Suppose you’ve dutifully learned your letters, trained your ears, and are feeling pretty confident about your pronunciation skills. Then you open up some book or website and find hard to pronounce words like Streichholzschächtelchen (little match box) or Eisenbahnknotenpunkt-hinundherschieber (Railroad switch operator) or the Czech vowel-less masterpiece čtvrthrst (a quarter of a handful). How do you get that many sounds into your […]
The Key to Learning Pronunciation
As rumor has it, you can’t learn to have a good accent if you’re above the age of 7, or 12, or some other age that you’ve most definitely already exceeded. But that can’t possibly be true. Singers and actors learn new accents all the time, and they’re not, on average, smarter than everyone else (and […]
Announcing Fluent-Forever.com and the Kickstarter!
After a loooong delay, I’m happy to finally have some announcements and updates!
Survey Results (The Difficult Sounds of German for English speakers)
Thanks to all who participated. Here are the (most important) word pairs that caused problems: Scale: 1 – Sound the same (mit/mit). 2 – Very Similar (drücken/drucken). 3 – Similar (Pfüte, Pföte). 4 – Different (Pfeet/Pfit). 5 – Completely different (Meat/Mat)
Reader Q&A: What to do when – How to use a pronunciation guide, daily routines, custom Anki models
Part two in Reader Q&A, we’ll talk about the order that you should learn things. Q: I got one of the Pronounce it Perfectly Books. How do I use it with your approach? Should I learn the base vocabulary concurrently? A: I’d follow the book and put the spelling rules into my Anki deck (so words […]
