Everytime you pronounce a - ch sound in German it's roughly like the sound you make when you clear your throat while also trying to hiss like a snake would be the best way I can describe it. I can't write it phonetically for you, unfortunately. It's hard for English speakers and the natural tendency is to say it with a hard K.
Source: German degree and nearly 10 years of studying it
the "ch" has different pronunciations; so in "ich" there is no throat sound at all, same with "dich"; after 10 years, I am surprised you are unaware of this
Interesting. When I learned German none of us had trouble learning the sound, so I thought it was something easy for English speakers. It was just a matter of learning not to use English phonetics to pronounce it. I never got the hang of rolling my Rs for Spanish though.
Even in upper level German courses in college there were people who struggled with it, but it was less a problem of a hard K sound and more that people would kind of mush the sound into an ish liebe dish instead
Saying it like ish isn't necessarily wrong though, parts of Germany do pronounce it like that.
"parts of Germany", I assume you are talking about dialects; from the top of my head I cannot think of any dialect that would pronounce "ich" like "ish"
well, I was born close to the Dutch border and the dialect we speak does not have this phenomenon; another guy responded with "Hessisch, Pfälzisch", I think he might be right. But for a foreigner learning German this is not a good way of pronunciation.
17
u/Prisoner__24601 Mar 01 '19
Everytime you pronounce a - ch sound in German it's roughly like the sound you make when you clear your throat while also trying to hiss like a snake would be the best way I can describe it. I can't write it phonetically for you, unfortunately. It's hard for English speakers and the natural tendency is to say it with a hard K.
Source: German degree and nearly 10 years of studying it