The German alphabet and the English alphabet are very similar to each other as they are both derived from the Roman alphabet.
The main difference between the two alphabets comes from the pronunciation of the letters, the most extreme examples are u,v,w,x and y
| Letter | Pronounciation |
| A/a | aː |
| B/b | beː |
| C/c | t͡seː |
| D/d | deː |
| E/e | eː |
| F/f | ɛf |
| G/g | geː |
| H/h | haː |
| I/i | iː |
| J/j | jɔt |
| K/k | kaː |
| L/l | ɛl |
| M/m | ɛm |
| N/n | ɛn |
| O/o | oː |
| P/p | peː |
| Q/q | kuː |
| R/r | ɛʁ |
| S/s | ɛs |
| T/t | teː |
| U/u | uː |
| V/v | faʊ |
| W/w | veː |
| X/x | ɪks |
| Y/y | 'ʏpsilɔn |
| Z/z | t͡sɛt |
| Ä/ä | |
| Ö/ö | |
| Ü/ü | |
| ẞ/ß |
They are listed here as special characters but the German Umlaute are essentially just three extra letters (ä, ö, ü) that you should just study like any other ordinary letter.
Those that have been around the early days of computing and the web may still use ae, oe and ue instead of ä,ö and ü. This comes from the fact that the early ASCII standard was quite limited when it comes to languages other than English and did not include these characters. Nowadays, with UTF-8 and higher being ubiquitous this should not be a problem anymore.
The Eszett ß, more commonly called scharfes S (sharp S) is the only other special character in the German alphabet in comparison to the English alphabet.
As the name already suggests it's basically what you get when you pronounce an 's' more sharply. Though when speaking fast the difference is most often lost
You will most often notice the Esszett in written German as quite a few words contain it. Examples are:
Side note: The scharfes S is only found in the Standard High German dialect of German. It is not found in the Swiss German dialect (German keyboards in Switzerland don't contain a key for this letter).
The German alphabet can be sung, which is also a way used to teach children the German alphabet but can also help adults learn it to!
