heard both languages spoken by native speakers, I have to say that Tamil sounds harsher/uglier to me (resulting in anger from half of my extended family .)

[Vijay]

Aww Yeah, I guess to me, it used to sound like a weird de-Sanskritized/hyper-Dravidianized version of Malayalam lol. But I guess I'm starting to just look at it as a language in its own right instead. I doubt I've completely shaken off the Malayalee prejudice yet, though. (Malayalees tend to think Tamil is just bad Malayalam).

[Quark8]

I doubt I've completely shaken off the Malayalee prejudice yet, though. (Malayalees tend to think Tamil is just bad Malayalam).

After spending a few weeks in Tamil Nadu, I learned that most Tamils think of Malayalam as debased Tamil. I personally think them as different languages, but I have a feeling that the fact that I have more exposure to Malayalam than Tamil is influencing my desire to know more about Malayalm than Tamil.

[Jonlang]

Russian - sexy as fuck

I can't really comment on the rest of your list, but really?! Russian is sexy?

[jmcd]

Weirdly enough, my favourite food nationalities are Italian, Thai and Vietnamese ...

I'm more or less the opposite on this: I have a good correlation between food national preferences and language sound national preferences. On the other hand, my language pereferences includes obvious food favourites like Hindi, Thai and Japanese. Wonder how well this works out for other people.

[Vijay]

I have a feeling that the fact that I have more exposure to Malayalam than Tamil is influencing my desire to know more about Malayalm than Tamil.

You're just out to make me happier and happier, aren't you?!

I...have a website for teaching Malayalam, but seriously, it could hardly suck more in terms of layout and design and stuff and doesn't go far at all in terms of content, either. EDIT: Oh, and it basically hasn't been updated in like a dozen years or something?! And I don't even know how to update it anymore! But I write lessons periodically on another forum, too. Maybe if you'd like, I can help you learn it! (Caveat: I'm a heritage speaker, and it's not the language I'm most fluent in (though it used to be), but I live with my parents, so I hear it around me all the time, and I (try to) read stuff in it, so...).

If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious, how'd you get to be so familiar with Malayalam?

[Quark8]

If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious, how'd you get to be so familiar with Malayalam?

One of my parents speaks it, and in all of my trips to India I quite a while with my relatives that speak it. Despite that, I could not speak a word in Malayalam, despite hearing it everyday, until my fourth trip .

[Vijay]

If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious, how'd you get to be so familiar with Malayalam?

One of my parents speaks it, and in all of my trips to India I quite a while with my relatives that speak it. Despite that, I could not speak a word in Malayalam, despite hearing it everyday, until my fourth trip .

You think that's bad, all of my paternal cousins have two Malayalee parents, and (almost?) none of them speak it. Some of them don't even understand the most basic sentences in it!

[Nooj]

A good friend of mine is dutch. I love hearing her talk dutch. Dutch is the combination of all that is good and right in the world.

The gyeongsang dialect of korean, that of my mums side of the family. Fuck that standard korean, saturi for liiiife.

I really like the madrileño dialect of spanish (i live in madrid). The ways gallegos speak spanish. The various varieties of andalucian and canary island spanishes. In america...boy i could go on for days about the american spanishes. I dont think theres one i dont like. Maybe rioplatense but thats just stupid contrarism cause everyone else seems to like it and i dont see why.

[Viktor77]

A good friend of mine is dutch. I love hearing her talk dutch. Dutch is the combination of all that is good and right in the world.

You need to get your ears checked.

Just kidding, Flemish isn't that bad, I've gotten use to it. I dare say I quite like hearing it now. But Holland Dutch still sounds like a coughing fit to me.

[Nooj]

yeha but precisely for that!

i donno.

i reckon a lot of it (maybe all of it) has to do with the kind of people you associate with the language. and if you have good experiences with good people, that rubs off on the language.

dutch is nice for me because my dutch friend is so nice and i associate it with koekjes she used to bake for me, the movies we used to watch, the cups of tea in the morning.

chilean spanish brings me memories of countless bbqs my chilean friends threw in the backyard on a sweltering australian night

gyeonsang dialect of korean is what i grew up hearing in the streets, in the home, at my grandparents place. the standard dialect is the dialect of tv shows and music and leaves me cold.

russian is the language of my best childhood friend. it is a warm, loving language for me.

along with all the romantic bullshit that a language can accumulate (like how french is with some people) subjectively for a person.

[Imralu]

Russian - sexy as fuck

I can't really comment on the rest of your list, but really?! Russian is sexy?

Yes. As fuck, as I said.