This article is about a fineness of German pronunciation that can take you to the next level. Many learners of German don't know this, or only figure it out after many years. Even the author of this article had to learn German for 7 years and start her career at sylby to discover it... But you never stop learning, that's the beauty of languages!
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It's no secret that Germans love their consonants. And Germans have a particular preference for certain consonants: the voiceless ones. To check whether a sound is voiced or voiceless, place two fingers against your larynx and pronounce a sound. If you feel a vibration, you are pronouncing a voiced consonant, whereas if there is no vibration, it is a voiceless consonant.
"DeR Ritter ritt auf seinem Ross durch den Wald und hielt Ausschau nach dem Räuber, der ihm seine Rüstung gestohlen hatte.” What do you notice about this German sentence? Rrrright! There are a lot of R's. The letter R is one of the most frequently occurring consonants in German. However, it can cause some problems for German learners. When we learn the German alphabet, we only learn one letter for the R. What many people don't know, however, is that there is more than one r-sound! In phonetics, we distinguish between different r-variations. The most common r-variations are [r], [ʁ] and [ʀ]. There are many more r-sounds in other languages, but these are the most common in German, which is why we will focus on them in this article.
There is a famous saying in Italian that goes: 'Il mondo é bello perché e vario'. It means that the world is so beautiful precisely because it is so colorful, so diverse. It is the same with language and pronunciation. There are around 7000 languages in the world, which means 7000 different ways of expressing emotions, telling stories, interpreting humor, including a variety of sounds and speech melodies to sing through life. Isn't that wonderful?
In American movies, we often see people speaking German portrayed stereotypically with a harsh accent. Have you ever wondered why that is? The portrayal in movies is often exaggerated to make scenes more dramatic. However, there's also a linguistic basis behind it, and it's partly due to the German sound system. There are certain aspects of German pronunciation that make it sound harsh compared to other languages.
Learning a new language requires a lot of effort, time, and energy, which can sometimes be frustrating when you can't communicate as quickly as you'd like. Moreover, there was a long-standing belief that learning languages could confuse and impair children. So why should one embark on this journey? We have many reasons, and hopefully, this article will offer you some inspiration and motivation.
If you’re learning German, you may have struggled with one of the tricky new sounds. And perhaps you’ve wondered, while practicing, if there is a standard German pronunciation. In this article, we’ll give you a brief overview of its merits and its weaknesses.
Vietnamese-speaking German learners are especially lucky at sylby, as the co-founder wrote her doctoral thesis among other things on second language pronunciation by native Vietnamese speakers. Therefore, she has many tips for native Vietnamese speakers up her sleeve: also in the lesson videos you get an exclusive tip here and there. This way, the efforts of her PhD time have been worth it for you!
The Ukrainian language is characterized above all by its many voiced consonants. This means that the vocal chords vibrate when the consonants are spoken. Today, it is spoken by an estimated 40 million people, some of whom would also like to learn German.
Czech has been influenced by the German language for a long time and has adopted many German words. Although the two languages share many similarities, such as short and long vowels or final devoicing of certain consonants (pronunciation of b d g as p t k at the end of a word like in Tag [taːk] ‘den/day’), there are several sounds and phenomena that can cause difficulties for Czech learners. In this article we’re going to look at five of them and give you tips on how to improve your pronunciation in German!
"Singing": this is what comes to mind when one is asked to describe the sound of Swedish. You could almost think that Swedish has a musical sound. Because of this, linguists are even discussing whether Swedish is a tonal language. This means that different pitches in a syllable also bring different word meanings, which is usually first associated with African or Asian languages.
Persian or Farsi is the official language of several countries in Central and the Near East and belongs to the Indo-European language family, to which German also belongs. However, the more than 100 million speakers of Persian are accustomed to pronunciation conventions that are significantly different from those of Germans.
Italian is perceived by people who speak German as more melodic and musical compared to German. The Italian accent in German is often perceived as sympathetic, but it also brings challenges when Italian speakers want to learn German. Here are some tips that can help.
Learning languages is a complex thing. If you want to use a language in all possible aspects of everyday life, you have to familiarize yourself with all the aspects of a language. If grammar and vocabulary are the theoretical part of language use, then pronunciation is the absolute practice.
When we talk about Chinese, we mix up many different Chinese varieties. Chinese is often mistakenly used as a generic term for all Chinese languages, but a distinction must be made between Mandarin, the official language in China, and all other Chinese varieties (e.g. Wu or Cantonese).
