German Alphabet & Special Characters 🇩🇪 | Ä Ö Ü ß + Pronunciation Guide

Welcome back to German with John Berlin. Today we'll be doing some fundamentals and some basics of the German language. How to get started learning it. Now for the starters we need to see how we can type the special characters when we write German. Otherwise all the letters are like like in Latin like the English letters except for these four letters which we'll just have a look right now together. The first letter is as we had mentioned earlier are umlaut. The two dots are called umlaut and it's pronounced like a. Now to type this letter here is the combination. That means if you don't have a German keyboard you could pull down the old button and press 0196 yes at the same time and you'll get the output umlaut in capital. Accordingly you could do it for the o-umlaut which is ü, u-umlaut which is ü or sz. Yes you can get these characters with the following alt codes. Fantastic. Now if you don't want to do that there's of course the English convention yes in which you could alternatively use a e instead of an umlaut. It denotes as well umlaut. Perfect. Super. Now some combination letters which I would like to point out the sounds of some combination letters. Now whenever in German you come across ei or in Deutsch if we pronounce it's if whenever a and e are written together the sound it makes is ei like in Frankreich. Whenever e and a are written together in this fashion it makes the sound e. It's diesem. Yes. Sz together make ch like farscheinlich. Tula. Now sz has two sounds. Either it could be ch like machen or sometimes it could be like sch like kirsche. It differs from word to word. S we already know is making the sound of z like zex. Whenever you see sp together you not call it sprach. You rather call it sprach. Sp. Whenever there is st together you won't call it studier. You could better call it studieren. Yes. Whenever you have a u together in Deutsch it makes the sound of oi like in the words neuen Deutsch or Euro. Perfect. So with that in mind let's get started and read a text I have for us. Now the text I have here is the original text and the text on the right is with the sounds that I have written down in syllables for the respective alphabets. That means I was big enough to read this text. You might want to follow the sounds wherever required and you could take your time out and read this text. So let's see how we go. John Bjarlin forstello. Mein Name ist John Bjarlin. Ich bin einen Chefsteller und einen Deutschlehrer von Beruf. Ich bin 33 Jahre alt. Meine Hobbies sind zu unterrichten, Bücher zu schreiben, Boxen zu gucken und zu malen. Mit 30 Jahren habe ich mein erstes Buch geschrieben. Ich habe eine kleine Familie und eine Hündin. Ich habe sie aus der Liebe für Deutschland Berlin genannt. Ich spiele Fangen mit ihr. Ich interessiere mich sehr für fremde Sprachen. Ich möchte noch Spanisch und Französisch lernen. Ich habe mich an einem Spanischen Sprachinstitut angemeldet. Wahrscheinlich lerne ich Spanisch so gut als Deutsch. Der spanische Kurs dauert insgesamt 16 Wochen. Danach werde ich die mittlere Stufe erreichen. Ich habe einen Freund Marc. Er kommt aus Spanien. Er kennt auch ein bisschen Deutsch. Er kann mir beim Spanisch lernen helfen. Übrigens jetzt muss ich mich auf meine Reise nach Spanien vorbereiten. Ich habe viel anzupacken. Zufriedenlich wird alles klappen. Super! So you could rerun this video and whenever you listen to this video you could rather have a look at this text written on the right. I'll just read an excerpt for you to see how the sounds I have written down here. For example, Mein Name ist John Berlin. It's like Mein Name ist John Berlin. Ich bin ein Schriftsteller. Ich bin einen Schriftsteller und einen Deutschlehrer von Beruf. Ich bin 33 Jahre alt. Ich bin 33 Jahre alt. Meine Hobbys sind zu unterrichten, Bücher zu schreiben, Boxen zu gucken und zu malen. Meine Hobbys sind zu unterrichten, Bücher zu schreiben, Boxen zu gucken und zu malen. Perfekt! So this was just a brief excerpt to show you that the original sounds are just interpreted here with the description of those sounds written as these letters to help you identify the right sound and practice it. Alright, so I wish you all the best. Read this text and see you get the right sounds. See you in the next lesson. Signing off, this is John Ball.