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related: german.stackexchange.com/questions/167/… –  Jan May 25 '11 at 18:33
@Explorer You had me momentarily surprised, but then I saw in your profile that you come from Norway. And indeed, my experience with Norwegians is that they would pronounce it more like “ä”. For the “ö” pronunciation, listen e.g. here: dictionary.reference.com/browse/further –  Konrad Rudolph May 25 '11 at 21:16

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ü also takes a while to get to grips with.


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@fzwo: TeX stand for the greek letters tau-epsilon-chi and is thus pronounced [tɛχ] (although in Germany many peoply pronounce it [tɛç]). –  FUZxxl May 25 '11 at 18:42
@FUZxxl: No, TeX is supposed (by Knuth) to be pronounced with a "ch" as in nach, but I don't know any German who does this. They all say it with a "ch" as in ich or frech. –  Hendrik Vogt Jun 6 '11 at 17:04
@Alenanno: No, the pronunciation of "ch" depends on the vowel preceding it. –  Hendrik Vogt Jun 6 '11 at 17:07
@Hendrik Isn't this exactly what I said? –  FUZxxl Jun 6 '11 at 17:16

Try to speak the German word for "matchbox"

Streichholzschachtel [ˈʃtʀaɪ̯ç.hɔlʦˌʃaχ.tl̩]

and then you know, which consonants are difficult to pronounce.

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Or "Zündholzbox"? –  FUZxxl May 26 '11 at 9:11
@ladybug: I suppose there are many words for which there is no synonym. Is there a synonym for matchbox? –  O. R. Mapper Mar 21 at 22:20



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@Phira: Given that the tzsch in that example spans a word boundary (within the compound), I don't think it's a good example. Otherwise, you could argue that English has the exact same thing, e.g. in a sentence like "Vince should leave." The ce sh would form the same combination of sounds, but there's no issue about that because the ts sound and the sh sound belong two different words and syllables. –  O. R. Mapper Mar 21 at 22:24

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