Like the sound in the British pronunciation of "hair." No direct equivalent in American English, but imagine saying "aaah" at the doctor's, with a tongue depressor pushing your tongue down. Same sound as the long version, just a bit shorter, like the vowel in "mop." Similar to the "a" in the English “father.” This is what makes German speech sound choppier than English and makes native Germans sound so distinctive when speaking English – just ask any German with a noticeable accent to read the words “each other” and notice how they put a stop between the words where no native English speaker would). An example of a glottal stop is the break in the middle of “uh-oh” – or, for British readers, the way Cockney speakers swallow their Ts. The following table gives some examples of these sounds and how to pronounce them.Īlso keep in mind that most German syllables that begin with a vowel are led off by a glottal stop. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they mainly involve unstressed syllables and short grammatical words (e.g. In general, a vowel is long when followed by a single consonant and short when followed by a combination of consonants. These terms refer first to how long the sound is held or drawn out, but there are sometimes also differences in the sound itself between the long and short variants of a vowel. Short vowels in German are very short and clipped compared to English, and long vowels are held a bit longer. These are eight standard German vowels – the same five as in English plus the three umlaut vowels ä, ö and ü – and they each have a “long” and a “short” variant.
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