German accent of Henry Kissinger

[Torsten]

Hi, I'm just listening to Henry Kissinger for the first time in my life and it's quite interesting to hear that he's been able to preserve his German accent. What does he sound like to your ears?
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Alan]

Hi Torsten,

It still sounds loud and clear as a German accent to me - I suppose it has shades of Arnie, too.

A
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[Yankee]

[Torsten]

I agree with both of you, Alan&Amy. HK does sound differently than Arnold but then again you can hear their accents have similarities ('shades' as Alan puts it.) The funny part is that HK speaks absolutely fluently and grammatically correct (how else would he have been able to work for the US government) -- he just has this distinctive German accent. Maybe, that's one his success secrets...
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[Jamie (K)]

Henry Kissinger's brother has no foreign accent. Someone once asked him how he succeeded in losing his accent, when Henry didn't. His answer was something to the effect of, "Simple. I listen to people and Henry doesn't." I don't remember if those were his exact words, but close.

I tend to think that HK succeeded in spite of his accent, rather than because of it, and I also doubt that he made an attempt to preserve it. In my experience teaching pronunciation -- and from what I've read, other people have noticed the same thing -- people who maintain that bad an accent for so many years, despite high intelligence and competent language education, are usually very arrogant people who are overly worried about their dignity. They also seem to give little credence to anything that's not written on paper. I had one lawyer for private lessons once who was so hard-headed that after four years she never noticed how her husband's first name was correctly pronounced -- and his name was just Bob! She could say it right if you showed her, but it she had never realized that she pronounced it wrong. When I finally brought it to her attention, and she realized she'd been saying it wrong, she still resisted pronouncing it correctly. The irony is that these people feel undignified when pronouncing their new language well, so they hold on tight to their old accent, and frequently wind up sounding undignified anyway.

Arnold's English is not that similar to Henry's. It's easy to hear that they have different accents. It's extremely rare for either one of them to make a mistake in grammar or vocabulary. Arnold's speech has more natural melody and intonation than Henry's, so Arnold's sounds more "English" despite his heavy accent. Arnold has one very persistent mistake, though. He very frequently says "mit" instead of "with". Sometimes in a very long interview that's the only mistake he makes, but he does it scores of times.