German pronunciation, explained through songs

The two ch sounds: ich and ach

German writes one letter pair, ch, for two different sounds, and which one you get is decided by the vowel just before it.

After a, o, u and au it is the hard, scraped one, made far back in the throat like the ch of Scottish «loch»: ach, Nacht, Buch, auch.

After i, e, ä, ö, ü, ei, eu and after l, n, r it is a soft hiss made at the front of the mouth — the noise at the start of «huge» or «hue», held a little longer: ich, mich, Licht, echt, durch, Mädchen.

English has neither sound, so the instinct is to fall back on k. Resist it: ich is not «ick».

Two footnotes worth having. When the s belongs to the stem, chs is simply ks — sechs, Fuchs, wachsen. And the ending -ig takes the soft one, so König comes out as «Könich» and wenig as «wenich».

Hear it in: Mensch (Herbert Grönemeyer)

The R in the throat, and the R that turns into a vowel

The German R is not made with the tip of the tongue at all. It is a soft scrape at the very back of the mouth, in the same place as the French R, and in singing it is often barely there: Regen, rot, braun, Freund.

The English R, bunched in the middle of the mouth, is the single sound that marks an English accent in German instantly.

The bigger news is what happens at the end of a word. The ending -er is not a consonant at all: it becomes a dark «uh». Vater sounds like «fah-tuh», aber like «ah-buh», wieder like «vee-duh».

The same happens after a long vowel: Uhr, mir, Tür and Jahr end in that vowel and in nothing else. Non-rhotic English already does this in «water», so half the job is done.

What is worth guarding is the pair bitte and bitter. Both endings are unstressed and neither has a consonant, but the first is a colourless «uh» and the second is darker and more open — and that is the whole difference between «please» and «bitter».

Hear it in: Durch den Monsun (Tokio Hotel)

sp- and st- at the start of a word are «shp» and «sht»

At the start of a word, German sp- and st- are not «sp» and «st» but «shp» and «sht».

Stadt is «shtat», Straße is «shtrah-se», spielen is «shpee-len»; Stern, Sport and sprechen all begin the same way.

Inside a word the s goes back to normal: Wespe, Fenster, Kiste, beste, meistens — a plain s, exactly as it looks.

English has st- and sp- at the front of hundreds of words and reads them plainly, so your instinct is wrong at precisely the point where German changes.

What catches people out is that the rule follows the STEM, not the word. A prefix does not switch it off (verstehen, aufstehen, bestellen), and in a compound the sound comes back in the middle of a long word: Hauptstadt, Frühstück, Bahnsteig, Gaststätte.

Hear it in: Atemlos durch die Nacht (Helene Fischer)

z, s, ß and ss: three fixed values

Three letters, three fixed values, and none of them is what an English reader expects.

Z is always «ts», never the z of «zoo»: Zeit, zehn, zwei, tanzen, Herz. Take the ts of «cats» and move it to the front of the word. TZ is the same sound: Katze, sitzen, jetzt.

S before a vowel is voiced — it is the English z: Sonne, sagen, sieben, lesen, Rose. Sonne begins the way «zone» does.

ß and SS are the plain, hissing s: Straße, heißen, weiß, müssen, wissen. A single s at the end of a word is plain too: Haus, das, was.

The pair that shows why this matters is reisen and reißen. Identical except for the one hiss, and they mean «to travel» and «to tear apart».

Hear it in: Komet (Udo Lindenberg x Apache 207)

Ü and Ö: the lip trick

Ü and Ö are single sounds, not a u or an o with decoration, and English has neither.

For Ü, say the «ee» of «see» and then, without moving your tongue at all, round your lips as if to whistle. The tongue makes the vowel, the lips make the umlaut: über, für, Tür, müde, Glück.

For Ö, say the «e» of «bed» and round your lips as if for «oh»: schön, hören, können, zwölf.

Ä is the easy one — simply a long or short «e»: spät, Mädchen, Bär.

