When foreigners sing German phonetically, the results are kind of painful. Listen, if you dare, to Johnny Cash sing “Wer kennt den Weg? (I Walk the Line)” [WMV] [Real]. If you can’t get enough, you can grab the lyrics and sing along. Listening to the recording brought back painful memories of my high school German class, where there were those students who simply couldn’t lose their thick American accents. It has been twenty years since I last studied German formally, and I’m certain that my own German pronunciation has picked up a Swedish accent in the meantime. My vocabulary has also deteriorated (on that page I get the gender of the word “Person” wrong), although my grammar at least has thankfully held steady. (Well, except when I lose my senses entirely and forget how to decline adjectival nouns.)

If Johnny Cash isn’t your thing, you can go to the article and click to listen to David Bowie sing Space Oddity in Italian, or the Beatles sing Get Back in mixed German and French…