When you start learning German you will come across the alphabet in one of the first lessons and you most likely practise spelling your names or maybe the places you come from.
But what if you want to say your email address in German and have to spell it? You may start by saying “meine E-Mail-Adresse ist …..” and then you remember the @ sign and the hyphen and underscore …..
How do you say them?
These are the extra things you need to know:
- @ – at, although when Germans say it, it sounds more like et
- dot – Punkt
- hyphen – minus, because it looks like a minus sign
- Underscore – Unterstrich
- everything in lower cases – alles klein geschrieben (literally everything is written small)
- everything in upper cases – alles groß geschreiben
Watch my video to hear how you say all these words and to complete one listening exercise:
Now its’ over to you – can you say your email address in German?
I can now say my email address in German thanks to @german_tutor Share on XThis video is part of my German Alphabet course, so if you feel you need, or just want, to revise the German alphabet, I’m happy to see you as one of my online students. You can also try my listening exercise on Memrise: the German Alphabet
@ – at, although when Germans say it, it sounds more like et
Yep that threw me the first time a German tried to give me his email address down the phone. I have noticed that nowadays more and more Germans use the English pronunciation of @, same way they now tend to pronounce the ‘F-word’ correctly. Infact this very evening I was watching a 20 year old German Krimi and was slightly taken aback when they pronounced ‘Village Hotel’ as ‘Villarge’, these days most Germans IME would tend to say it the English way.
Another really useful ‘trick’, and not just for emails, is to learn and use the ‘die Buchstabiertafel’ (oder Buchstabieralphabet,Telefonalphabet, Funkalphabet, Fliegeralphabet). A= Anton Ä= Ärger B= Berta usw etc. May take a bit of effort but once you get used to it you’ll wonder how you ever survived or managed to learn German in Germany without it!
You mean this one: https://youtu.be/b0IojqLq_Fg ☺
As for the pronunciation, it all depends on how good their English pronunciation generally is.
I once have been told in no uncertain terms that ‘ze cet set on ze met’ is the only proper way to speak English and everything else is slang. Luckily that was a few years ago, so hopefully thing are changing,
You mean this one: https://youtu.be/b0IojqLq_Fg ☺
LOL, I might have known you’d have done a video already! *note to self, always check first before posting cos Anschi is on the ball*
PS.On the subject of what we were taught and is now wrong, I was about to remind you that there is no ẞ (große ß) in ‘proper’ German! Then I remembered that you know far more about German than I ever will and went and checked. Seems since i last looked the große ß has been accepted, by popular demand, as ‘correct’ at least in computeryness.
It’s been allowed since 2008. I have to admit that I don’t like it but I can understand that people might like/ need to use it when writing, for example, names with an ß in capital letters on a poster. Writing ‘ss’ instead could make people read the names differently to what they are.
How do you say ‘all one word’?
Oops, I missed that one. It’s ‘alles ein Wort’.
Thank you!!