This has two main pronunciations depending on dialect, and both are quite tricky for a native English speaker. (In Austria, an “s” at the beginning of a word is pronounced like an English “s”.) “s” is pronounced like an English “z” at the beginning of a word or between two vowels, and like an English “s” elsewhere.Also note that “d” is “dentalised” in the same way as “t” your tongue should be slightly further forward in your mouth than it is in English. “b” “d”, and “g” are pronounced the same as in English, except at the end of a word, where they become “p”, “t” and “k” respectively.Some consonants change their pronunciation depending on their position in the word: “the wan is wery waluable”! This is a great example of hypercorrection these speakers are trying so hard to not pronounce “w” in the stereotypically German way that they change “v” to “w” even when they’re not supposed to.) (Side note: it’s very stereotypical of native German speakers to pronounce “w” like a “v” when speaking English, for example “vat does Vill vant?” But if you spend time with Germans whose English is intermediate, you’ll notice they very often make the opposite mistake – pronouncing an English “v” like a “w”, e.g. “x” is always pronounced “ks”, even at the beginning of a word.( Volkswagen in German is pronounced “folks-vagon”.) “w” is pronounced like an English “v”.The difference is that in English, “qu” is pronounced “kw”, but in German it’s pronounced “kv”. “q”, like in English, is always followed by a “u”.“j” is pronounced like an English “y” – like in the word ja (“yes”), pronounced “ya”.(Generally, when an English word has a “hard c”, the German cognate is spelled with a “k”, e.g. Before any other vowel it’s pronounced “hard”, like a “k”. “c” rarely appears outside of letter combinations like “sch”, but when it’s on its own, it’s pronounced like a German “z” (see below) before “e”, “i”, “y”, “ä”, “ö”.“L” and “t” are basically the same too, with one small difference: in both cases, your tongue should be slightly further forward in the mouth, touching the upper teeth as well as the gums. ”f”, ”h”, ”k”, ”m”, ”n”, and ”p” are all pronounced the same as in English. German is a diverse language with a lot of different dialects, but the rules below apply in most places, most of the time. There are also a lot of special letter combinations you need to remember, much like how the “sh” in English sounds different to an “s” followed by an “h”. The catch is that some letters have more than one pronunciation depending on their position in the word. It’s usually clear how a word should be pronounced from its spelling. “y” is still called “ypsilon”, but it’s pronounced /ʏˈpsiːlɔn/ (the difference being that the stress is on the second syllable instead of the first.)īelow we’ll also cover four “special” letters of German (“ß” and the umlauted vowels), but first, let’s look at how the above 26 letters are pronounced.īefore we start, a quick reminder: in German, all nouns are always written with the first letter capitalized.Īs I said earlier, German pronunciation is generally consistent.Austrians do things a little differently: The above chart gives the letter names in Germany. You know how the letter “z” is called “zee” in America and “zed” in Britain? Something similar happens with a few of the German letters.
ALPHABETIC GERMAN WORDS IN ENGLISH HOW TO
If you don’t know how to read IPA, check out the Fluent in 3 Months guide to reading IPA.