So when i say that i speak german without an accent,
that means that i speak german without a u.s accent, are we clear on that?
I don't speak German like this, but rather like a German.
I hear it a lot that I speak German without an accent, and for me that's
the best compliment coming from a native. So today I wanted to talk about it a little bit
I think I don't talk
as much about like specifics of having a good german accent as i do like
how to get a good German accent i talk all the time about like oh you have to listen to podcasts
you have to shadow you have to you know listen to music and you know focus on auditive resources but
in terms of like the specifics of what actually goes into a like native sounding accent i think
i've barely spoken on that if not like at all so let's talk about it, lass uns davon reden.
so before i even get into any specifics i want to talk about why is having a good accent important
let's do a personal reason first so for me as a person from the us we have the kind of reputation
all over the world that we are not good at learning languages that we suck at speaking them
and that we have terrible accents um and that for me the third one and the last one that is
i think it's the easiest thing that a person can do to kind of ward off that stereotype
because even if you speak just a tiny tiny bit of your language that you're learning if you speak
it with a good accent you obviously establish like more rapport people say that you put more
effort into learning a language and it you know it just generally feels good i think it also
you know it can give you a confidence boost if you're especially in the beginning stages
if you have a good accent so for me it's all about appearance which is kind of stupid but i mean it's
it's it's a real real thing. I don't know i think people are more eager to talk to you and like want
to help you a little bit more if you have a good accent in my experience and that's just in general
not just with german because like under all of my like portuguese videos even the ones from like the
beginning or like you know maybe a year after i started learning i still wasn't really that
good because i had a good accent people were like yes go you you're doing great and it's like a big
confidence booster i think so that's why an accent has always been important to me and that's why i
always put a lot of effort into it especially at the beginning and with that said now i guess
i should talk about the i guess the problems the pronunciation problems that people usually have
with german i mean it really depends on the person that's learning it and like what their
native language is and stuff like that but i think that there are a couple of universal difficult
pronunciation things in german i think these are the difficult features of german that literally
everybody talks about and has already spoken about so i won't spend too much time on them but
they do need mentioning so the first two biggest ones are ch and which is just an r sound and these
are very common pronunciations in german and you know they're guttural noises and they can be very
uncomfortable to pronounce for some people i think about it all the time i'm like what happens when
a german person gets sick what happens if they have a sore throat do they just abstain from
words that have ch and r in them i wouldn't want to pronounce those words thankfully for me i had
already learned french or like i had already you know begun learning french by the time
that i started learning german so the sound was already down pat but also needs mentioning that
not all the regions like not all german-speaking regions pronounce these the same way they vary
a lot between like not just parts of germany but also in other german-speaking countries and that's
what you know makes them really really easy to distinguish accents sometimes so you know there
is a light to all the darkness you know for ch some people say ch and some people say sh,
like you know it's more like a softer sh kind of sound and for Rs you know some people say Rh and
some people trill them like Rrr. when i was in high school my german teacher she
was from like the south of germany i don't think she spoke like um bavarian per se but
she spoke german with a bavarian accent these two sounds are what make it really interesting
to listen to german from different regions and countries because they're always like
the biggest tells but simultaneously some of the hardest sounds
so i guess my advice for these two sounds would just be like to try to make them consistent
because what i do hear a lot of times from beginner german speakers is that they mix them
so sometimes they'll be like and sometimes they say sure sometimes they go huh and sometimes and
i'm just like ah kind of makes your german sound like a quilt because you're just taking you know
pronunciations from all over i mean if that's what you're going for then go ahead but i personally
did not take that route and next i would say the most difficult set of sounds for german learners
especially beginner german learners are vowels especially vowels with umlauts so i'm talking
e these sounds are not very common in a lot of languages maybe in europe a little bit but i think
for most of us we're not just we're just not used to stretching and moving our mouths in that way so
i'm honestly not surprised but you do have to put the work in on those and it's tricky because even
if you do memorize like certain umlaut sounds you have to remember random things like um like
a with an umlaut when you put it in a diphthong with you it becomes oi so the equivalent of eu
i mean diphthongs in general are difficult you know remembering like e versus i owl versus oi
and stuff like that so when you throw a diphthong in there it just like makes your brain do like a
processing time thing i play the cello i'm a cello player and i remember that when i was in high
school for the first time i encountered a piece called Träumerei which means like daydreaming
and i about had a [ __ ] stroke trying to read that word because i was like
a [ __ ] was träumatized after saying that word do not recommend okay so now moving on from the
basic stuff that everybody complains about all the time i wanted to talk about like some more
specific things that i hear people making mistakes on that kind of hinders their german from sounding
completely 100 natural you have to pay attention to s's when they proceed t's and p because i hear
people all the time they say stuff like 'Stop and Spiel' but it's not stop and spiel it's 'Shtop'
and 'Shpiel' so when s's come before t's and p's they assume an sh sound not an s sound i think
a lot of people forget this especially people from the us because we do have these words like
we have the word stop in english so when we see stoppen we're not going to say shtoppen
like it's kind of we just forget to because we have something that's similar but that is super
important adjectives and adverbs that end in i g stop making the g sound so damn hard if you listen
closely to a native german speaker you are more likely to hear them say 'häufigh' than 'hoy fig'
hoy fig is like.. i see the g you know you you want to pay attention to that g you don't want
to make it feel left out i get that but you gotta smooth it out right i think we sometimes we think
that german is such a harsh language that we have to pronounce every single word very harshly that
is a stereotype german is actually most of the times very very soft for example take the word
you see on there's an ig there but it's soft it kind of it's not really like a ch sound it's
kind of like if a g and a ch sound had a baby just chill out let it just dissolve.... häufig.
