Good Pronunciation sites?

Filan

Would you believe despite a long time immersion in the German language..I still have problems with the most vital of sounds...ch...especially in -Ich-...meine Freundin ist deutsche and it's embarassing!...Hilf mir bite!:)

Sin scéal eile

Filan wrote: »

.I still have problems with the most vital of sounds...ch...especially in -Ich-...

Are you Irish? if so you would have learned Irish in school, the German ch is just the same as in irish (just like you're about to make a huge spit )

F.A.

That's not entirely true, unfortunately. The "ch"-sound you refer to as being similar to the one in the Irish language is the one that appears after a, o, and u when written. When appearing after e, i, ö, ä, and ü (and not followed by s), the sound is totally different.

OP, I have been trying to teach my Irish boyfriend that same sound, but he's very impatient and gets too frustrated to try and practice...

The theory is easy enough, though - the sound is basically a voiceless version of y in words like you, year etc. You form it at the tip of your tongue, close enough to the middle of it, but you keep your voice off. If you don't know how to do that, put your hand at your throat and say "bbbbb". You should feel a vibration at your throat. Now do this but say "pppp" instead. The vibration should be gone as p is the voiceless version of b. Make any sense? Once you get that, it's just a matter of practicing.

Good luck! I salute you for wanting to get it right!

That_Guy

http://www.fonetiks.org/

Try this site. It's decent enough.

Breaktown

I use http://www.dict.cc/

They have pronounciations for most words, though a lot of them are computerised.