How to Pronounce an Umlaut | German Lessons

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Learning how to speak German? In this video, you'll learn how to pronounce an umlaut. It will help you perfect your German accent.

How to pronounce an Umlaut. Three vowels in the German language have an umlaut. A, O and U. A with an umlaut becomes AA. O with an umlaut becomes Ou, and U with an umlaut becomes EU.
Here are some examples of words with an Umlaut. Nahe is close, Naher is closer. Nahe - Naher.
Nahe - Naher.
Now you try.
Vogel is bird.
Vogel is birds, with an umlaut. Vogel - Vogel.
Now you try.
Bruder is brother.
Bruder is brothers, with an umlaut. Bruder - Bruder
Now you try.
And that's how you pronounce an umlaut.

[SuperBuildsInMC]

How come Germans use the emoticons :) and :O when they have Ü And Ö?

[awilddogehasappeared]

me "how to pronounce an omelet"

[RitaTheDragon]

"Now you try"
This feels like a German Dora the explorer episode

[fabianritter]

This does not help at all. I have taught the pronunciation of ö and ü to some friends of mine, btw I am a native speaker.

How to pronounce the (most difficult) "ü": Keep your lips like saying the German "u", but say the German "i" instead. 

And for the "ö": Keep your lips like saying the german "o", but say the German "e". As simple as that.

[Sonicgott]

Ä is like the A in Apple.
Ü has no English equivalent, but try pronouncing the "oo" in "Food" or "Pool, " but pucker your lips. This is the closest approximation I can think of.
Ö is similar to the U in "Fur." Again, pucker the lips. It is more vocally "outward, " than "upward" as compared to the Ü, as the flat, front part of your tongue is bent downward below your bottom teeth for this vowel, whereas the Ü your tongue is slightly above your bottom teeth.

These are very hard vowels for Americans to replicate the first time, and does take practice. Record yourself with a mic and play it back so you can hear yourself.

[SkorpioN]

I’m getting Dora the explorer flashbacks

[pozk-tfey]

I speak Sakha language, it's north-eastern turkic language from Siberian branch. I did it from first try, because we also have ü, ö and ä words :)

We also have a similar pronouncing of "h" word :D

Very interesting! Greeting to Germans from Eastern Siberia(Yakutia, Russia)!

[WinEntity]

"A" with an umlaut becomes "Eaaihh."
"O" with an umlaut becomes "Euuhh."
"U" with an umlaut becomes "Uehhh."

[maysamibraheam]

not clear at all for non German people

[artistsComplex]

I really like this video because it does a comparison of the regular vowel to the umlaut, but I also wish it included both the long and short version of that umlaut, as well as more (and varied) examples. I also think it's super important to have visual aid (that is, seeing a person pronounce the sounds). Still, for being a short video, this was pretty helpful. Thanks!

[pylonbuffering]

the Ü umlaut looks like a smiley face ü

[robertbrandywine]

Now just a darn minute (lol)!   At the beginning when you gave the stand-alone example of how to pronounce ä, you gave it a sound very much like "egg".  However, later when you had us practice it you were using  a sound more like the English long a, that is to say, rhyming with "say", "day", "way", etc.  

These two sounds "egg" and "day" are similar but not the same, so which is it? 

[jph]

And I suddenly feel like an idiot with earbuds in trying to say "bruder".

[HichamBoummaaiz]

"Mütter" should sound closer to "Mitter" than to "Mutter".

German vowels can roughly be divided between "light" and "dark" vowels. The former are e, i, ä, ö, ü, while the latter are a, o, u. So ü and u are very different to native speakers. English speakers tend to have trouble hearing and pronouncing the difference, but to speakers of many language, it's pretty big. Ü and ö are very close to i and e, respectively. They're even considered to rhyme with them in poems, but certainly not with u and o.

So if you want to exaggerate the difference, pronounce "Mütter" as "Mitter" and "Mutter" as "Motter", "Brüder" as "Brieder" and "Bruder" as "Broder", etc. Then only go halfway in each direction from your current pronunciation of u/ü, and you should still have two clearly separate and distinguishable vowels that are somewhat close to the correct sounds.

[BrendanBoon]

This is not just in the German language its in a lot of European languages for example jäger that's in a lot languages the difference is; is that its pronounced differently

[episodekiller]

Helped but I still have no idea how to say my last name lol

[biggiehwan]

It is hard to pronouce brother and brothers. When i say it, it sounds the same lol

[ender]

For the U with Umlaut, sound like you are getting punched in the gut. It actually sounds similar.

[bertrandolf]

To constructively criticize the video: It should be pointed out that in her example of the Ä she speaks the word in a northern german accent, where - as in the video - the ä in "näher" ironically and explicitly is NOT pronounced like an ä but shifted to an almost absolutely pure e. The "e" in the end of her "nähEr" is much more of an "ä". So what is written as "näher", her sounding is exactly inverted to "nehär", like the pronounciation you'd hear for example in Hamburg. The textbook german pronounciation would be with a sounding "ä" in both positions: nähär. Funny and helpful coincidence, that the sound of "ä" (ae as it is written helpwise) you "tändäntially häve in mäny of these amäricän "a"s and "e"s. So in the änd, the ä will be the easiest Umlaut for english natives to lörn. ;) In a tendential more high british or oxford english, many of these sounding "ä"s are shifted to "a"s like in "are" though. Could not come up with an english example for ü (ue) right now - are there any?

[darkpain]

Wow! This is the best tutorial ever ❤️❤️❤️