None of this is decoration. Mutter is «mother» and Mütter is «mothers»; schon means «already» and schön means «beautiful»; konnte is «could» and könnte is «would be able to». Drop the dots and you have changed the grammar, not just the accent.

Hear it in: Wir sind groß (Mark Forster)

Long and short vowels, and the three signals in the spelling

German vowel length is not a matter of style. It changes words, and the spelling tells you which one you have.

Three signals say LONG: a silent h after the vowel (Bahn, ihn, wohnen, mehr, Uhr), a doubled vowel (Saal, Meer, Boot), and ie, which is simply a long i (Liebe, sieben, wieder). A single consonant after the vowel usually means long as well: Vater, Name, Tag.

One signal says SHORT, and it is the loudest: a doubled consonant. Mutter, kommen, Bett, Stimme, offen — the doubled letter is not a long consonant, it is a mark on the vowel in front of it.

Hear the pairs: Stadt and Staat, Ofen and offen, ihn and in, bieten and bitten.

One warning for English. English «long» vowels are different vowels — «bit» and «bite» share nothing. A German long vowel is the SAME vowel held longer and kept pure, so Staat is not a diphthong, just a stretched a. And the lengthening h is never pronounced: gehen and sehen have no h sound in them at all.

Hear it in: Wir sind groß (Mark Forster)

Reading ei, ie and eu

Three letter pairs that a reader has to unlearn before anything else.

EI is «eye»: mein, Zeit, Wein, weiß, heißen. AI does the same: Mai, Kaiser.

IE is a long «ee»: Liebe, die, sieben, wieder, nie. Never «ai», never two syllables.

EU is «oy», as in «boy»: heute, Freund, neu, Deutschland. ÄU is identical: Häuser, träumen, Bäume.

There is a shortcut for English readers that actually works: in ei and ie, the SECOND letter says its English name. E-I ends in i, so it sounds like the letter I, «eye». I-E ends in e, so it sounds like the letter E, «ee».

Drill it on Wein and Wien, or Beine and Biene: the same two letters, only swapped, and the words are wine and Vienna, legs and bee.

Hear it in: Atemlos durch die Nacht (Helene Fischer)

d, b and g go hard at the end of a word

At the end of a word German lets go of the voicing: d becomes t, b becomes p, g becomes k.

Hand sounds like «hant», Kind like «kint», halb like «halp», gelb like «gelp», Tag like «tak», Berg like «berk».

The spelling does not change, because the soft sound comes back the moment an ending follows: Hand but Hände, Tag but Tage, halb but halbe, Berg but Berge. That is how you know which letter to write — put the word in the plural and listen.

For an English speaker this is the hard part, because English keeps the difference and builds words on it: «bed» and «bet», «bag» and «back» are different words.

German simply collapses them. Rat, «advice», and Rad, «wheel», are pronounced exactly the same, and so are Bund and bunt, seit and seid. Only the sentence around them tells you which one you heard — which is also why a lyric can rhyme them without cheating.

Hear it in: Leuchtturm (Nena)

The glottal stop before a vowel

German begins a word that starts with a vowel by closing the throat for an instant and releasing it — a tiny catch before the sound. It is the break in the middle of «uh-oh».

You hear it most clearly when two vowels meet across a word boundary: ein Ei is not «ei-nei», it is ein | Ei, with a clean cut between them. The same goes for am Abend, beim Essen, in Ordnung.

It also appears inside a word, in front of a stem that starts with a vowel: be|obachten, ver|einen, Spiegel|ei, The|ater.

English links instead. «An apple» comes out as «a-napple», and if you carry that habit over, German words dissolve into each other and stop being recognisable.

This is the main reason German sounds clipped and hammered next to French or Italian. It is also why sung German flows so much more than spoken German: a long note softens the catch, and singers let the line run.

Hear it in: Auf uns (Andreas Bourani)