OK, so this isn't exactly going to be in an "Open Letter" format :-) I watched another great episode of Easy German from the Easy Languages team and I wanted to make some comments on it as I think what it looks at might be instructive for a broad audience of language learners in general, and German in particular. It shows an American born German learner practising her pronunciation by asking strangers in the street to help her out. Her efforts were really well received and she got some great (albeit highly inaccurate, see below) feedback. At the end of the episode she gives a little piece to camera where she encourages people to go out and practice speaking no matter how bad they feel their accent is. Good advice!
There are some ridiculously unkind comments on this and the previous video she was in, but they were mostly very positive. The main thing is that she's trying and that she wants to improve. And, apart from a very strong American accent in her German, her other German skills are excellent. I want to focus below on what I think she could do to improve her accent rather than the negativity. She does sound as though she can't break what Idahosa Ness calls a "visual addiction". I think I've mostly broken this too, or at least transferred my visual addiction to the International Phonetic Alphabet rather than the vagaries of the spelling system of English. It just means that the sound values that you associate with a letter are so influenced by what you know from your native language that you can't hear when someone tells you something completely different.
One important thing that I learnt is that natives are a FANTASTIC resource for learning a language and improving your accent, but that asking them direct questions about how their language and its sound system function is bound to be ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. Out of all the people who gave her actual advice on how to pronounce the sounds, only one said anything useful, and that was because she presented the sound as an animal noise in a humerous way that moved the concept away from attempting to assign some sound value to a letter and more to training the speech organs to just make the right noise. It's an important step.
I don't personally know Dana or how she learnt German, but because her German is so good except for the pronunciation, I get the feeling that she may benefit from some of the books that helped me improve my accent and understanding of what I'm doing wrong. Don't get me wrong here - I don't sound like a native speaker! My most recent use of my increasingly unpracticed German was with a German work colleague visiting our office. After having had a chat for a while he told me that I had almost no accent, but then he corrected that to say that he could tell I wasn't a native speaker, but from my German he wouldn't have picked me as an English speaker, but perhaps as French if he had to guess. That gave me a good laugh, and also some food for thought about another part of my accent that could probably be cleaned up, but I won't go into the technical details.
Any long time reader of this blog will know that I credit having used Assimil for my semi-decent accent because it gave me many hours of practice listening to and trying to replicate the speech of native speakers. The main workout here is for the muscles of speech production which, unsurprisingly, become very, very efficient at producing the sounds of your native tongue with a minimum of effort, at the expense of an array of muscle motions that you don't normally need. It's a very mechanical process, and just requires plenty of practice. At Dana's advanced stage of German she might find any of the Assimil material a bit boring, but I think anyone could use it to deconstruct their accent. Just listen to the audio and try to match it exactly. Don't look at the words unless you don't know the word and can't figure it out from context and, even then, you should only need to do this once or twice. Keep going until you can reproduce both sides of the dialogue in real time without making any mistakes. Obviously, your accent won't be perfect, but aim to get as close to the original as you can hear yourself.
That's step 1.
In all of the following, where I've written "German" assume I mean "Hochdeutsch", unless otherwise specified. The sounds in different dialects vary widely. If you're just looking for some quick hacks to improve your pronunciation of German in particular, skip to the summary section at the end of the post.
Step 2: Read "A Practical Introduction to Phonetics" by Catford. Seriously. This may sound like a lot of effort, but it's not actually heavy reading and is full of practical exercises to gain control of your vocal tract. I really highly recommend this for language learners struggling with their pronunciation of all those "strange" sound in whatever language they're learning. I couldn't do some of the exercises related to ejective sounds, so don't feel bad if you don't master all the sounds. You won't need to, but you will develop a greater understanding of how they work. I downloaded an Anki list called "IPA motherload" later on and, after listening to the ejective sounds a few times, realised that I could actually produce them all and, thanks to Catford, I understood what was going on in my vocal tract when I did. Bonus!
Step 3: For German learners at intermediate level or above, read Linguistische Phonetik by Joerg Mayer from Stuttgart University. It's in German, and covers most of the same material as the Catford book, but with more details on looking at spectrographs and, more usefully for German learners, on the specifics of German pronunciation. It's free, and it's in German. What more could you want! Some of the material in it is particularly relevant to sorting out all the different ways to pronounce "ch" and "r" in German. These are particular problems that Dana has, along with just generally pronouncing vowels as per her own dialect of American English. The German vowels are well covered in the Mayer work.
Step 4: Read the section on German Phonology on wikipedia. With the above introductory material, it should all hopefully make better sense.
Step 4: Keep practicing with a native. Record them and record yourself trying to emulate them. This is vital for self-awareness. But remember - don't ask them for advice on what you're doing wrong, because the tips will probably be wrong and therefore more confusing. Also the tips from the comments in the youtube video above linked to should be avoided. I mean, what does it mean to pronounce ü as "u" + "e". Maybe if you think it means to pronounce it further forward than an "u" alone. Also note that many Germans seem to be taught that they all pronounce "r" all the time as a trill in the front of their mouth (tip of the tongue behind the top teeth). This is one possible form, but other forms seem more common in everyday speech. Note the lady teaching Dana to say "verrückt" makes this mistake and then says a very different sound at the back of her mouth. However, it's correct for the FIRST 'r' in "Bratwurst". Sound complicated? Not really. Understand there are different sounds for the same letter, know what they are and how to produce them, practice, and then you will hear them better from natives. Some people do this quite intuitively, but I needed the above books and to listen and repeat a lot to catch on to these.
