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German Alphabet and Pronunciation of German Words

List of all topics in the level A1

This unit contains topics:

1. German alphabet
2. How to correctly pronounce German words?

The first step toward learning German is to read the alphabet and then words accurately, even if we don't know their meanings. The first few lessons in the A1 level course are just about learning correct pronunciation. The goal of this lesson is to learn German pronunciation. At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

1. Correctly pronounce all letters in the German alphabet.
2. Read and pronounce German words.

At this level, just emphasize learning pronunciation.

German alphabet

German alphabet has 26 normal letters, from A to Z. Some of them sound similar to their English counterparts and some have different pronunciations. However, there are four extra letters, of which three are umlauts (Ä, Ö, Ü) and one is the ligature (ß). ß is only written in lower case. Whenever it has to be used as a capital letter, it is written as SS, for example, DIE STRASSE (the street) in capital letters, and die Straße in the lower case.

The following video teaches the pronunciation of all the letters in the German alphabet.

Practice

Try to pronounce each letter and then compare it with the given sound. Learning German letters in their own pronunciations is important before jumping onto the next section (i.e. How to pronounce German words).

How to pronounce German words?

In the first step, it's very important to learn the pronunciation of the German alphabet because if you try to pronounce a German word with help of the English alphabet, most of the time it would be wrong.

Below are some German words, which in written form are similar to their English counterparts, but pronunciation is different.

The German language is easy to read because words sound exactly as they are written. In the beginning stage of language learning, we divide a word into different parts and try to pronounce these parts. Then combine these parts to form a complete word. For details, please see the following video.

Practice

Try to pronounce the following German words and then compare them with provided audios. These are the same words used in the above video. We suggest that you don't jump practice sessions in this course and be patient. Only move to the next lesson after a complete command of the current lesson.

Vocabulary building

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