Learning German is not child's play. Not even for francophones; even if the word francophone might remind you of the city of Frankfurt or the region of Franconia, although speakers of French are meant.
With around 615 million speakers worldwide and its status as one of the official languages of the Indian government, Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet. German and Hindi both belong to the Indo-European language family. Thus, some words in German and Hindi have common ancestors and the similarity can be seen to some extent even today.
The history of the Greek language goes back a long way and many languages have integrated words from it as foreign words. German has also taken many words from Greek and partially germanized them. One might think that this makes learning German easier for Greek speakers. However, there are definitely some differences in pronunciation.
Your native tongue or other linguistic skills you have has a big impact on how well you can deal with the pronunciation of the language you are learning. Languages that differ a lot from what you are used to tend to be more of a challenge. And pronunciation is not an exception from this. Here are 5 tips for Polish speakers to help you improve your German pronunciation.
German and Thai are two languages with many differences. They have different structures and are not related. Thai, unlike German, is a tonal language. Thus, the pitch of the sound influences the meaning of the word. This does not exist in German, as there are more vowels here, but more about that later. Also that doesn't mean that someone who speaks Thai as a first language can't learn German. On your way to mastering German pronunciation, sylby is here to help you every step of the way.
There are many challenges that Spanish speakers face when learning German that are also well known to people of other languages. However, there are also specific difficulties for Spanish speakers. In any case, practice makes perfect!
Wolof is mainly spoken in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania. Despite the geographical distance, Wolof and German pronunciation are not that different! The two languages have an almost identical vowel and consonant system. They also share the distinction between long and short, open and closed vowels. Even some phenomena, such as the hardening of certain consonants at the end of the word, are familiar to both groups of speakers. In this context, as a Wolof speaker, you can draw on a lot of knowledge about your own language to practice German pronunciation.
There are thousands of languages around the world, and it is not surprising that they all differ on different levels - whether in sentence or word construction, and the same for pronunciation. There are many linguistic differences between German and Korean. This also results from the fact that both belong to different language families. German belongs to the Indo-European language family and is part of the West Germanic language group. The linguistic categorisation of Korean, on the other hand, is not that easy. The majority of linguists see it as part of the isolated language family, which means: No relashionship can be drawn to other languages, including German.
Many German speakers also like the English language very much. That's why there is even a mixture of German and English called Denglish. This can be very handy for native English speakers, as they can often improvise a mixture of both languages. Another advantage is that both languages are related, as they are both Germanic languages and also the most spoken in Europe.
Russian has about 250 million speakers. It is the most widely spoken language of the East Slavic language family, not only in Russia itself, but also in other countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Because of the Cyrillic alphabet, Russian learners of German must first learn a new alphabet. Sometimes, if you have already learned English, you are at least already familiar with the letters.
Croatian and German have more in common than you might think. For many language learners, the German language is difficult because of the many so-called cases. However, this is not such a big problem for Croatian speakers, as they are experts in this field: not only are cases also present in Croatian, but there are almost twice as many as in German! Maybe you already know that Croatian has several loanwords from German, such as the word kofer, which comes from the German word Koffer ‘suitcase’, or beštek, which means Besteck ‘cutlery’ in German.
Hebrew is a very old language. It belongs to the family of Semitic languages and is closely related to Arabic. The oldest form is called Ancient Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew originated between around the 12th and 10th centuries B.C.E. Later, it was mainly used in religion. But plot twist: in 1880, the author Eliezer Ben-Yehuda revived the language. This gave rise to modern Hebrew, also known as Ivrith. Alongside Arabic, Ivrith is the official language of the State of Israel.
Language learning has evolved with technology, notably through CALL and MALL. This overview explores mobile apps' role in mastery, tech's impact on pronunciation teaching, adoption differences, future trends, challenges, case studies, app comparisons, and tech's role in fostering cultural understanding and accessibility.
In the history of mankind, language has always played a major role, both on the communicative and on the social level. It can happen that language differences are perceived as a barrier and in the worst case this can lead to discrimination. In this article we address the relation between accent and discrimination.
If you learned Turkish as a first language and now want to learn German, you will quickly realize: Turkish is in love with vowels, German with consonants. This way, the two languages could almost not be more different in terms of pronunciation. Nevertheless, there are some helpful tips tailored for you to overcome the hurdles of German pronunciation.
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