How to Pronounce German Consonant Combinations Check out the Fi3M guide to pronouncing the rolled R for more details on this.
In Switzerland, Australia and Bavaria, “r” is pronounced as an “alveolar trill” – the famous “rolled R” sound that’s found in many other languages, like Spanish. Some people pronounce it as a “uvular trill”. In “Standard German”, it’s a guttural, raspy sound from the back of your throat, like the “ch” in the Scottish “loch”. 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”.)
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. If you don’t know how to read IPA, check out the Fluent in 3 Months guide to reading IPA.