Torture Your Friends With These 5 Hard-to-Pronounce German Words

It’s this time of the year — it’s too cold and too dark and nature is too dead. We need something to cheer us up — even if it comes at the cost of humiliating our non-German speaking friends. SAD-therapy lamps only go so far and they don’t make us laugh, do they?

I’ve picked up the mischievous habit of persuading my neighbor to read out a German word on the back of a product whenever we are shopping at Aldi (a German discount supermarket with branches all over the world).

I squeak in joy whenever she trips over a “ch” or mispronounces an Umlaut. I mumble a disappointed “yes, that’s correct” when she graciously navigates the traps of German pronunciation. Unfortunately (for me), her German reading and pronunciation skills are getting better with every trip to the supermarket.

So, as she is becoming a pro at it, I had to think up a few German words that are truly difficult to pronounce. After all, winter is not going anywhere any time soon in Northern Europe. Here are my favorites. They pretty much trip up any non-German speaker, and even some German speakers, so use them responsibly.