HAPPY IN MY CRETIN WORLD...

My fave band being die ärzte, I will use them as an example a lot because I'm currently editing a fanvideo again which means I have been watching their interviews and videos a lot = lots of exposure to (Berlin) German over the past couple of weeks. And DÄ has also taught me the most of my... or, if not the most, at least a lot of German, and I've also unconsciously picked up their Berlin dialect and I might actually pronounce things like in Berlinerisch, completely unprompted, but only because they've been my main source of HEARD German for over 15 years.

Anyhow, my main wonder is again how Finnish (my native language) has only 8 vowel sounds out of the... 33? vowel sounds that exists in languages overall. I counted that from the vowel chart on Wikipedia page, so I'm not 100% sure if there's exactly 33 out there.

So, only 8 vowel sounds exist in Finnish. German has 15, out of which 6 are the same as in Finnish. English doesn't share almost any of these sounds with Finnish. And I've known it for some time now and I've tried my best to train my ear to it, but I have such a hard time hearing the differences between vowel sounds that DON'T exist in Finnish. They literally all sound the same to me, or some of them sound like weird combos or two separate Finnish vowels, but I'm physically unable to produce a sound like this because I never need to combine them in Finnish. It's like trying to say two different words at the same time - impossible. I don't have this problem with consonants at all for some reason, only with vowel sounds.

I was just watching one die ärzte interview, one of the guys kept chanting "D Ä", so the letters, and it's always interesting how they say the letter Ä differently to how it's pronounced in words. It's much more like how it sounds in Finnish, but in "Die Ärzte" the Ä sounds to my ear how the letter E is pronounced in Finnish.