German
There are several German vowels that create problems for English speakers:
- One of the most difficult is German /eː/ as it is further forward in the mouth than in varieties of Standard English so that speakers may pronounce German Geht as if it were English gate.
- Similarly, /a/ is very similar to the accent of northern and central England. Hall (2003) suggests that the vowel in Southern British English hut is closest.
- Most English speakers also have difficulty with the two sounds represented by ch in German, usually replacing them both with. /k/; they also have difficulty with the guttural r of most German dialects.
Read more about this topic: Anglophone Pronunciation Of Foreign Languages
Famous quotes containing the word german:
“A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“Boys hide in lunging cubes
Crouching to explode,
Beyond the Atlantic skies,
With cheerful cries
Their barking tubes
Upon the German toad.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)