German accent!

Guest   Mon Mar 12, 2007 11:24 pm GMT
do anyone know any sites where they can teach you to do a mock german accent - cos yes, i too need one for a play...
somesortofnamehere!!   Sun Mar 18, 2007 12:52 pm GMT
i find putting on accents really easy for some reason.. like when ever im in a french or german class people allways say i sound just like a french/german person. if you know some one who talks german (or whatever accent you are trying to emulate) whenever they are speaking in that language just listen really closely. you can pick out when they are saying something with a sort of "grumble" in the back of their throats... like you hear often in french. just listening to how they say the letters/words can really help!! :):):)
Simmi   Tue Mar 27, 2007 11:13 pm GMT
Thanx, i have to do a skit for geography class, and yu all helped me alot thanx agen!
grace   Fri Mar 30, 2007 5:36 pm GMT
how u do umlouts
somesortofnamehere!!   Mon Apr 23, 2007 7:29 pm GMT
do u mean how do u pronounce umlouts?
Jessica   Sun May 20, 2007 6:13 am GMT
Okay you people. Not all Germans have accents. My mom has one. Its not very strong, but you can hear it. Like, instead of saying accent, she says äckzent. I do the same thing. But we DONT say the w like the v. Thats just like steriotypical or something.. Dont listen to it. The hands and apple comming out as hence and epple, yea, we do that too. So thats normal.. I guess. Anyway.. in most of the films you see in America, they do the German acctsents wrong..
Travis   Sun May 20, 2007 6:38 am GMT
Of the Germans I myself have known, most have only had weak accents, with probably the most prominent things being the degree of "carefulness", the lack of elision, assimilation, or epenthesis, the lack of things like unreleased stops, and, in retrospect, the not following the vowel length allophony typical of North American English. The one main exception to this is a particular German who works where I work who has a very marked cut glass RP accent without the least trace of an German accent save the occasional devoiced final consonant (and mind you that I have heard English English-speakers who almost sounded like they had final devoicing).
Travis   Sun May 20, 2007 6:45 am GMT
Going along with what I said in my previous post, the other main thing I've noticed about actual German accents in Real Life is that individual words are generally pronounced separately rather than flowing into one another, without epenthetic sounds such as glides being inserted between words and without adjacent word-final and word-initial consonants assimilating to each other (or in cases simply being elided). This goes along with the whole apparent "carefulness" of English spoken by native German-speakers, and is likely related to the German's inserting glottal stops between adjacent vowels.
Liz   Mon May 21, 2007 5:17 pm GMT
<<Going along with what I said in my previous post, the other main thing I've noticed about actual German accents in Real Life is that individual words are generally pronounced separately rather than flowing into one another, without epenthetic sounds such as glides being inserted between words and without adjacent word-final and word-initial consonants assimilating to each other (or in cases simply being elided). This goes along with the whole apparent "carefulness" of English spoken by native German-speakers, and is likely related to the German's inserting glottal stops between adjacent vowels.>>

Exactly. I just love it when they pronounce "theatre" with an intervocalic glottal stop! :-)

That's true the other way around, too. The English tend not to insert glottal stops between adjacent vowels when speaking German. They insert a glide when pronouncing, say, the word "Theater".

For some unknown reason, German-accented English speech reminds me of 30s U-RP. Has anyone ever got the same feeling?
Mark   Mon May 21, 2007 5:17 pm GMT
When I try French and German accents, I usually go for the ones depicted on 'Allo Allo', I find them the easiest to do.
Guest 224   Mon May 21, 2007 10:45 pm GMT
Some other things about German accents:

when a word ends in -g, make it sound like it's ending in -k. For example, "log" sounds like "lock."

words ending with -d should sound like -t. For example, "mad" sounds like "mat."

words ending with -b should sound like -p. For example, "robe" sounds like "rope."
Liz   Mon May 21, 2007 10:55 pm GMT
<<Some other things about German accents:

when a word ends in -g, make it sound like it's ending in -k. For example, "log" sounds like "lock."

words ending with -d should sound like -t. For example, "mad" sounds like "mat."

words ending with -b should sound like -p. For example, "robe" sounds like "rope.">>

The penomenon is called coda devoicing.
ladiko   Wed Jun 06, 2007 2:40 pm GMT
i think this pronunciation of german words is almost correct - you can hear the difference between the ch in euch and auch --> http://www.dict.cc/?s=auch+euch

try the speaker button next to every phrase. maybe it if usefull.
Travis   Wed Jun 06, 2007 3:09 pm GMT
>>Some other things about German accents:

when a word ends in -g, make it sound like it's ending in -k. For example, "log" sounds like "lock."

words ending with -d should sound like -t. For example, "mad" sounds like "mat."

words ending with -b should sound like -p. For example, "robe" sounds like "rope."<<

Mind you that there are English dialects which also have final devoicing, similar to what you specified above, such as some Upper Midwestern NAE dialects, some AAVE varieties, and East Anglian dialects, so such is not necessarily indicative of non-native speech. However, there may be some more subtle differences between such devoicing by native speakers and such by native speakers of languages like German, Dutch, Russian, and Polish, such as such will likely maintain phonemic distinctions through means such as vowel length and plosive glottalization and such is likely to be conditional upon the phonetic environment and not necessarily consistently applicable to all obstruents.
Kendra   Wed Jun 06, 2007 3:45 pm GMT
''A German accent in English?''

They have strong final devoicing:

boys [bois] (boyce)
whores [hors] (horse)
to use [tujus] (/the/ use)
eyes [ais] (ice)
club [klap] (clawp)
bed [bEt] (bet)