Week 7

This week was devoted to the major stress. 
While I was listening to the audio again and again, the thought groups became clearer to me only when I started underlying the major stress there. I could hear that one word is longer and louder than others, so, on the basis of these louder words I was able to correct the thought groups that I haven’t noticed the week before. 
It was interesting to listen to my own recording then as well. I've noticed that my speech got so much more expression when I started practicing with the major stress! Finally, the ideas got the necessary accents of the important points.
Here is my recording from this week.
My plan for the week after the spring break is to practice more with the word stress as well. I need to pay more attention to the stress in the individual words, especially in the compound words. 

Week 6

It looks like every week my recording becomes longer and slower, when it should have already started becoming shorter and my speech faster...
Here it is.
I remembered the process of working with the audio recording that we had in the OPIE Pronunciation Lab. I also decided to follow this system myself to "wear learner's shoes" for the time I'm practicing this speech.
This week I concentrated on the thought groups, which are essentially the phrases separated from the other ones by pauses. The tricky part about identifying thought groups is that the pauses can be long and obvious (in narrator's speech) or very short and almost unnoticeable (Martina Bollinger's speech). I feel that the thought groups in this speech are very uneven: some of them are unnaturally long, and some – very short. I hope that when I proceed to the next stage (identifying the major stress in each thought group) thought group will become clearer. At least, that's what I observed while working with the tutees. It is often one of the most challenging parts of working with a speech, but it gets better once we move on to something that's more emphasized by the speaker - major stress in a thought group.
The tricky part about these thought groups is that every speaker can potentially read the same speech with pauses in different places. My understanding of the speech does not always coincide with what the narrator or the speaker (Martina Bollinger) is trying to convey. It could be one of the reasons it took me longer than I expected to work on this part.
The next week, as I have already mentioned, I will be identifying and practicing the major stress in every thought group. It should help me sound more natural and closer to the original.

Week 5

Although my throat hurts after practicing German pronunciation with this uvular [r] sound, I still try to spare time for developing fluency at least within this speech. This is probably the most time- and effort- consuming part for me.
After listening to this recording over and over, I still could not find the counterpart for the English [w] sound! Overall, in German there is definitely a mismatch between the letters and sounds. Letter w is pronounced as [v], and letter v is represented by the sound [f]. Even in the English phrase Win-Win Situation the speaker does not round her lips. It is adapted to the labiodental fricative [v].
The other English borrowings, such as Online- Shop, E-Book, Reader, Kindle, Amazon, Homepage, Internet  are also pronounced in the German manner. The words might have been internalized in the language because of how common they are. The only exception is probable the word Reader. The reason behind it might be that the speaker in that part is actually and English L1 speaker, so for him it might be a lot easier to pronounce this word in the English manner.
Vowels turned out a lot easier for me, that the consonants! The umlaut a, u, and o are somewhat close to the vowels we have in Ukrainian. They are a little softer than their English counterparts. Rounding is also what makes them different. I assume that this feature is what can make German vowels pretty difficult for English speakers to master.
This is my recording from this week.
For the next week I hope to start looking at the suprasegmental features. I will start with identifying thought groups and pauses of the speaker, and see if I can mimic it.

Week 4

My aim for this week was to practice uvular 'r' sound in the connected speech, and to notice the differences between other fricatives ([x] and [Ç]), and try reproducing them at least as a separate sounds.
For this purpose I also used the Iowa website. It has not only the descriptions of the articulatory steps for specific sounds, but also gives several examples.
At first, as I was saying in the previous post, they sounded very similar to me. Later, I've started differentiating subtle difference between them.
Glottal [h] is a very short sound. It is used similarly to the English counterpart.
Velar [x] can appear only at the end of the word, or in the middle of the word after back vowel sounds [ɔ] and [u], which makes sense because it eases the tongue movement. 
In contrast, palatal [Ç] sounds a lot softer, and serves as an elsewhere case for [x]. Those two sounds are in complementary distribution. During the production of this sound the lips as if are stretching in a smile.
The glottal stop, as I have just discovered, is more common in German than in American English. It is widely used in the middle of the word between the prefix (both separable and inseparable) and a word root.
Here is my recording from this week.


In the German consonant chart I did not find the sound [w]. I wonder if it exists in German. This is what I will explore next week.
Also, I want to take a closer look at the German pronunciation of the English words.