xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
I once met a girl in a bar who spoke such absolutely perfect and grammatically correct German she did sound like an alien impersonating a human.
Or someone who very much wants to show that she's better than you.
Turns out she wasn't from Germany at all. She was an immigrant from Slovakia, who had learnt German at such a high level that it sounded weird.
I've been learning German too myself, and the thing that the traditional language courses don't teach you is the way natives speak. Listening to actual German speakers was pretty much alien to me even after two years until I bumped into a couple Easy German videos where they touch the very same subject as this xkcd and that actually got me listening to certain parts of speech more carefully and that way also understand it better.
Now I actually find myself doing the same shortcuts sometimes when I'm progressing with the skill. It's the same with English since I have to use it daily at work even though I'm not a native speaker. Funny how the languages work in real life vs. in theory.