Cities
Most German, Austrian and Swiss cities are written as in English. The major exceptions are listed below, along with some other European cities where the German spelling is quite different. "Berlin" is spelled the same way as in English but is pronounced quite differently. Click here to try our exercise on how to say the names of important cities in German-speaking countries.

Vocabulary 3: Die Stadt - The City Die Stadt City    Die Stadt City Basel Basle    Luzern  Lucerne Bern Berne    Moskau  Moscow Braunschweig Brunswick    München  Munich Brüssel Brussels    Prag  Prague Genf  Geneva    Rom  Rome Hannover  Hanover    Warschau Warsaw Köln  Cologne    Wien  Vienna Lissabon  Lisbon    Zürich  Zurich

Countries
The vast majority of countries have their names written differently in German from how we would spell them in English. Here is a selection of the most important ones:

Vocabulary 4: Das Land - The Country   Das Land Country Andorra  Andorra Australien Australia Belgien Belgium Brasilien Brazil Bulgarien  Bulgarien China China Dänemark  Denmark Deutschland  Germany England  England Estland  Estonia Finnland  Finland Frankreich  France Griechenland  Greece Großbritannien  Great Britain Indien  India Irland  Ireland Island  Iceland Israel  Israel Italien  Italy Japan  Japan Kanada  Canada Kolumbien  Colombia Kroatien  Croatian Lettland  Latvia Liechtenstein  Liechtenstein Litauen  Lithuania Luxemburg  Luxembourg Mazedonien  Macedonia Mexiko  Mexico Moldawien  Moldova Monaco  Monaco Neuseeland  New Zealand Norwegen  Norway Österreich  Austria Polen  Poland Portugal  Portugal Rumänien  Romania Russland  Russia Schottland  Scotland Schweden  Sweden Slowenien  Slovenian Spanien  Spain Südafrika  South Africa Südkorea  South Korea Tunesien  Tunisia Ungarn  Hungary Wales  Wales Zypern  Cyprus

Test yourself!
You can test yourself on your knowledge of German words for countries by clicking on the two bars below:

Putting everything together
To say which city and country you come from or live in, you use the appropriate preposition. Prepositions - words like "in", "on" and "over" - stand in front of a noun or pronoun and relate it to the rest of the sentence. The two prepositions which we need for this section are "in" (= in) and "aus" (= from, out of):

Simple enough? Unfortunately not. For all German nouns have a gender and so far we have merely established the rules for neuter nouns...

Chapter 2.3: The gender of German nouns

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