Avalus has sent us something to smile about today,
… on the way home I saw this pretty fearless squirrel, having its gnawy way with oakseeds. Again with a short video of the fluffy critter munching!
© Avalus, all rights reserved
© Avalus, all rights reserved
© Avalus, all rights reserved
Squee.
If you want to make people despair at the German language, make the pronounce “Eichhörnchen”
Sorry, I don’t get it. What’s so hard about that? There are a number of German words that I have more trouble pronouncing, such as “gebrochen.” (The combination “ro” always comes out sounding like I’m clearing my throat when I try to say it.)
No Content Warning for Iris? ;-)
@Giliell, that is soo true. It is one of those German words that I was never able to pronounce no matter how much I tried.
@Allison, maybe it has something to do with what your mother language is? Gebrochen is a word that never made any trouble to anyone I know who learned German, and I know over twenty such people. But Czechs have usually trouble with “soft” R, because Czech language does not contain it, but “hard” R is not a problem, because it is the only R our language has.
A cute critter with a throaty German name in autumn light.
Allison
I met very few people who got that one right. The soft “ch” seems to evade most people. And then two of them with an h in between. Poor French and Spanish speakers.
Look at how Ice Swimmer thinks it’s throaty when it’s one of the softest sounding German words I know
I wasn’t aware that German distinguished between a hard and a soft “r”. (Russian, yes.)
I do know that different regions do “r” differently — my (German) “r” is way back in the throat, as is the hard “ch”, and so is “o”, which I think is why I have trouble with “gebrochen” — it’s all in back where you’d clear your throat. However in some regions — like Bavaria and Franken — they do “r” with the tip of the tongue, like Italian and Spanish. (It’s also the “r” you use when singing in German. When I was in a chorus and we did pieces in German, I’d end up using the back “r” when saying the words, but the front “r” when singing them. But then, phonemes are different when sung vs. when spoken anyway.)
I lived in Munich for a few years, but never picked up the Bavarian “r”. I did pick up the habit of pronouncing unstressed “e” high up, like the “e” in “schnee”, but shorter.
Just for fun, some regions don’t have a soft “ch” at all (Vorarlberg and parts of Switzerland), all the “ch” sounds are hard (=back of the mouth), so words like “ich” sound funny to my ear.
Languages are fun…
I got the ach and ich sounds mixed up, right? In Finnish, we only have the h as in Herr or haben and as for the r, the throat r is absent and the frontal trill r is stronger/longer than the German one.
@gedjcj: Damn, forgot about that!
@Giliell: I am not that fies xD
Yep.
@Allison, German has many dialects, and the one where Giliell lives is particularly difficult for me to understand for example. I had one colleague from there who seemed unable to speak “Hochdeutsch” with me and it was not uncommon for me to have to ask him to repeat sentences multiple times before I was able to get what he says. But that same could be said for other colleagues from other regions as well. Even after spending twelve years in Germany, there were dialects that sounded like totaly alien language to me.
As for German pronunciation, I was once told that “anxiety sweat” is Angstschweiss, which seems extremely appropriate.
(spelling from memory, never heard the pronunciation)
The general region. It’s one where dialects are rich and often used to vary from one village to another. And yeah, it’s pretty far removed from standard German. We’ve got primary dialects here, which means they evolved independently and then one of them won the race for becoming the standard language. English outside of the UK are secondary dialects, that’s why the USA does have dialects, but they are not as different from one another than traveling for 200 miles in the UK.
Travelling far less than 200 miles will result in different dialects in some parts, particularly what are now the large conurbations, so there is an obvious difference between English as spoken in Sheffield and as spoken in Barnsley which are maybe 15 miles apart, or between the “Black Country” towns & city and the rest of the West Midlands cities again around 15 miles apart. The thing I have found that helps me understand the different dialects more easily is that it is often the rhythym of speech that changes as much as the pronunciation aand words, so if I can key into that rhythym change I can generally understand the variation in dialect.