German accent!

Candy   Mon Sep 19, 2005 5:54 pm GMT
Christian,
Sounds pretty German to me!! You sound quite a lot like my better students whose accent when speaking English isn't so strong.

Unfortunately I'm totally hopeless at describing accent and pronunciation so I can't really give you any tips on how to improve...;(
Also have no recordings of my students speaking English for comparison....;(( (I don't think they'd be too happy if I recorded them!)

For me, the most 'German-sounding' thing in English is to pronounce 'apple' as 'epple', 'hands' as 'hence' etc.
Sorry to be rather unhelpful! But keep up the good work! :-)
der.chris.tian   Mon Sep 19, 2005 6:12 pm GMT
hmmm.. ok.

up to now i always thought the worst mistake is to spell a "the" as a "se". but this a <-> e thing makes also sense. i'll try to have it in mind in future... thx!
Thomas   Mon Sep 19, 2005 10:36 pm GMT
Being a German myself, I'm also struggling with the hands-sound, but it's more difficult you natives might think: there is no single such sound. Nobody ever tells you that and the only description of it I found is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86-tensing

The sounds of "can't" and "class" are very different, the first one sounds almost like an E to German ears while the second one is almost an A. In between are words like "fast" or "hand".

Is anyone aware of discription of the phenomenon or guidelines on how much this vowel should be tensed in different words (i guess it depends on the consonants it is between, but I'm not sure, it's very hard to figure out since it varies a little bit with different speakers)?

Thanks.
sto   Tue Sep 27, 2005 9:08 pm GMT
Hi all

As a Pole I used to have the same problem : one time I heard the polish "a" the other "e". Only recently I found out that the sound pronounced by native speakers is , as it is symbolized on www.americanaccent.com, the "ä" sound .

In order to pronounce it you have to "relax your tongue and drop your jaw as far down as it will go".Of course it is important to emphasize that the pronounciation of this sound depends on the country a native speaker comes from . For example the Britishmen seem to pronounce the "ä" more like polish "a",at least it seems to me that they do.

example : class,dance,france etc.

take care :)
sto   Tue Sep 27, 2005 9:11 pm GMT
Ooops , I confused the symbols as well as the discirption .
The sybbol is :[æ] not "ä"
and to pronounce it you have to "To pronounce it, drop your jaw down as if you were going to say [ä]; then from that position, try to say eh" -- slightly different ;-)
Travis   Tue Sep 27, 2005 10:40 pm GMT
At least here, the tensing of /{/ is very apparent in some words, and may be noticable to native speakers in places to a degree similar to that that the German and Polish-speakers above have noted. This is probably due to a combination of æ-tensing and the Northern Cities Shift, resulting in tensed /{/ in places potentially merging with or at least being easily confused with /E/. Hence, as laxed /{/ is already quite high, and /E/ has only been relatively slightly backed, a sufficiently tensed /{/ may very well collide with /E/, with only a very slight front-back distinction being present to differentiate them with. This is exacerbated by the fact that /{/ is never diphthongized as [e@] in my dialect, unlike in some NAE dialects with æ-tensing.

This is most apparent in the case of the words "than" and "then", which in informal speech here are effectively homophones and which have a distinctly different vowel from "that", even though in formal speech "that" and "then" share the same vowel phoneme. This seems to be case, though, where in informal speech tensed /{/ has actually been replaced with the phoneme /E/; at least for myself, the distinction between "than" and "then" is learned rather than native.

However, there are other cases where the distinction between /{/ and /E/ in two words that differ only with respect to such is very slight, such as the word "can" and the name "Ken", where for me at least the vowel in the former is only very slightly lower and fronter than that in the latter, and is much closer to it than the vowel in "cat". Furthermore, while this is not really the case at home in the Milwaukee area, here at UW Madison, which has students from a wider area including the enrity of Wisconsin, I very often perceive what I have as /{/ in "can", if an /{/ very close to [E], as actually being /E/ in others' speech. Interestingly, I notice that the /{/ in the thing "can" is often laxer and less [E]-like than that in the modal verb "can" in my idiolect, but that is most likely just a matter of being more significantly stressed than an actual phonemic split, like that in the Mid-Atlantic area, which incidentally goes the opposite direction.
Anne   Thu Sep 29, 2005 11:35 am GMT
I have listened to Christian's message with interest and can probably add another typican German mistake (after w = /v/ and the 'th' sound) this being diphthongs e.g. in his example 'launch'.
Being German and having lived in Britain for 14 years myself - I must admit that these (or even more complicated thriphthongs) throw me from time to time!
The other comment on 'hands' etc. I don't know if I can agree completely since a lot of Germans learn American accents and, anyway, the varieties are so wide ranging. See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/feature1.shtml
for a very useful read.
stella   Thu Sep 29, 2005 12:25 pm GMT
easy... just try to speak without connecting the words, make "th" sound like "s" or "f" or "d" and you'll do fine...
Wisha   Tue May 09, 2006 3:50 am GMT
I'm a german student, native of Pittsburgh, PA (in the US of course ;) ) so I especially have trouble with the accent, the "Infamous Pittsburgh O" as its been called that most of us do.
I can tell you that in a word, like hand for example, the "d" sounds like a "t" at the end of a word. I've found thatI can pull a fairly conincing accent, but its hard. The "th" sound we are accustomed to, I've heard two different ways. With both the t and h pronounced separately, andsort of like a z.
Also, you should be aware of the hard and soft ch sounds. A soft ch sounds like a hiss, like a snake... sort of. A hard one sound like a hocker if you want the truth.
The "s" in german is also somewhat like a z in english.
Some germans that I know (a few of my good friends actually) tend to exadgerate the "a"s in words occasionally. Almost like we wouls if it were spelled with an "h" after it.
"V"s frequently sound like the letter "f".
The of course, there is the obvious "w" being "v" in english.

Hehe, well, I hope I helped. ^^ Herr Chaney would be most disappointed if I didn't.
bernd   Sat May 13, 2006 7:30 am GMT
That`s really kinda funny - I am a German student of English and I have tried to get rid of my German accent for the whole of my English speaking life and now you guys are looking for one...I can tell you, there are loads of "germanicisms" around but I'll give you only the most prominent ones:
As someone else has already said: it's the /v/ instead of the /w/ what makes it particularly German (btw - we misuse it both ways: "wase" instead of "vase" and "Valter" instead of "Walter"), then of course it's vowels of any kind, especially diphthongs, the "th" in tongue twisters like thwart or thirty thorny thistles (because we don't have a "th")...

If anyone ever comes across a recording of a speech held in English by our former "Bundespräsident" Heinrich Lübke....That's the deal!!

"Make it good!"
Bernd
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Jane   Mon May 22, 2006 10:34 am GMT
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Samuel   Mon May 22, 2006 10:38 am GMT
Samuel   Mon May 22, 2006 10:39 am GMT
michelle   Mon May 22, 2006 3:16 pm GMT
I thought Germans were more like afghanastans,which I have'nt found out yet.Is it possible though, and if someone can tell me?