German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "die Hand" in German?

dee HANT. A breathed h, a short open 'ah', and the final d hardening into a t.

die Hand /diː hant/

Short, closed and over quickly. The plural Hände fronts the vowel to a short ä and adds a schwa, which restores the d's voicing — so the plural changes vowel colour, syllable count and final consonant all at once, and sounds noticeably unlike the singular.

Listen: die Hand

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Sound it out

H An h you can hear. It is silent only after a vowel, never at the start.

a Short and open, as in father but clipped. Not the flat fronted vowel of English hand.

n A straightforward n closing the syllable.

d A t, not a d. The written letter tells you the word's family, not its sound.

Hear it in a sentence

Gib mir deine Hand.

Give me your hand.

Listen: Gib mir deine Hand.

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Gib mir deine Hand is an imperative, and the du-imperative of geben is the bare gib with its shortened stem vowel. Mir is dative as the recipient and deine Hand accusative as the thing given, which makes the short sentence a compact case lesson.

Where English speakers slip

The English word hand supplies a fronted, flat vowel and a voiced final d, and German changes both — an open 'ah' and a hard t. The plural is the third thing worth drilling, since Hände is 'HEN-duh' and shares almost nothing audible with the singular apart from the h.