The German Alphabet: 26 Letters Plus Four, With Audio
The German alphabet has the same 26 letters as English, plus four extra characters: the three umlauts ä, ö, ü, and the ß, called the Eszett or scharfes S.
Whether that makes it 26 or 30 letters depends on who you ask, and Germans themselves disagree. Officially, the umlauts are not separate letters: they are A, O and U wearing dots, and they file under A, O and U in the dictionary. The ß is not officially a letter either. In practice, all four behave like letters, appear on every German keyboard, and change meaning when you drop them.
The good news: like Spanish and unlike English, German spelling is highly regular. Learn the sound of each letter and each combination once, and you can pronounce a German word you have never seen. The famously long compound nouns are not hard to say, only long.
The German Alphabet: All 26 Letters
Tap any letter to hear a native voice say its name.
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The umlauts are not optional decoration. They change words, and dropping them changes meaning:
schon (already) versus schön (beautiful)
Mutter (mother) versus Mütter (mothers)
Bruder (brother) versus Brüder (brothers)
Apfel (apple) versus Äpfel (apples)
Notice the pattern: the umlaut is doing grammatical work. It is how German forms many plurals. It is not an accent, it is morphology.
If you cannot type them, the accepted workaround is to write ae, oe, ue: schoen, Muetter. Germans do this in URLs and old systems. Never just drop the dots.
How to Make an Ö and a Ü
These are the two sounds English does not have, and they are learnable in about a minute:
ü: say "ee" (as in "see"). Hold it. Now round your lips as if to whistle, without moving your tongue. That is ü. Try über, Tür (door), fünf (five).
ö: say "eh" (as in "bed"). Hold it. Round your lips. That is ö. Try schön, hören (to hear), zwölf (twelve).
The trick both times is the same: keep the tongue where it was, move only the lips. English speakers instinctively move the tongue too, and get "oo" instead.
ß: The Letter That Got a Capital in 2017
ß is one of the strangest characters in any European alphabet.
What it sounds like: a sharp, unvoiced ss. Straße (street) is SHTRAH-se.
When you use it: after a long vowel or a diphthong. After a short vowel, you write ss instead. So:
Straße (long a) but Fluss (short u, river)
heißen (diphthong) but müssen (short ü)
Fuß (foot) but Kuss (kiss)
This is one of the clearest rules in German: the ß tells you the vowel before it is long. It is spelling that carries pronunciation information, which English gave up on centuries ago.
Where it does not exist: Switzerland. Swiss German dropped the ß entirely in the 1970s. Swiss texts write Strasse, heissen, Fuss. If you see a German text with no ß anywhere, it is probably Swiss.
And the capital. For most of its life, ß had no uppercase form: writing STRASSE in capitals meant substituting SS. In 2017 the Council for German Orthography finally adopted ẞ, a capital Eszett, after decades of typographers arguing about it. It is now official, and almost nobody uses it. It is the newest letter in the Latin alphabet.
The Sounds That Catch English Speakers
W says V. V says F. This is the single biggest trap. Volkswagen is FOLKS-vah-gen, not volks-wagon. Wasser is VA-ser. Vater (father) is FAH-ter. Every English speaker gets this backwards for months.
Z says TS.Zeit (time) is TSAIT. zehn (ten) is TSEHN. Never an English z.
There are two CH sounds, and they are not interchangeable.
After a, o, u, au: a rough scrape from the back of the throat, like Scottish "loch". Nacht (night), Buch (book), auch (also).
After everything else: a soft hiss near the front, like a whispered "h" in "hue". ich (I), Milch (milk), München.
Saying ich with the throaty version is the most recognisable foreign accent in German. Germans will understand you, and they will also know exactly where you are from.
S before a vowel says Z.sieben (seven) is ZEE-ben. Sonne (sun) is ZO-ne.
ST and SP at the start of a word say SHT and SHP.Straße is SHTRAH-se. Sport is SHPORT. Stein is SHTAIN.
EI and IE are opposites.ein is AIN. vier (four) is FEER. The rule: pronounce the second letter's name. Ei says "I", ie says "E". Bier is BEER, Wein is VAIN.
Final consonants harden.Tag ends in a k sound: TAHK. Und ends in a t: UNT. Halb ends in a p. This is a rule, not an exception.
Pronunciation: What the Table Cannot Give You
A table can tell you that ü is "ee with rounded lips". It cannot tell you whether the shape you just made is right, and English gives you no reference point to check against.
Same with the two ch sounds: the difference between ich and ach is a few millimetres of tongue position, invisible on a page, unmistakable to a German ear. And the German R is a third sound English lacks entirely, made at the back of the throat, and it half disappears at the end of words (Vater ends closer to FAH-ta).
The only fix is to hear a native say the whole word, then say it back out loud, several times, until your mouth stops resisting. That listen and repeat loop is called shadowing, and it is the fastest way to turn a sound you recognise into one you can produce. It is how the Hyperpolyglot app handles every phrase: real sentences, native audio, looped until they come out automatically. Available on iOS, Android, and Web.
Spelling Your Name Over the Phone
Germany has a real, standardised spelling alphabet, and people genuinely use it:
A wie Anton, B wie Berta. The umlauts have their own entries: Ä wie Ärger, Ö wie Ökonom, Ü wie Übermut. And ß is Eszett or scharfes S.
Worth knowing: the 1934 version replaced several Jewish-origin names (David, Jacob, Nathan, Samuel, Zacharias) with others, and post-war Germany restored some. In 2022 a new DIN standard replaced the names with city names (Aachen, Berlin, Chemnitz) partly for this reason. Older Germans still use the name version.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Pronouncing W as English W. It is V. Wasser is VA-ser.
Pronouncing V as English V. It is F. Vater is FAH-ter.
Using one CH sound.Ich and Buch have genuinely different sounds.
Dropping the umlaut dots.Schon and schön are different words. Write schoen if you must.
Reading Z as English Z. It is TS. Zeit is TSAIT.
Confusing EI and IE. Say the second letter's name: Bier is BEER, Wein is VAIN.
Writing ß in Swiss German. It does not exist there. Strasse.
Using SS where ß belongs.Straße has a long a. Fluss has a short u. The letter tells you.
Bonus: German Capitalises Every Noun
Not an alphabet fact exactly, but it is the first thing you will notice on a German page and nobody explains it: every noun is capitalised, always, not just proper ones. Der Hund, die Straße, das Buch.
It looks bizarre for about a week, then becomes genuinely useful: in a long sentence, the capitals show you instantly where the nouns are. German is the only major language that kept this, and English abandoned it in the 18th century.
Learn ü and ö in a minute of lip-rounding, drill ich against ach until they separate, and remember W is V. Do it with real audio rather than a table, and German spelling stops being intimidating and becomes what it actually is: one of the most honest systems in Europe.
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