Prosody and intonation in German

[tungemål]

Haselnuss: Excellent answer, thanks for that.

I agree that working systematically through a book, like you did, would be beneficial. I have to consider if that will be worth the time and money for me.

My Italki teacher told me that my pronunciation is good. That is in large part due to the fact that Norwegian and German pronunciation are fairly similar. However, the teacher I've got doesn't seem to have much insight into intonation patterns. It is not something I really "need" to work on to make myself understood, but it would be fun to have a more native-like intonation.

For me, I think I'll use the Frölich Deutsch video as a model for practicing and not spend too much time on it.

[Andersonko]

I just discovered this forum and note that it has not been very active recently. But I hope some of you are still around. I am a retired professor of German. I completed my PhD in Germanic Linguistics at the University of Colorado in 1970. My doctoral study was entitled Some Aspects of English Language Interference in Learning German Intonation. It involved an extensive study of intonation patterns of native Germans, native American English speakers, and AE students of German. Patterns were observed by listening and with the help of the Jensen Transpitchmeter and the Kay sound spectrograph.

In general, I agree with the forum observations so far. However two vital factors are missing.

1. Syllable rhythm. German leans toward syllable timing, while American English is strongly stress-timed. AE does not favor long stretches of unaccented syllables. Of course, stress spacing is not absolute, but always works toward perceived even spacing. Jamming syllables into the spaces contributes to vowel reduction. In German, with more syllable timing, vowels retain more of their "full" attributes. AE students typically use too many secondary accents when speaking German because of their native AE stress timing.

2. Bracketing/parenthesis. German is rife with parenthetic constructions, such as so-called separable prefixes, etc. It should not be surprising that bracketing (Umklammerung) is found in intonation. A statement can be divided into three parts, head, body, tail. At the end of the head there is a rise to a mid-high level. The rise is continued through the body which concludes with a fall on the primary sentence stress, and the tail continues mid-low until concluding fall. The pattern is up, over, and down. German writers refer to this as the Spannbogeneffekt. The pitch remains mid-high through the body.

Of course, the variations of intonation are great, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I would welcome further discussion.

[tungemål]

Welcome to the forum, Andersonko.

So if you had to summarize: to learn a convincing German intonation, what should one focus on?

[Le Baron]

I just discovered this forum and note that it has not been very active recently. But I hope some of you are still around.

Oh, I though it was quite active.

1. Syllable rhythm. German leans toward syllable timing, while American English is strongly stress-timed.

I would accept this without question for French, but German - whose speakers have pretty much the same issue with French as English speakers do, namely that is has long strings of unaccented words linked by liaison - seems to me to lean more towards stress timing, or at the very least in-between.

The 'isochrony' of German, its use of intonation and tempo, seems to me much closer to that of English in general and especially as German makes a big deal about enunciating the separation between words - whereas French as a syllable-timed language doesn't care about separating words very much at all. Plus the intonation in syllable-timed languages is generally monotone and has very set ways of adding intonation.