LingoDrop
German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "teuer" in German?
TOY-uh. The eu is 'oy' and the -er ending softens into a dark 'uh'.
The oy diphthong swallows the stress, the ending takes none, and the whole word is over quickly despite looking long on the page. Adding an adjective ending produces teure, where the e of the stem drops out entirely — German avoids stacking too many unstressed vowels in a row.
Listen: teuer
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Hear it in a sentence
Das Hotel ist zu teuer.
The hotel is too expensive.
Listen: Das Hotel ist zu teuer.
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Das Hotel ist zu teuer uses zu in its 'too' sense as a degree word. Hotel is a borrowing and takes its stress on the second syllable, ho-TEL, so the sentence has a front-stressed adjective at the end and a back-stressed noun in the middle — a nice reminder that the first-syllable rule applies to native vocabulary only.
Where English speakers slip
English readers see the word and reach for something like 'tewer' or 'too-er', giving eu the value it has in English feud. In German it is 'oy', every time. Then the ending: pronouncing a real r there is the second habit, and dropping it makes the word land as two clean vowels, which is much closer to how a German actually says it.