Here's a cool site,where you can hear words spoken in all the various Germanic languages:
http://www.languagesandpeoples.com/Germanic

The only disappointing thing to me,is that the extreme left column sound samples haven't been done yet.
The native speakers of those varieties are all long dead-but I'm sure someone knows how to say the words,in each language.

I'd have to say that the English samples from North Carolina don't sound like my cousins in Johnston County.
I'm guessing the speaker is a hick-from-the-sticks,maybe Western N.C.,where the mountains are.
You can definitely tell the flattened 'i' sound of all Southern accents,though.Listen to words like 'night' and 'five'.

There are people on this forum from all over the world-which examples sound like how YOU talk?

Interesting site, thanks.

I myself speak standard german (Hochdeutsch) with a tiny little bit of a swabian/bavarian accent.

And chinese with a heavy Beijing accent.

Thanks for that link Reb. I took 2 years of German in high school and 2 years in college and the teachers/professors told me I always had a very good pronounciation of the language.

Then you might actually be one of the few english speakers who can correctly pronounce my name, "Jochen".

The german "ch" seems to be terrible difficult for english speakers, so I always get called "yo-han", which sounds like they're calling their butler...

LMAO. Yeah, I never had a problem pronouncing the gutteral "ch" sound in German. I also try not to over-do it and sound like I'm speaking Hebrew instead.

Panzer-I also took German in school,and always loved it.
I've got a set of teaching cd's,and can hook up a mic and interact with it.The program rates your sound,so you get some feedback on how accurate you are.
Probably 50% of my pronunciation gets rated as Native Speaker.
A good percentage of the rest gets rated as Very Good to Good.
The absolute worst rating I get is on the word 'acht',though.
I think I can pronounce Jochen's name correctly,and I don't generally have trouble making that sound.
For some reason I can't detect,my 8 must really be horrible.
Whatever it is,I just can't hear it.

A Greek lady told me that Greek speakers just can't hear a difference when English speakers say the words 'mad' and 'mud'.

The pronounciation always came easy to me but the grammar is what gave me bigger problems. You know, in English we have a very strict sentence structure so its always the same (subject, verb, predicate) but in German you can shift stuff around and it took me a long time to get used to that.

Swedish of course! There are only two dialects to choose from on that site so it has to be the Stockholm version. Although it's not quite like my norhtern dialect it's a way better fit than the southern Sk�ne dialect.
And I have no problem pronouncing german words either.


And, finally, the most famous swede



------------------EDIT------------------
By the way. The only negative thing I can think of when it comes to learning a new language (if there really are any), is that you stop actually HEARING it and start to understand it, if you get what I'm trying to say?
It's the same thing with your native language, you really don't hear it except for those rare moments when you manage to catch you brain unawares.
So, a few time in my life I've happened to turn on the radio or TV and, for a split second, couldn't for the life of me grasp what kind of weird language I was hearing.
Then the coin dropped (as we say in Sweden) and it connected.
Swedish sounds bloody weird if you ask me

I'm 36 years old and the Swedish Chef still makes me laugh.

are you including Scots in this?
we're pretty guttural you know

of course some people might question whether we speak English ...

Is it pronounced like the word "wochen" except with the J?

Yes, and the J is pronounced like the Y in 'Yes'

So it's not Joken then .

If you have a problem with that one you can have a go at my name; Bj�rn (the Swedish word for 'bear' actually, so now you know!).

Isn't Bjorn the Swedish equivalent to Dmitri in Russia or Li in China? I mean, it seems like there are tons of Bjorns in Sweden!