A phonetic description of self-initiated self-repair sequences involving the repetition of words in German spontaneous speech is presented. Data are drawn from the Kiel Corpus of Spontaneous Speech. The description is primarily impressionistic auditory, but it also employs acoustic records to verify and objectify the impressionistic findings. A number of different patterns around cut-off are identified. The comparison of phonetic differences between reparandum and repair tokens is used to argue that repair sequences can also provide an interesting insight into the way in which fluent stretches of spontaneous speech are phonetically organized.