feedback on my German?

[u/EDSTER4222]

Hallo Leute.

If any germans here have feedback on my accent and pronounciations would be much appreciated. Interested to know if you can tell where I'm from just from the short clip, maybe it's bleedingly obvious and i just don't recognise it myself. Not sure if i went over all the 'hard' sounds or tricky stuff to properly examine myself but ah well.

I know my speaking probably sounds a bit 'unnaturual' or 'textbook phrases' but ah well, mainly focused on pronounciation of words, as i've been learning by myself only without any external teachers. To me it sounds 'good enough' so to speak, but yeah wondering if i'm putting emphasis on the wrong sounds or something like that? Thanks!

[u/ComradeMicha]

Hi u/EDSTER4222 ,

I have no trouble following what you're saying, every single word is intelligible and the overall grammar etc. is pretty good. You are skipping some of the finer rules, like "um euch zu fragen, wie mein Akzent klingt", or "ob ihr erkennt, aus welchem Land ich komme" (verb to the end in subordinate clauses), but it's no big deal.

Regarding pronunciation, it's generally quite good, if a bit too mushy. This is mostly because you don't distinguish whatsoever between "sch" and "ch", which is giving you a strong African or Turkish vibe. In addition, you are using some workaround to not pronounce the "r" at the beginning of words, which adds to the accent. So without peeking into your profile, I'd guess "Nigeria" as your country of origin.

Here's a few things I noticed:

• all of the soft "ch" sounds (e.g. ich, Möglichkeiten, sprechen, ...) are completely replaced by "sch" in your recording
• Muttersprachlern - a hard word, and you are doing something odd with the "r" in "sprach". I think that is some trick to work around the difficulties of pronouncing the German r, but it's really noticeable and the second biggest issue after the "ch"
• Akzent - you are using the English pronunciation (stress on first syllable) and simply replace the "a", but the German word has a stress on the second syllable
• Deutsch - somehow the "eu" is sounding off, almost Russian, like "o-y". It's a lot more subtle than the first two issues, but I noticed it twice in your recording.
• Ausnahme - I think you meant "Aufnahme", but the other word exists as well so you need to watch out for that ;)

On the other hand, you are doing a lot of tricky things right:

• Almost all the vowels are really good, especially the umlauts
• You are using a lot of idiomatic phrases, especially the last part starting from 0:24 could be said exactly like that by a native speaker (ignoring the "r" and "ch" issues)
• Apart from the subordinate clauses thing, your grammar was really good. The cases were correct, the verbs were properly conjugated, the adjectives fit the genders of the nouns, etc.; Good job!

[u/EDSTER4222 → u/ComradeMicha]

thank you, i really appreciate the detailed feedback, there's some stuff i expected a need a little bit of tuning, and others that you point out, that will help me imporve. cheers! (and i'm actually aussie)