0.1 Spelling is sound — German reads what it writes — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say why German spelling is predictable in the direction that matters: from the written word to the sound. Name the one habit English has given you that breaks that predictability — treating a vowel letter as a puzzle rather than as an instruction. Put the stress on the first syllable of a German word, which is right far more often than not. Read ten everyday greetings aloud from the page, without having heard them first. Prerequisites : none. This is the first lesson of the course. German and English are cousins. They separated perhaps fifteen hundred years ago, and the family resemblance is still visible in the words you will meet on your first day: the German for water , house , hand , book , father , day and night are all recognisably the same words as yours. That closeness is the single largest asset you bring to this language, and the whole second volume of this course is built on it. But before any of that becomes usable, you have to be able to turn the letters on the page into sounds. And here English has given you a bad habit rather than a head start. So this first lesson is about the relationship between spelling and sound — not the details of individual sounds, which come in the five lessons after this one, but the principle. Get the principle and the details fall into place; miss it and every new word stays a guess. English asks you to guess; German tells you Consider the letter sequence -ough in English. In though it is one sound, in through another, in cough another, in rough another, in bough another, in thorough another. Six spellings identical, six pronunciations different. Consider a in father , fat , fate , fall , about . Consider that meat , meet and mete sound the same while read and read do not. Because of this, you have learned to treat the written form of an English word as a hint about a pronunciation you must already know. You do not read English words; you recognise them. When you meet a genuinely new English word in print — a place name, a surname, a technical term — you hesitate, and you are right to hesitate, because the spelling underdetermines the sound. German does not work that way. The relationship between letters and sounds runs close to one-to-one, and where it is not one-to-one it is governed by rules with very few exceptions. A German reader confronted with a word never seen before pronounces it correctly and without hesitation. After this volume, so will you. It is worth being precise about the direction of this claim, because the reverse is not nearly as clean. Going from sound to spelling, German has real ambiguities: several ways to write a long vowel, the choice between the two letters that both give the [f] sound, the question of whether an ending you hear as [ɐ] is written one way or another. Dictation is therefore genuinely hard, and there is a whole lesson on it later. But going from spelling to sound — which is what reading is, and what you need first — German is as regular as any major European language. A vowel letter is an instruction The most important consequence is about vowels. In German, each vowel letter stands for one pair of vowels: a long one and a short one. The short one is a little more open than the long one — the table shows [eː] against [ɛ] and [oː] against [ɔ] — but the two stay close neighbours. The letter a is an [a]-type vowel, long or short. The letter i is an [i]-type vowel, long or short. No letter switches to a completely different vowel the way English a does between fat and fate . Letter What it always means a [aː] or [a] — as in father , never as in fate or fall e [eː] or [ɛ] — as in bed , never as in see or even (in an unstressed ending, a weak vowel instead — lesson 0.2) i [iː] or [ɪ] — as in machine or bit , never as in fine o [oː] or [ɔ] — as in more , never as in done or one u [uː] or [ʊ] — as in food or foot , never as in cut or music Read that table again with the negatives in mind, because the negatives are where your errors will come from. English gives the five vowel letters roughly twenty values between them; in stressed syllables German gives them ten, and they come in pairs, a long and a short version of each letter's vowel. When you see i , the answer is never the sound in fine . When you see u , the answer is never the sound in cut , and never the glide in music . Two more letters behave the same way and have no English equivalent at all: ü and ö , which are the front-rounded vowels. They get a lesson of their own. For now, note only that they are single letters with single values, not decorated versions of u and o . Consonants: the five you must relearn Most German consonants are close enough to English to cause no trouble. Five are not — w , v , z , s and j — and each of the five is a letter you already know that means something different here. The last two rows of the table add two spellings English does not have at all, ch and ß . Spelling Sound, and the trap w [v] — Wasser begins like English vast , not like was v usually [f] — Vater begins like English father z [ts] — zehn begins with the sound at the end of English cats s [z] before a vowel (at the start of a word or between vowels), [s] at the end, [ʃ] in sp- and st- at the start of a word j [j] — ja begins like English yes , never like jam ch two sounds, neither of them English; lesson 0.4 is about only this ß [s], always; it is a letter, not a decoration, and it never doubles The pair w and v is the one that will embarrass you first, because it is not a sound you cannot make but a letter you will read the English way by reflex. The German word for wine is spelled with W and begins with the sound of English v ; the German word for father is spelled with V and begins with the sound of English f . Both of those words are cognates of yours, which makes the reflex stronger, not weaker. Stress falls at the front The third thing to fix on day one costs nothing to learn and buys a great deal. In a native German word,