German uses the same twenty-six letters as English, plus four characters English does not have. That is the whole inventory, and once you know what the extra four do, German spelling becomes about as predictable as a natural language gets.

The four extra characters

The umlauts are not decorations and they are not optional. They change the word. A great many German plurals are marked by an umlaut and nothing else, so dropping one does not make you sound casual, it makes you say the singular.

The eszett is a single letter that looks like a capital B to an untrained eye. It is always pronounced as a sharp s. Switzerland does not use it at all and writes ss instead, which is worth knowing before you assume a Swiss text has a typo.

The spelling rules worth knowing on day one

• Every letter is pronounced. German has very few silent letters, which is a real kindness after French.
• w is pronounced like an English v. So the German w in a word like Wasser sounds like the v in very.
• v is usually pronounced like an English f.
• z is pronounced ts, always, wherever it appears.
• s before a vowel is a z sound; elsewhere it is a sharp s.
• sch is one sound, the English sh. So is st and sp at the start of a word, where the s becomes sh.
• ch has two readings, one soft and one rasping, depending on the vowel before it. This is the only genuinely awkward sound in the language for English speakers.

Capital letters do grammar

The thing that surprises every beginner: German capitalises every noun, not just proper ones. Not the first word of a sentence and names, but every single noun, in the middle of a sentence, always.

It looks strange for a week and then becomes extremely useful, because it means you can pick the nouns out of a long German sentence at a glance. Given how long German sentences can get, that is a feature rather than an eccentricity.