When realised at the uvular place of articulation, the German r-sound can include the following
variants (see International Phonetic Association, 1999, p. 87):
uvular trill, voiced uvular fricative, uvular approximant,
voiceless uvular fricative.
Slight trill; also weak voiced frication in “Rasse”
reiße ("to rip")
Rasse ("race")
Weak voicing, with some frication
verreisen ("to travel")
Approximant, with regular voicing throughout
Herren ("gentlemen")
reise ("to travel")
Voiceless with strong frication
trat ("kicked")
treten ("kick")
In addition, there are contexts (especially postvocalically and word-finally) where /r/ vocalizes
completely to [ɐ]: e.g words like “hart”, “Ohr”, “besser”.
VOT in initial stops in German
German is a language with two-way contrasts.
In initial position German and American English are fairly similar to Cantonese (according
to Catford with somewhat weaker aspiration for the voiceless aspirated stops,
though this is not apparent here). However, as the non-aspirated stops may be
slightly voiced (i.e have a short voicing lead) and are generally fairly fully
voiced intervocalically, they are assigned the symbol for voiced stops.
pʰasə ("skip")
tʰasə ("cup")
kʰasə ("cash desk")
bas ("bass")
das ("that")
gasə ("lane")
Audio Source
Illustrations of the IPA.
References:
International Phonetic Association (1999): Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide To The Use Of The International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge University Press.
