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:
“Boys hide in lunging cubes
Crouching to explode,
Beyond the Atlantic skies,
With cheerful cries
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Upon the German toad.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I don’t want to shoot any Englishmen. I never saw one ‘til I came up here. But I suppose most of them never saw a German ‘til they came up here.”
—Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959)