[junto]

I'm British and I've been in Germany on and off since 2007. The first few years of learning the language were hard. I spent most of my time with German speakers, and after a few months they got tired of all speaking English for my benefit.

At first spending time in a foreign language environment is immensely tiring. I'd be ready for bed every night at 9:30 just from the mental exhaustion, but after a while things start to click.

To start with you start to get the gist of the conversations going around you. Then you'd start to participate, and finally you'd have a pretty good idea of what everyone is talking about and would be able to converse with everyone in a social environment.

My German is still full of mistakes, and my 5 year old speaks better grammatical German than I do, but people understand me, and that's enough for me.

[pm90]

That's very interesting! I don't think I've read about this process of learning a new language in such a specific way. It makes sense though.

I do have a question, if you don't mind my asking. When I arrived in the US from India, I learned very quickly that accent and voice intonation are very important for first impressions and learning an American accent with good intonation has greatly helped me both personally and professionally. So my question is: is it similar in Germany? I was curios to know whether this was just an American cultural thing or whether it was more universal.

[junto]

I have a fairly good accent, but I also have a good ear for copying other people and impressions. My accent certainly isn't a typical British/American accent speaking German. The common mistakes are in pronouncing letters in an English way, rather than a German way.

That being said, intonation is relatively easy in German once you understand that all letters in German are always spoken in the same way, and always pronounced (no hidden letters), so once you have the grasp of the alphabet you can pretty much pronounce anything. In other words "Hochdeutsch" (high German) is fairly easy to get to grips with.

The hardest thing is German is the grammar. You simply have to learn the articles and tenses. Even Germans sometimes make mistakes with the articles (der, die, das, etc), which can change based on the tense, verb and base article.

For many English first language speakers, the lack of English grammar knowledge is a stumbling block to learning another language (it was in my case anyway).

One point to mention is that Germans seem to be particularly accommodating to my German language failures, impressed simply that I can converse in German. I am however white Caucasian and British. I'm not sure that same would apply if I was from Tunisia and black. In other words, I'm not sure if I have an observational bias. Other nationalities and cultures may have a vastly different experience to me.

[my_first_acct]

I can't say anything about German culture, but I have an alternative hypothesis to your suggestion about American culture.

My experience, as a native speaker of US English, is that English speakers from India often fall into the category of "speak English fast and fluently, but with a strong accent that is hard for my US-trained ears to parse".

If someone with a strong accent speaks English slowly, I have time to adapt to the accent and figure out what they are saying; not so with someone who speaks quickly.

When talking with certain people from India (and Scotland), I am very tempted to just nod along instead of confessing, "I realize that you are speaking perfect English, but I have absolutely no idea what you are saying".

[wolfgke]

> I learned very quickly that accent and voice intonation are very important for first impressions and learning an American accent with good intonation has greatly helped me both personally and professionally. So my question is: is it similar in Germany?

First: There aren't many varieties of German (and you will probably want to learn "Hochdeutsch" (high German) which is the variation that is spoken in Hannover in its purest form) - yes there are varieties, but this is not a concern for most people learning German as a foreign language. So there simply isn't such an analogue to Indian English accent vs. American English accent in German for making first impression etc., since there is "mostly only Hochdeutsch".

As long as you have a correct pronounciation it is much more important to be really certain in the grammar (the German grammar has its ugly parts which even some low-educated Germans do wrong; so if you want to make an educated impression it is important to be very certain in the grammar) and have good vocabulary. If you really are able reach this level of German as a foreign speaker, I believe there will be hardly anyone who doubts your willingness to learn. :-)