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.