Re: pronunciation of "r" before WW1

iwasaki wrote:

I'm shocked! I believed it was true, as many German language
learning books tell us. I bought my first German grammar book when I
was a high school student. It was an old book even at that time, and
it says that its first impression was published in 1957 (my copy was
the 91 impression). The book mentions the pronunciation of each
German word in katakana so that the beginner would understand, and it
says "der Vater" is "deru faateru". Nowadays German learning books
in Japan say it's "dea faataa", and German I learned at college was
also like that. So maybe the German language old Japanese people learned was not German spoken before WW2, but German spoken in some regions?

The problem, I suspect, is that the Japanese "ru" is pronounced with the
front of the tongue, whereas the German "r" is pronounced with the back
of the tongue. Thus, both sets of textbooks are giving you equally wrong
approximations of a sound that does not exist in Japanese. What you
need, I believe, is the sort of textbook that shows the shape of the
mouth and tongue needed to make the sound, combined with some practice
with tapes (or similar) that let you compare your pronunciation with
that of a native German speaker.

English speakers have the same problem, by the way. It's possible that
you have learnt how to speak German with an English accent.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer
receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet
address could disappear at any time.
.

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