So, my very rough, very broad, tips, for improving some of Dana's main problems are:
1) Forget the letters altogether and just focus on what you're hearing and the way natives move their mouths. At first, the letters will have such a strong power over you in terms of pronunciation that you might really struggle to hear what's actually being said. Throw away your crutch - you're healed of your visual addiction!
2) Vowels: German vowels are often "tenser" and closer than what we think of as their English counterparts. So, if you're struggling to say words like "sehen" like a native, try again but close your mouth a little more. This will probably push you more in the right direction.
3) Umlauts: They're just different sounds, basically. Forget the letter and it's "weird" appearance. "ü" is actually the same as the /i/ sound from English words like "three" and "tree" but with the lips rounded rather than unrounded. I guess this is like an "u" in that, in English at least, it has the most lip-rounding of any vowel. In German, "ü" has just as much lip-rounding as "u" (approximately). But I digress. To practice "ü" say a long German "i" and round your lips. Practice rounding and unrounding your lips. There, you've said it. I might go into the others in more detail in the future, but there's a bit more variety of possible pronunciations in these, depending on the word and vowel length. You can read a table of examples in the Myer book mentioned above, p.44. Very roughly, if you are a native English speaker you shouldn't have any trouble with getting in the right general area for these if you start with the unrounded version and then round your lips. Once you get used to this skill, it will unlock a whole world of new vowels which don't exist in English.
4) ich-laut and ach-laut, written as "ch" in German. These are particular problems for Dana in terms of how close her accent is to that of a native, but probably not a huge deal usually in terms of comprehensibility. Still, there are plenty of word pairs which only differ in these sounds ("nacht" vs "nackt" is a classic example), so they're definitely worth working on and not really hard for an English speaker to learn. Dana has done what most people do when faced with sounds they aren't familiar with and pronounces them with the closest sound from her own native language. When she says "ich" it rhymes with English "wish" and her "ach-laut" is just a "k". These are sort of close in their own way. As a language learner, it's a good idea to know vaguely where this difference pops up, but don't memorise it. Learn to pronounce (and then recognise) the different sounds, and then you will just learn the correct pronunciation when you first hear the word. Eventually you will develop an intuitive feel for this.
So, producing the sounds. I was going to go into a more detailed explanation here, but I think that would lose most readers, and I don't want that. So, in simple terms, the "ach-laut" is like a weak 'k' sound. When you say 'k' (do it now a few times) your tongue is making contact with the soft part of the roof of your mouth. To get to 'nacht' from 'nackt', just make a weaker contacts and hold it. Eventually you will get the balance right and find a spot where the sound is just right. If you're doing it right, you should be able to sustain it indefinitely, as opposed to the 'k' which relies on the tongue completely blocking the flow of air through your mouth, even if just for an instant. If you feel like you don't have the spot quite right, start again by repeating "ka ka ka ka" and then keep weakening it. Listen to examples of this sound on wikipedia to make sure you know what it sounds like. This is just a starting point. The sound is often (depending on the word and dialect) produced even further back than /k/. Just knowing that there's a similar sound but "further back", you will be better able to listen for the difference and try to replicate it. This "further back" version in words like "Fach" is really good for clearing your throat - so practice by practicing a "throat clearing" sound and then move to be something more socially acceptable :-)
The 'ich-laut' is also fairly easy for an English speaker. Say a long /i/ sound, like in "three" and "tree" and hold it. Say "treeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee". Once you are happy you can hold a steady version of this sound concentrate on just moving your tongue closer to the roof of your mouth. You also need to stop your vocal cords from vibrating, which is also easy to do. English speakers do this all the time - it's the difference between "fat" and "vat". In "vat" the vocal cords are vibrating in the 'v' and not in the 'f'. Practice switching between 'f' and 'v' and you will soon get control of this vibration (known as "voicing") as a separate factor. In fact, if you take an "eeeeeeee" and turn off the voicing, you are already most of the way to the ich-laut. And remember, you're NOT trying to pronounce 'ich' here, you're trying to squeeze the "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" sound with your tongue until you hear the hissing sound. So go on, SQUEEZE THAT "EEEEEEEEEE"!
Note that the German 'r' sometimes (depending on dialect and the specific word) will sound like either version of the ach-laut, so you're really increasing your pronunciation by practising these sounds. I won't go into the other details of 'r' as I fear it would be information overload for now. It's covered quite well in the books I mentioned above.
So, anyway, those were the major issues I noticed, and my tips. I hope they're helpful to some of you.
To summarise:
* German vowels are often "tenser" than what you might expect as an English speaker, especially 'i' and 'e', so squeeze them a little.* To say "ich" properly, take your 'i' ("eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee") learn to turn off the vibration of your vocal cords (say "ffffffffffvvvvvvvvvvvvvffffffffffffffvvvvvvvvvvvvv" over and over until you can control this vibration for any other sound) and then squeeze your "eeeeeee" really hard, until it hisses. When you're "eeeeeeeeeee" is hissing, you've hit the spot :-) Imagine there's something on the roof of your mouth that you want to squash. In fact, just turning off the vibration (voicing) will get you most of the way to the ich-laut.
* Ignore the "weirdness" of umlauts. Just remember that they're often lip-rounded versions of vowels you're probably already familiar with, or can get close to, so go on and make friends with the umlaut today!
* To avoid confusing "Nacht" with "nackt", clear your throat :-) Then practice sustaining a "throat-clearing" sound. Also practice saying "ack" over and over, but let it get weaker and weaker. These are the two versions of the ach-laut. "Nacht" is really somewhere between throat-clearing and a weak k, but now you know the rough area, go find it!
As usual, please leave any questions or comments below, and all the best of luck to Dana and all other language learners out there struggling with their unruly mouths!
