German pronunciation: 36 minimal pairs to listen to

This list is shorter than the usual ones because it follows a single rule: it contains only the distinctions English does not have. A difference your own language already makes costs no effort; the ones it does not make are the ones worth practising.

That is why each of the 7 groups first says what an English speaker does instead. That is the real information; the words below are the evidence. There is no phonetic script here: if you know the symbols, you do not need this page, and if you do not, they tell you nothing.

What happens here: English has no vowel made with the tongue pushed forward and the lips tightly rounded at the same time, so English speakers reach for the nearest one they own. ü usually comes out as the oo of ‘food’ or as ‘you’ [juː], which turns Tür into Tour; ö comes out as the vowel of ‘bird’ or of ‘go’, and schön slides towards schon. To make [yː], say the ee of ‘see’, keep the tongue exactly where it is and round the lips as if for ‘oo’. For [øː], do the same starting from the e of Beet. If the tongue slides back while the lips round, you have made u or o again.

What happens here: Nearly every German vowel comes in a short and a long form, and length alone can separate two words: [ʃtat] is a town, [ʃtaːt] a state. English speakers miss this in two ways. They read the spelling as if it were English, and they glide the long vowels — Beet turns into ‘bait’ and Ofen begins with the o of ‘go’. A German long vowel is held steady from start to finish. The spelling helps once you know how it works: a double consonant after the vowel (Bett, offen) marks it short; a double vowel, an ie or a silent h (Staat, Miete, Höhle) marks it long.

What happens here: Short ä sounds exactly like short e: Wände and Wende are said alike. Long, they are two different vowels. Long ä [ɛː] is open, and a British speaker already owns it — it is close to the vowel of ‘air’ or ‘bear’ as it is said in much of England today, without the r. What goes wrong is the e: it glides into the ay of ‘bay’, lands halfway between the two German vowels and belongs to neither. Keep it steady, with the tongue higher than feels natural. Many speakers in northern Germany merge long ä into long e themselves; the standard keeps them apart.

What happens here: German ch is two sounds, and what comes before it decides which. After a, o, u and au it is [x], the sound at the end of Scottish ‘loch’: Nacht, Buch, auch. After i, e, ä, ö, ü, after ei and eu, after l, n and r, and in the ending -chen, it is [ç] — the hiss many English speakers make at the start of ‘huge’. English speakers replace [x] with k and [ç] with sh or k, and each replacement is another German word: Nacht becomes nackt, Kirche becomes Kirsche. For [ç], keep the tongue raised towards the hard palate and the lips spread; sh needs them pushed forward.

What happens here: A British speaker starts closer to German here than an American one, but the advantage runs out in one exact place. At the end of a word German -er is not an r at all but a short open vowel, [ɐ], close to the u of ‘cup’. British English says its own -er with the neutral vowel at the end of ‘sofa’ — and that is the German -e [ə] — so bitter and bitte, einer and eine fall together. Open the mouth further for -er. At the start of a syllable, as in rot or Reise, the r [ʁ] is made at the very back of the mouth: take the ch of Bach, add voice and soften it. The English r, with rounded lips and nothing in the throat, is understood, but it is heard at once as foreign.

What happens here: At the end of a word or syllable German makes b, d, g and s voiceless: Rad and Rat are both [ʁaːt], Tag ends in [k] and lieb in [p]. English keeps these sounds voiced, and English speakers carry the habit across — Hund with a clear d sounds foreign, although nobody mistakes the word. Between vowels the difference is alive, and there it does separate words. The trap is the letter s: before a vowel it is voiced, like the z of ‘zoo’, while ß and ss are always voiceless. Say reisen with the s of ‘race’ and you have said reißen. The pairs follow the standard of northern and central Germany; in much of the south, and in Austria and Switzerland, that s is voiceless too.

What happens here: German does not run a word or stem that begins with a vowel into what comes before it. It closes the throat for a moment and opens it again: the glottal stop [ʔ], the catch in the middle of ‘uh-oh’, and the sound many British speakers already use for the t in ‘bottle’. English links instead — ‘an egg’ becomes ‘a-negg’ — and British English slips an r in between certain vowels, as in ‘law-r-and order’. Carried into German, that turns vereisen into verreisen. Speakers whose accent drops h at home have a second trap: without the h, Haus is aus and heiß is Eis. Keep the h breathy and the catch crisp.