The Sounds of German

Being constantly surrounded by a language is always an interesting oral experience, especially when it's a language that you don't know very well. With German, however, I've found that being surrounded by this language isn't exactly the most pleasant experience. I've never found it to be a particularly beautiful language—in fact, I think it's pretty ugly. Even when I speak it. There are some sounds that I find okay, and it certainly isn't as ugly as I thought it was before I started studying it, but it isn't singsongy like Italian and doesn't flow continuously like French. I guess it's even uglier than English, and I'm not particularly attached to English as an aesthetically pleasing language.

In any case, I thought that for this post, it might be nice to reflect on a few of the sounds I hear a lot in German, and what I think of them, for those of you readers who don't really know what it sounds like.

First off, the umlauts, otherwise known as the ¨ accent. There are three vowels that can have an umlaut above them in German (ü, ö, ä). If you can't type them with your computer, you can also just write each letter with an e following it, which is—at least for me—a more phonetically meaningful way of writing it. The umlaut changes the vowels by making them less "pure" in a way, kind of like how you'd think they'd be pronounced if they were followed by an E. The actual vowels (u, o, a) are pronounced like this: (ooo, oh, ah). With the umlauts, they are pronounced a bit differently: [y] is the phonetic way of writing ü (which is also the French u)...essentially it is an "ee" but with your lips rounded, as if you were saying "ou"; ö is pronounced like the French e, or [ø] with the proper phonetic writing...kind of like pronouncing "eh" but with your lips rounded; and the ä is like "eh" or the "ea" in "bear."

Got it?

Then there are the "ch" that crop up everywhere. Now, don't be fooled like I was initially. I thought that every "ch" in German was that guttural "ch" like in Hebrew. Turns out that that clearing out your throat sound only happens about half of the time. For instance, if I want to say the word "I", I say "ich." As in the famous "Ich bin ein Berliner." Now, this "ch" in "ich" isn't a "sh" or a "ch", but rather a bit of air flowing over your tongue as you raise it up to the roof of your mouth. It kind of sounds like a cat hissing, I guess. But it's less harsh than you'd think. But, if the "ch" comes after an "o" or a "u" or "a," then it is pronounced with the throat. 

The German "r" in the middle of a word is like a French "r," (kind of gargling a bit), but at the end of a word, it's basically just implied. So "Berliner" isn't pronounced like in English, but rather "Berlineh." Like a Boston "r." There is also the ß in German, which is like a double S. "tion" at the end of a word is like a "zion" where the z is a "tz" (always is in German). 

Well there you have it, the sounds of German! That's what I'm hearing every day, when people are speaking or when I'm just trying to sound out certain words in my head. That's what I heard last night when I saw Cabaret (das Musical) performed live, translated into German. The lousy German accents that the American actors generally fake were translated into the real language, and it was a pretty special experience, let me tell you. 

The thing I found most difficult about Cabaret in German (and I'll write more about this on my other blog, the Broadway one) was how sinister it seemed in the authentic language. In fact, I think that is part of my problem with German. While stories of the Holocaust and WWII are certainly upsetting to everyone (not least of all the German people themselves), it was only when speaking of those subjects that I was ever exposed to German. In high school, when learning about WWII, we heard Hitler's speeches, Nazi guards screaming "Raus" at Jewish victims, and propaganda videos. I never heard "nice" German, or a person speaking German calmly without screaming at someone. In a way, that has shaped my perception of the language, and it's not always pleasant to hear it. Hopefully by dint of improving my German, I can surmount this reaction I have to the language itself, and learn to find the beauty in these sounds.