LingoDrop
German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "gefallen" in German?
guh-FAL-en. The ge- prefix is an unstressed schwa and the beat lands on FAL.
Because ge- is inseparable, the weight falls on the second syllable instead. That has a visible consequence in the past tense: the participle is simply gefallen, identical to the infinitive, because a verb whose prefix is already ge- does not add another one.
Listen: gefallen
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Hear it in a sentence
Die Stadt gefällt mir.
I like the city.
Listen: Die Stadt gefällt mir.
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Die Stadt gefällt mir turns English inside out — the city is the subject doing the pleasing, and mir is the dative person it pleases. The verb form gefällt shows the umlauted stem vowel of the third person, and Stadt begins with 'sht' and holds a short a, thanks to its doubled t.
Where English speakers slip
English speakers stress the prefix, producing 'GE-fallen', which German never does with ge-, be-, ver-, ent- or er-. The grammar is the harder half: learners build ich gefalle die Stadt on the English model, when German requires the thing liked to be the subject. Get the sentence pattern first and the stress tends to follow.