(September 8, 2015 at 11:46 pm)Alex K Wrote: The ch is a bitch. If you master both main varieties of that, you're really really good. The upside is, noone will understand you any less clearly if you do ch -> k, and there are even German dialects which do it regularly (north/eastern German, famously Berlin). The northern German varieties have the ch=k precisely because they are more closely related to English historically (see the "machen"-"maken" Isogloss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benrath_line and the related ich-ick isogloss).
Remember: your native language is a northern German dialect with some french vocabulary
Although I never learnt many German words or grammar from my German father, one thing that I did learn from a very early age was the 'ch' sound. It's probably stopped me from making too many people wince with my English accent when I moved to Scotland. It's exactly the same sound.
I remember when I was about 6 or 7 having trouble with German words like 'Zu' or Tschuss. I actually mastered that many years before I mastered the English word 'the' which came rather late to me because I never knew to put my tongue behind my front teeth.
