The following funny but educational video tries to elaborate why the German accent in English sounds the way it does.
The video featuring Svenja Patricia Quecke better known as Trixi from the YouTube channel DontTrustTheRabbit, will help you understand what makes the German accent the German accent. Well, that may sound strange but you’ll soon realise that isn’t.
Patricia sat down and did a research by asking herself the following question: What characteristics does a typical German accent have and why?
She presents the results of what she humbly says wasn’t a professional research but her personal guesswork. Patricia is being modest here because her findings are amazing.
What does a typical German accent sound like and what’s the explanation for that?
1. The staccato talking – which means when Germans speak, they make a little break after every word.
2. The German pride of consonants – one fact that you’ll easily notice about the German language is that Germans are not afraid of consonants. They are in fact proud of consonants and emphasis them even more. Patricia says Germans in fact use consonants very confidently and instead don’t put so much weight on the vowels.
3. The last letter love – in English language sometime people swallow the last letter of the word, in German that never happens.
4. The sounds that Germans don’t know or know differently. Patricia mentions the consonants she discovered to be unknown to Germans or are known in a different way. For instance, in German, “D” is often pronounced as “T”. “It is the opposite of what English tries to do. English tries to soften everything and we are trying to de-soften everything,” she says.
WATCH THE VIDEO AND HEAR THE WAY PATRICIA EXPLAINS THE ABOVE POINTS
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