I thought that there were 26 letters. The
esset is a ligature, it's when two letters that are joined together, it's from the two S's found in Fraktur joined together i.e. ſ + s = ß. The umlaut is a diacritic, a glyph add to letter e.g. a + ¨ = ä. I don't know if they are considered new letters, I thought of them as modified versions of per-existing letters imo.
French seems to flow because of the
liaisons and the words lean into each other as if a sentence is one long word. German has guttural stops, and depending upon regional differences the ending of certain consonants that are vocalized in English are non-vocalized, so g when it is the last letter is pronounce [k] , d when it is the last letter is pronounce [t] and a few others. German also has the voiceless velar fricative ch [x]
It took me a while but I learned to roll my R's in the back of my throat like how Kraftwerk say "Harrisburg" in Radioactivity, and have non-rhotic at the end of words which I don't know is still in practice. I learn to scrap the back of my throat when pronouncing the French R e.g.
très bien. I don't know if it is because of those things that make German sound harsher to some people than say French. I took German language 3 years in high school, and I like the language very much. And I studied the French language on my own
I had a speech impediment when I was young, and I am bit conscience how I would sound when speaking to a native speaker their language. But then again because of the speech impediment I became interested in languages.