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Emrys

(9,098 posts)
13. Well, yes, I studied German at UK A-level (in which I somehow got an A grade),
Mon Mar 23, 2026, 12:15 PM
Monday

then more briefly at university, so I'm familiar with its pronunciation, though I've no doubt by now forgotten much more than I ever learned.

I'm also a Welsh speaker, and one of its features is that its vowel sounds are "pure" compared to UK English. For example, UK English speakers in most regional accents outside the north of England would likely pronounce most vowels as dipthongs - "bale" for instance, would be pronounced as "bayl", whereas in Welsh and German we don't dipthong-ize vowels, so I was complimented on my German pronunciation, at least, by native German speakers. (It also helped with the ch sound, which Welsh also has.)

If you search on Google for the word Fräulein, the first result, for me at least, reads

Dictionary

Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more

Fräulein
/ˈfrɔɪlʌɪn/

noun
noun: Fräulein; plural noun: Fräuleins

a title or form of address for an unmarried German-speaking woman, especially a young woman.
"Fräulein Winkelmann"


and it includes a speaker icon. If you click on it, it gives an audio pronunciation of the word, which is as I explained.

(That definition assumes you want to define the word as it's been borrowed into English - in German, Fräuleins is definitely not the plural form!)

Here's another site that'll read you the word as spoken by a variety of German speakers, again as I explained: https://forvo.com/word/fr%C3%A4ulein/

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