Schwul and Schwül

The Umlaut. As it turns out, learning how to pronounce the umlaut is actually very important.

I went to an International party organized by InterNations, a networking community for expatriates and "Global Minds." The first woman I met was from Armenia, the second person I met was from Turkey, and the next two guys I met were German. Since there are so many different countries represented, the common language is English.

One of the german guys I met is a Teacher and we eventually started talking about the pronunciation of the 'umlaut.'

To explain it in writing is fairly simple, and in fact, this is how you spell the umlaut letter if your keyboard doesn't have the ability to do the umlaut.

ö sounds like oe

ü sounds like ue

ä sounds like aeh (like in Heaven)

The pronunciation is a lot more difficult. Especially the ü and the ö --they are sounds we don't really have in the English language.

Since I was speaking to a teacher, my "homework" was to find out the difference between "Schwul and Schwül," (keeping in mind that the 'w' in German is pronounced as the English 'v', just in case you are reading this and trying to pronounce these words out loud.) =)

The sample sentences were:

Das Wetter ist schwül. (Since we were talking and not writing anything down, I heard: Das sveater ist schvool. So naturally I started thinking about a sweater....which turned out to be unrelated to the actual meaning...)

Mein Bruder ist schwul. Again, to my novice ears, I heard "Mine Broder is schvool, and I could not discern the difference between the 'schvools.'

Before I left, I had him write down schwul and schwül so I knew how to spell them correctly.

When I looked up 'Schwül' (pronounced schvuel) I learned that it means "humid." The description actually said "please do not confuse with schwul (pronounced schvool), which means gay, or queer."

Homework is now complete...now I just have to work on the pronunciation.