oh [ __ ] a bug just flew into my window and killed itself so the final two things this is the
penultimate thing i'm going to talk about it's not so much like specific sounds or pronunciations but
strategies um and like things that native german speakers do that makes their language sound like
you know a lot quicker and a lot more fluid and these two things have taken me such a
long time like a lot of listening practice close listening to kind of incorporating naturally so
thank me later it's so bright all of a sudden is that better so first talking about endings
um sometimes endings on german words especially verbs just disappear or they're like reduced or
something it's kind of hard for me to describe so i'd rather just show it through examples okay so
listen to these two examples especially focus on the word haben and tell me what sounds different.
so between these two examples we see kind of like an almost
like mumbling or just like an elimination or a reduction of the ben sound in 'haben'.
that is like 99 of the time if people are speaking quickly that's what you're going to hear people
don't always speak so clearly with like leBEN, haBEN. it's like leb-m, hab-m. it's kind of
trippy right it's kind of trippy for me too um another good example is with some verbs that end
in k-e-n so like for example the the verb merken which means to to realize or to remember
it's not so harsh you know you don't pronounce it so harshly it kind of just buckles onto itself
like so in a conversation or if you're watching a video where native speakers are speaking make sure
you listen to the ends of like infinitive verbs and stuff like that or just these like endings
in general and most of the time they are going to buckle okay and the final thing i wanted to talk
about it kind of encompasses a lot of different things and instances but i couldn't really if i
thought it would be pretty tedious to talk about them separately because they're pretty specific
so i just put them all under the umbrella of what i call cutting where necessary three things that
germans do all the time they often contract words cut small syllables where they think that they
can be shorter or they will just like leave final letters off of verb conjugations so here are some
of the most common examples of these things that i can remember on the top of my head. two examples
of contractions because normally these preposition and article combos would be auf dem and an das.
keep in mind though that aufm is sort of like it's more of a spoken contraction that i don't
think it's act it's not actually grammatically correct whereas turning into ans that is like
a that's grammatically correct so in general they like apply these to spoken and written speech but
yeah something that also counts toward cutting where necessary is shortenings of definite
articles so like 'Es gibt 'ne ganze Menge.' It's not 'eine' ganze Menge, it's ne ganze
Menge. If you say 'Ich hab 'n gutes Kentniss davon, it's not ein gutes Kentniss
literally definite articles are never more than two syllables but even that is too much for some
germans they're just like nope nah we're cutting the [ __ ] back so moving on you might have seen
from that last example that instead of ich habe i said ich hab. this is a very common shortening of
first person present conjugations i think they do it with some other like you know verb forms but
this is like the one that i guess i see most often so for example 'Ich hab' das noch nicht getan.'
but this isn't just with haben they also do this i hear it all the time like anything really also
building upon that um when you have inversion in a sentence and inversion is something really common
in german like with you know it's because of a certain grammatical situation the verb
will go in front of the subject instead of you know how it normally goes so like
they're not saying
i just thought of a sentence that actually exemplifies a lot of the things that i'm
talking about just to give you i guess a little example in a practical like real life example
so we got werd'ich we got nen instead of einen. We got schrei-m.
do you see what i mean like these are you know they may sound like just
little things but they they really do pile up inside of a sentence and like
inside of everyday speech oh my god i think i'm gonna stop there though because
my brain is going to explode like these are these are things that i apply in my speech all the time
but when i talk about them it does start to sound a little overwhelming so i'm going to spare you.
um so thank you so much for tuning in i will be back soon probably with more german videos
because that's really what i've been feeling and studying the most recently so makes sense right
as angela merkel would say don't do drugs stay in school and i'll catch you on the flip cheers