1–4 to answer · Enter to continue
1–4 to answer · Enter to continue
Ten units. Each adds a single new idea, and each has a short lesson before the drill.
The gate is 90% accuracy over 30 answers and a median under 3 seconds. Both, because right-but-slow means you are still computing.
1 · Vowel length, from what follows.
| After the vowel | Length |
|---|---|
| doubled vowel · ie · a silent h · ß | long |
| one consonant, then a vowel | long |
| doubled consonant · ck · tz · chs | short |
| two or more consonants | short |
| ch or sch · one syllable ending in a single consonant | not derivable |
2 · Final devoicing. b → /p/, d → /t/, g → /k/ at the end of a word. Not when an ending follows: Hund hardens, Hunde does not. The ending -ig softens to the ich-Laut instead.
3 · The ch split, decided by the vowel before it: after a, o, u, au it is the scrape /x/; everywhere else the hiss /ç/. sch is /ʃ/ and chs is /ks/.
Nothing here hand-writes a length, a devoicing or a ch. All three are derived, and the test suite asserts each against every word. Where the spelling genuinely does not decide, the engine returns nothing rather than guessing — and every such word carries a visible flag, which the suite also enforces.
IPA is in every panel. The drill answers use a respelling, because four IPA strings side by side are unreadable to a beginner.
aa ee ii oo uu = long vowels · a e i o u = short · öö üü = the long rounded front vowels
ay = ei /aɪ/ · ow = au /aʊ/ · oy = eu, äu /ɔɪ/
KH = the ach-Laut /x/ · kh = the ich-Laut /ç/ · SH = /ʃ/ · ts = /ts/
v = /f/ (the letter v) · w written as v · z = /z/ (the letter s before a vowel)
CAPITALS mark the stressed syllable. German stress is real and usually falls on the first syllable of the root — the unstressed prefixes be- ge- er- ver- ent- zer- are the systematic exception.
The US Foreign Service Institute places German one band above French and Spanish — roughly 750–900 class hours for an English speaker, against about 600–750 for the Romance pair and 1,100 for Thai.
Reading German is the easiest of the four. Spelling maps to sound more reliably than in French, and far more than in English. Once you have the three rules on this page you can pronounce almost any German word you have never seen, including the very long ones — which are just short words joined together.
What makes German harder overall is not the reading. It is:
What this app cannot do: teach you cases, gender, speaking or listening. It teaches you to look at written German and produce the right sounds. In German that is a genuinely large head start, because the reading system is so regular — and a small part of the whole.
Looking for a German voice…
Audio uses your device's own text-to-speech, switched to Spanish. If the speaker buttons are silent, no German voice is installed:
Every word also links out to Forvo, where the recordings are human.
Words are marked very common, everyday or less common, and Wiederholung draws tier 1 about 2.6× as often. Inside a single unit there is deliberately no bias — coverage matters more there.
These tiers are a considered estimate, not a corpus count. Real ranked frequency data would improve the weighting, and that is a known gap rather than a hidden one.
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