The dangers of pronouncing perfectly

Speaking well can also get you into trouble

There are some people who are such good mimics that even as adults they can learn to speak a language with no foreign accent at all. I am supposedly one of those (depending on which language, how tired I am, my state of mind when speaking, and who is making the judgment). We have covered some of the dangers of pronouncing poorly, but I can tell you that good pronunciation leads to its own set of madcap problems.

Imagine, for example, that it’s your first time in Germany, you have no foreign accent, and no one can detect you’re a foreigner until you make a grammar or vocabulary mistake (which in my case doesn’t take that long). You’re standing in an art museum, and you notice that the title of one painting of a local scene contains the word Schornstein (“smokestack”). You want to know what this word means, so you turn to the friendly old volunteer guard who has been moseying behind you. In German you ask him, “Sir, what does Schornstein mean?” You’re an adult, he thinks you’re a native German, so his subconscious mind doesn’t register your real question. In his own language he responds, “Oh, that’s not there anymore! There’s St. Sebastian’s church, but that Schornstein is no longer standing.” Wonderful. You still don’t know what the word means. So you try clarifying your question. “No, sir. I was asking what Schornstein means.” He replies, “I think they made tires there.” You give up and just guess.

That happened to me.

After my museum visit, I went out onto the street and had to call from a pay phone. (Yes, this was way back in the day.) I saw unfamiliar slots on it, and my German vocabulary wasn’t yet adequate to the instructions posted farther up. A German walked by. In his language I said, “Excuse me, sir, could you show me how to use this telephone?” I evidently sounded like a German. He thought I was a German. I said I didn’t know how to do something as routine as using a German pay phone, which every German child knew how to do. He stared, grinned at me, and burst out a one-syllable laugh: “HA!” Then he walked away.

Later I was out at the open-air farmer’s market. I saw these big flattened-out fruits, and I asked the man in German what they were. He told me they were figs, “Feigen”. I didn’t know that word, and I didn’t know what figs looked like anyway, so I kept asking him questions. He kept telling me they were “Feigen”, “Feigen…” with his face increasingly registering a look of concern, as if he thought there was something wrong with me mentally.

You’d think I’d have just told these people I was a foreigner, but it didn’t occur to me. Besides, if I told them I was American, they’d likely switch to English and I’d lose my chance to practice German.

Let’s say you head for the train station. You find out which train you need, and locate the boarding platform, but when you get there it’s chained off. You ask a pleasant-looking woman next to you (in your TV announcer German), “Why aren’t they letting us on there? It’s about time to get on the train.” She responds with a stream of ordinary, educated German that is beyond your present level of comprehension. Like a good tourist, you request, again in perfect broadcaster’s German, that she repeat it: “Excuse me. Could you speak more slowly, please? I can’t understand you.” She gives you a stare that says, “What planet did YOU just land from?”

All of these things really happened to me some years ago. When I recounted them to the German-born mother of a friend, she replied, “That’s a great compliment to your German! They thought you were an idiot and not a tourist! That’s really a compliment!”

Not long after that, a Colombian coworker came to my corporate cubicle and asked if I had any German language audio she could borrow. She was being sent to Europe soon to work on a two-week project. At least somebody speaks good English everywhere you go in Germany, so it seemed to me she didn’t need to learn anything for such a short trip. But since she was an avid language learner and a proficiency certificate collector, I thought maybe she had some longer-term goal. I told her that which audio I gave her depended on how much she wanted to learn. She said, “Just enough so that I won’t sound stupid.” Considering my recent experience over in Germany, I explained, “It’s okay. You’ll sound like a normal tourist. You need to study and practice the language for many years before you can sound stupid!”

Danger along the way

On the path to good pronunciation, there can be some temporary blocks and setbacks. One very common one involves mastering a new sound that to you seems similar to one that’s familiar to you. You get so concentrated on getting the new sound right that you overdo it and replace the old familiar sound with it. You can see this when some foreigners learn English. The German language, for example, doesn’t have the th sounds that are in English. Many Germans replace them with s and z, saying things like, “He sinks we went zere.” When a German first gets really conscious that he’s pronouncing these sounds wrong, and finally begins sticking his tongue between his teeth to make the th sounds, besides replacing his incorrect s and z with th sounds, he may, for a while, replace every s and z sound with them. This will lead him to say, “He thinkth we went there.”

Another example you may hear around you happens when foreigners try hard to learn to pronounce an American r. Some languages have what is called a “tapped” r, which is a quick tap against the roof of the mouth, right behind the teeth. This would be the r in Italian, Albanian, Polish, Russian, Arabic and many other languages. Some people whose native languages have this type of r become very conscious that this is not how Americans pronounce that letter, so whenever they’re tempted to flap an r, they make an American r instead. It usually sounds fine, but for a while they’ll wind up overdoing it. Notice that the t sound in words like “butter” or “Peter,” or in phrases like “a lot of” doesn’t come out of American mouths as a true t, but as something quicker than a d. In fact, it’s the same sound as this tapped r in other languages. People who speak those languages hear that tap in American pronunciation, and their subconscious tells them to replace it with an American r. As a result, they say things like “burrer,” “Perer” and “a lor of people.” It’s really hard to fix that once it starts.

French has two sounds that seem like u to Americans. The sound spelled in French as “ou” is about the same as our American “oo” and causes people few problems. The other one, which is also in German, Swedish, Hungarian, Finnish, Mongolian, Chinese and many other languages, is spelled “u” in French, and is often represented phonetically as ü. About the only time you will hear this one in English is when a comedian imitates a Swedish accent. It’s made by forming the inside of your mouth to say “ee” but at the same time rounding your lips as if to say “oo”. It doesn’t sound like “yoo”, but is just one pure vowel. Recently I heard a true story of a young woman who worked very hard on that vowel during her French studies, and suddenly started overdoing it, saying ü even where she just needed an u sound. This led to a little embarrassment. A few times she was in restaurants and instead of telling the waiters, “Merci beaucoup,” (meaning “thank you very much,” and having an “oo” sound at the end), she’d say, “Merci beaucü.” This sounded to the waiters like, “Merci beau cul!” which means, “Thank you, nice ass!”

These mistakes from trying too hard are unavoidable, and should only continue for a short time. Do not use them as an excuse not to try! Just chuckle along with the rest of the people and press on. The mistakes will go away, and your speech will be greatly improved.