LingoDrop
German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "richtig" in German?
RIKH-tikh. A throaty r at the very front, then two soft palatal hisses, one in each syllable.
Front-stressed, with the suffix unstressed. What makes this word a genuine workout is not the rhythm but the geography: the stressed syllable begins with a sound made as far back in the mouth as German goes and ends with one made near the front, so the tongue has to travel the whole distance inside one beat.
Listen: richtig
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Deine Antwort ist richtig.
Your answer is correct.
Listen: Deine Antwort ist richtig.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Deine Antwort ist richtig gives Antwort a glottal stop at the start, a w pronounced as v inside a consonant cluster, and a vocalised r before its final t. Deine ends in a schwa. The sentence therefore contains almost every unstressed-ending behaviour German has, all in four words.
Where English speakers slip
Most learners flatten the word into 'RICK-tick' with an English r, which loses all three of its distinctive sounds at once. Take them in order: put the r at the back of the throat, keep the two ch sounds as hisses at the roof of the mouth, and resist the pull to make them match each other's place — they are both soft, but the r is deliberately not.