Teach Me How To Say "I Love You" In Other Languages

technically that’s correct, but the phonetic spelling would be closer to:

Meh thumsay pyaar karthaa hoon

which I like to follow with:

Puppi daayn :smiley:

In Korean: Saranghae or Sanranghaeyo if you want to be polite.

In Afrikaans, “Ek hou van jou” just has the sense of English “I like you” or maybe “I like you lots” depending on context & tone(and it would be pronounced “Eck hoe fun yo”).

For “I love you” it’s “Ek het jou lief” or “Ek is lief vir jou”. Either has the same sense as “I love you”.

If you wanted to be a little formal and old-fashioned, it would be “Ek bemin jou”, which carries a sense of romantic love that “lief” doesn’t. Think of it as “I am passionately in love with you”, Don Juan styley. A Lover is a “Minaar” or a “Minnares”, depending on gender. A beloved is the “Beminde”

Catalan: T’estimo.
Euskera: Maite zaitut.

I love Afrikaans! “Ek is lief vir jou” is adorable :slight_smile: And it’s all so archaic to my ears, talking about “beminnen”. I’d love to learn properly some day.

Švejk, we could go back to saying “ik bemin je” to have a proper non-compound way of saying I love you :smiley:

“Wall eye knee” – Cantonese

qamuSHa (kah-moosh-KHAH) - Klingon

melon le (MEH-lone lay) - Elvish

Norwegian: Jeg elsker deg. (Pronounced something like: “yay EL-sker day”.)

Danish: Jeg elsker dig. (Pronounced like… well, it’s Danish, so everything sounds like this anyway.)

Greek sagapo

In pinyin (Roman characters), it’s written “wo ai ni”. (The simplified characters are 我爱你. The traditional character for “ai” is a little different: 愛.)

I can’t speak for Cantonese, but in Mandarin it does sound a bit like that. But if you want to get picky (and I do!), to my ears, the vowel in the first word, “wo” starts more like an “oh” than an “ah”. So if there were such a word as “woll” (rhyming with “goal” and “toll”), if you stopped just before pronouncing the “ll”, you’d have it. “Eye” and “knee” are close enough, I think. But if you want to be understood, it’s also very important to get the tones right.

“Wo” (I) should drop very low at first, then rise a bit. Kind of like saying, “Really?” or “So…?” as in, “So what?” But when it’s said quickly with other words following, the rising part sometimes gets lost and it just sounds low.

“Ai” (love) should start high and drop sharply. Imagine saying, “Huh!” as in “Huh! How about that!” or “Yes!” in an assertive manner.

“Ni” (you), like “wo”, starts low and rises. Because of its position in the sentence, you’ll pretty much always hear the rise.

So imagine two people saying, “Really?” “Yeah! So…?” and you basically have the tones for “Wo ai ni”.

Also, fun fact about “ai” (love) : you can’t see this in the simplified character 爱, but in the traditional character 愛, you can see the root character is “heart”. Aww.

And apparently, although this literally means “I love you”, Chinese people are more likely to say “I like you” (“Wo xihuan ni”, 我喜欢你), which is “more playful and less serious”.

Well, the omniglot link already had it, but I know it, and I need to show off.

Hungarian: Szeretlek. (Sz is just pronounced as the voiceless ‘s’, like in sing).

I wish I knew how to sound out the Lakota Sioux phrase. That would be cool.

My husband is Malaysian; I speak only English and a very small, insignificant smattering of Malay (enough to ask simple direction, or follow the general gist of a very basic conversation just by pulling out the few words/phrases that I recognize). I learned what I needed to get by when I lived there for a year. What I actually hear people say is just a very long enunciation “sayaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang” to express love. But I am pretty sure that the direct “I love you” translation is “saya cinta kamu”. I know that expresses romantic love because years ago, when I used “cinta” with my adorable nephews, they laughed hysterically (and rather uncomfortably). My husband had to explain the difference between “cinta” and “sayang”.

I have Indonesian friends, and although the structure of the language is very similar, I can’t understand anything they say at all. My husband says that it is a dialect difference similar to english and pidgin.

Te Amo (“tay ahmo”) in Latin.

Extra points for Te Deamo (“tay day ahmo”), which means “I love you especially” and conveys more romantic overtones.

If a guy said that, I’m afraid it could be misconstrued.

Обичам те
“Obicham te”
(Bulgarian)

>punch in the arm<
(Middle School America)

And “ti amo” in Italian (although you could also go the advanced route).

Yes, “Wall eye knee” sounds more like Mandarin than Cantonese. I don’t speak Cantonese, but “I love you” should sound something like “ngaw oy lek”. The interesting thing about Chinese dialects is the words are all the same, only the pronunciations are different (great idea by an emperor long ago, I say).

Persian(Farsi) is دوست دارم , pronounced doostat daaram.

Don’t know the phrase you got, but my reference has it as “tecihila” and pronounces it as tay-CHEE-khee-lah.

(The h should be dotted in the orthographic system used, but ASCII can’t cope with that - it’s like the guttural H in Hannukah)

My French is only high school level, but I thought “je t’aime” was “I like you” and “je t’adore” was “I love you”.
ASL is a combination of the letters I, L, and Y. Make the ‘rock and roll’ horns, then stick your thumb out to the side.

|..| (thumb maybe down a little more)