Wien und Wein: Connecting Sound and Symbol in First-Year German

Abstract

Although German spelling is relatively phonetic, particularly in comparison to English, students in first-year German classes nevertheless experience some difficulties in assimilating new rules of orthography. We have all heard students read Wien as if written Wein, leider for Lieder, lauft as lauft, schon as schon, or teuer as *tiuer. This is, of course, the result of interference from English orthography, which shows inconsistency in the pronunciation of various vowel combinations, and which does not have umlauts or other German spelling conventions. Constant correction on the part of the instructor gradually lessens or even eliminates this persistent series of errors. Recently I have begun using a technique which trains students to associate correct pronunciation with the graphemes as soon as they see them, and which seems to clear up such errors rapidly. The approach is based upon associating problem combinations with very common German words which are almost never mispronounced or misspelled, such as ein, die, and deutsch. When a student misreads a word, I ask him or her to compare that word with one already known which has the same combination of letters. The student is then usually able to come up with the correct pronunciation. The benefits of this approach are clear. Students discover the correct pronunciation without merely repeating the instructor. The association between spelling convention and pronunciation is made clear and students are more likely to remember the correct sound-symbol association the next time they encounter the word or similar words.