Thanks for sharing the article. German is my mother language - and I came to appreciate it as a beautiful language. It has not the natural beauty of Italian, it is more how you can go from sounding harsh to sounding soft, where you not only change your voice but also the kind words you say. You can make it sound and feel like the worst of all Nazi movies or as romantic as a Beethoven piano serenade.

By the way, I think it is a language for men. Women have a tendency to sound too harsh with it. In contrast, egyptian/syrian Arabic or Farsi tend to let you fall in love with the women who speak it, yet men speak it to harsh (Arabic) or often strangely funny sounding (Farsi). Few languages are nice to hear whichever gender it speaks (French comes to my mind, of course its all a personal taste).