No word ending slides into the subsequent word. Compare that to English and you'll either sound like a robot or like you're angrily forcing each word out at a time. You're hopefully not a robot. Another thing is the pitch of your voice. Obviously voices vary in pitch, but in general you notice that other languages use a much wider range than German does.
It makes it sound a little monotonous compared to other languages. That one sounds awfully harsh, doesn't it? However, there is another aspect he failed to address: aspiration. In German, almost all unvoiced stops are aspirated, whether they occur word-initial Tor word-final rot or word-internal hatte. By comparison, in French or Finnish stops are always unaspirated and in English they are usually only aspirated in word-initial positions.
The aspiration often causes speakers of those languages to perceive German as rather harsh and often even perceive a German accent in their own language as harsh. A milder, second aspekt is the presence of up to all four different affricates: tz, tsch, pf and in dialects kch.
While ts and tsch are somewhat known across many languages and, ironically, tsch is rather rare in German , pf and kch are very rare across the world and only occur in German across the developped countries.
Especially the non-dialectal pf may also contribute significantly to perceived harshness. As a matter of fact, after two weeks in Berlin, I only thought it sounded harsh on one occasion - when a public servant was being rude on purpose. This has left the Country as well as the language with a really bad reputation over the years. In Countries like the US, and even England, most people still draw their knowledge of Germany from the many Hollywood Nazi Movies - with tall blonde Soldiers shouting around orders, running into combat like robots from Star Wars guess who was the Prototype for the Empire , and laughing like evil devils.
I would compare it to the way the arabic and maybe russian is portrayed in Hollywood movies atm. Most Englishspeakers think those languages sound harsh as well. Now - that being said, many German dialects could sound a bit harsh to the average Englishspeaker even if History had gone down a different path. I noticed that British, and even US English is generally more polite than the major northern German dialects. Also, while seeming a little bit rude at times, German is still very formal: The kind of Wordgames, and new Word creations that is common in English, and especially the humor has only started to enter spoken common German the last 20years or so.
I have to admit that I sometimes miss the humor and lightness so common in general English conversation when I am in Germany. But it's not the only Country to have that problem, and that is not a general characteristic of the language itself. For example, if you go from Bavaria to Austria,Vienna, people have a more laisser-faire way, and they speak, even though akin to Bavarian dialect, in a more melodic, sing-sang and humorous tone.
And even though Viennese does have a lot of peculiarities, it still IS the same German language Die Dialekte klingen nicht unbedingt hart. Die sogenannte Hochsprache dagegen klingt hart. Manche Leute sprechen halt sehr explosiv, andere ganz entspannt. Das macht sehr viel aus. Sign up to join this community. Do you think German sounds harsher than most other languages? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section! Posted by Katie See Author's Bio. Interested in German? Take German Classes in Toronto.
Improve your German. Browse hundreds of videos, take endless quizzes and master the German language faster than you've ever imagine! Watching a fun video, but having trouble understanding it? FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive subtitles. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don't know, you can add it to a vocabulary list.
And FluentU isn't just for watching videos. It's a complete platform for learning. German is pronounced with the back of the tongue and consists of mainly hard syllables. It is important to note that this is different from the romance languages which just flow off of the tongue and generally are pronounced with light flowing syllables.
On a different note, German, in pop culture, is generally represented through Nazis. He yells the entire time! When you hear regular people speaking or even children speaking, that is what German sounds like, not the stereotypical German of pop culture.
The German people are not all angry and just because Nazis were bad and yelled angry German a lot, that does not mean the German language sounds that way or should sound that way. The second video is 11 minutes of screaming Germans!
I find this post rather entertaining because my grandmother, a German native but now American citizen, sounds so angry when she yells in German— my whole family just laughs at her when it happens!
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