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German speaking and American accents | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5502 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes  Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 1 of 5 23 November 2009 at 2:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've heard from a few of my German speaking friends that Germans don't like to talk to Americans in German partly because of our accents when we speak it. Can anyone tell me how Americans speaking German sound different than Germans? Like if I wanted to avoid being labelled as an American immediately upon opening my mouth, what would I change about my speaking?
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6917 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 5 23 November 2009 at 2:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm not a native German speaker, but some sounds that you might want to focus on are ü, r and ö. I've sometimes heard Americans use /oo/, retroflex (or "American") /r/, and /ay/ for these sounds.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 5 23 November 2009 at 10:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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- Vowels:
-- Be able to make pure monophthongs, without your tongue moving. Most English vowels are diphthongs (depending on your regional accent, almost all of them may be); most German vowels are not. -- Speak clearly. Germans separate their words more than English speakers do, and they don't reduce vowels in unstressed syllables anywhere near as much as English speakers do. Less technically - pronounce vowels similarly, whether or not they're in a stressed syllable. -- Make sure you can hear and produce all the different vowel sounds of German; it helps to have a German sit with you and confirm you're recognizably producing each vowel sound. - Consonants: -- Recognizable forms of most aren't that difficult, but it's worth working on the hard and soft ch sounds, and picking one of the regional variations for the 'r'. For 'r', you can pick a uvular trill, a uvular frictive, or an alveolar trill, but you can't use the English r. Also, be careful - the 'r' at the end of words is often actually a vowel that sounds sort between an 'a' and the 'e' in words like the English 'the'. 'Pf' doesn't exist in English, but should be pretty easy to master. -- If you want to sound German, rather than simply be easily comprehensible, work on details like how much to aspirate consonants (plosives are much more strongly aspirated in German), whether specific sounds are dental or not, etc. - Prosody: -- Listen carefully and imitate it; it's fairly straightforward for an English speaker who gives it a bit of effort, I'd say. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5502 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 4 of 5 23 November 2009 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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On most words that begin with "r" and words that have consonant "r"s mid sentence, do I always use a rolling "r" sound? My regional accent, I'm deep south, so nearly all of my vowels are diphthongs, meaning I'm gonna have to really work on that. So the fact that their vowels are monophthongs, does this mean they usually emphasize them less in speech than we do?
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 5 23 November 2009 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That sounds correct for an accent for the south of Germany, as far as I know (the south is where the alveolar trill, or 'rolling r', is used - see wikipedia's page on German phonology. I've spent most of my time in the north, and don't know southern accents very well.
Yeah - it's a big issue for pretty much everyone who speaks (only) English natively, when they start learning other languages. It's perfectly doable, but it takes some focused work.
Nope, I don't think there's a correlation. I should emphasize this: listen to a lot of German. That's absolutely critical for sounding like a German. It helps to listen to it in a phonetically aware way, but either way, listen to it, as much as possible. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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