datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5591 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French
| Message 1 of 7 08 September 2009 at 6:19pm | IP Logged |
I'm having trouble getting the Umlaut characters embedded into my brain, are there any videos I can listen to or watch to learn them?
I'm perfectly find with regular characters, it's just the Umlauts that bug me :/
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Mareike Senior Member Germany Joined 6230 days ago 267 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German* Studies: English, Swedish
| Message 2 of 7 08 September 2009 at 6:43pm | IP Logged |
Look at youtuve:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMSnlPPgAYk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAIIfj5SEHo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN-RAdkvzzE
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Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6476 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese
| Message 3 of 7 08 September 2009 at 8:54pm | IP Logged |
Also try GermanPod101's podcast on the Umlaut vowels: http://media.libsyn.com/media/germanpod101/P_L4_081209_gpod1 01.mp3
The entire Accent Improvement Series should be very interesting to you.
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egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5702 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch
| Message 4 of 7 10 September 2009 at 11:15am | IP Logged |
I'm also learning German right now and something that helped me out a lot, was relating those sounds to ones I already know:
The German ä is [ɛ] which is a sound that exists in English. e.g. the 'e' in "bet".
The German ö is [œ] which is a [ɛ] with lip rounding. So make an "e as in bet" e sound and round out your lips.
Finally the ü is [ʏ] which is a [ɪ] with lip rounding. The [ɪ] is in English and is the 'i' in "bit". So make that sound and round out your lips.
Of course these guidelines are just approximations, copying what native speakers say is of course the most important. I just thought these might be useful. Good luck!
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Ulrike Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5567 days ago 23 posts - 27 votes Speaks: German*, Latin, English, French Studies: Persian, Arabic (classical)
| Message 5 of 7 15 September 2009 at 11:26am | IP Logged |
The German "ö" is pronounced as the u in "Burma" or "hurt".
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MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5815 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German
| Message 6 of 7 15 September 2009 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
Ulrike wrote:
The German "ö" is pronounced as the u in "Burma" or "hurt". |
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They’re quite different sounds actually.
The long German Ö is pronounced [ø], like the first sound in the English fAte, but longer and rounded
The short German Ö is pronounced [œ], like the English bEt, but rounded
Both the long and the short German Ä are pronounced [ɛ], like the English bEt
The long German Ü is pronunced [y], like the English kEEp, but rounded
The short German Ü is pronunced [ʏ], like the English bIt, but rounded
Edited by MäcØSŸ on 15 September 2009 at 2:10pm
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eatonjn Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5558 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Swedish
| Message 7 of 7 22 September 2009 at 6:18am | IP Logged |
There is a German girl who does YouTube videos to help German learners.
I showed her pronunciation video to my boyfriend and he found it really useful, even more so than my attempts at tutoring.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3X3fWOXDhI
She goes through the alphabet giving special attention to German's tricky vowels.
Hope that helps!
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