Pronounciation/German | Specific language questions | Forum

You'll find an explanation of the German phonetic system for native speakers of English at

http://www.german-grammar.de/grammar/content/grammar_1_5.htm#chapter3

Two online phrasebooks with audio:

http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EN/ENDE/ENDE002.HTM

http://www.ielanguages.com/German.html

Edit: I'm moving this thread to the "Specific language questions" subforum. I hope you don't mind

Do you recall the Blog post on The “flow” of fluency: How to freestyle rap in a foreign language?

Idahosa Ness's conviction is that:

A more efficient approach is to focus first on mastering all the component sounds of your target language before studying the meanings associated with those sounds.

I concur that under ideal conditions one would to take the time to master the sound system first, but in fact my curiosity has always kept me from concentrating exclusively on phonetics.

One point to keep in mind is that bad pronunciation habits can be difficult to break after a while. However, the difficulty really depends on what you want to unlearn.  For instance, if a certain letter has only one pronunciation in your target language, and you finally get the hang of pronouncing it correctly, it's surprisingly easy to replace your old pronunciation with your new one in all contexts even after years of study. That is why, as frustrating as it might be not to instantly get to grips with, for instance, rolling your R like a native speaker, there is no need to get frustrated – at least as far as my experience goes.

The story is a quite different one in cases where you have been approximating different sounds with a single sound, though … So now matter how unnatural your first approximations of new phonemes might seem at the beginning, make a conscious effort to produce separate approximations for different phonemes.

Another mistake I found particularly difficult to unlearn is stressing particular words on the wrong syllable.

Since I do not intend to paraphrase all that has been said on this topic, I end this post referring you to the forums' link collection on pronunciation & phonetics.