English pronunciation for German speakers
- Free diagnostic
- No card
- 6 transfer points
The specific sounds to check
Final-consonant devoicing
German turns a voiced consonant at the end of a word into its voiceless counterpart (b→p, d→t, g→k, v→f, z→s), a rule that carries directly into English — "rise" can sound like "rice", "bad" like "bat".
w pronounced as v
German w is pronounced like English v, so "wine" said with a German-transfer w can come out sounding like "vine" — the opposite direction from most other L1 v-w merges.
th has no native equivalent
German has neither English th sound; both are usually replaced with s/z or, less often, f/v.
German v is pronounced like English f
Confusingly, German v is pronounced like English f (the opposite mapping from w/v above), which can occasionally cross-contaminate English v in the other direction for some learners.
The German r is farther back in the throat
Standard German r is typically uvular, made further back than English's tongue-based r, which can give English r-heavy words a consistently different colour.
bad vs bed
English short-a and short-e don't map cleanly onto German's own vowel set, so the two can drift together in careful or fast speech alike.
What a week looks like
Day 1-2
Drill rice/rise and two more final-voicing pairs, keeping the voicing buzz through to the very end of the word.
Day 3-4
Practise wine/vine, watching that w stays lips-only with no teeth on lip.
Day 5-6
Drill both th sounds, then read a paragraph and flag any that slipped to s or f.
Day 7
Re-read the diagnostic line and compare it against your Day 1 take.
Not every point above will be yours
These are common, well-documented transfer patterns for German speakers as a group — not a rule about any one person. Region, schooling and how long someone has spoken English all change which of these actually apply. The diagnostic line is there to tell you which ones are really yours, not the list above on its own.Straight answers
Why does "rise" sometimes sound like "rice" for German speakers?
German devoices consonants at the end of a word as a regular rule of the language, so a voiced English ending like z can come out as its voiceless twin, s, purely from habit rather than from any difficulty making the sound.
Isn't w easy, since German has a w letter too?
The letter is the trap — German w is pronounced like English v, so reading English with German letter-to-sound habits flips w and v in exactly the way that changes wine into vine.