Minimal Pairs for Spanish, French, and German

How do you work through a pair?

Say each word on its own, then the two together, then test yourself on which one you said.

1. Say the first word three times, slowly, following the hint.
2. Say the second word three times.
3. Say both, first then second, so the difference sits side by side.
4. Write each word on a card, shuffle the two, and say the one on top while recording.
5. The next day, play the recording before you look at the card. Name the word you hear, then check.

These steps are a House routine, this site's own choice, not tested with learners. Step 5 tests your ear a night later, much as a Cold Say-Back tests your memory. A recording only plays back what you said, so it can't judge whether the two words sounded different. It does let you test your ear.

Early on, one pair a day is enough. In the 90-day plan, minimal pairs are one of three jobs that take turns on days 1 to 14, with vowels and the r first. For a sound that also needs whole sentences, take it to shadowing.

What's in the list?

Nineteen pairs for Spanish, French and German. Norwegian isn't here yet. To keep the whole list, with the IPA and the hints, download it as a CSV file About this table Data: IPA (except ahorra and pleine, which follow the textbooks below) and word meanings from Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/), CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), via Wiktextract and kaikki.org (extract of 2026-10-30), read 2026-11-10. Changes: the transcriptions are copied without slashes; meanings are shortened into the hint column.; Pairs and sound descriptions follow ¿Cómo suena? (Escudero, Barreca and Carbone, SUNY Create OER), FREN 140: Basic French Pronunciation (Carrasco and Zahedi, Palomar College, LibreTexts) and Deutsch im Blick (Abrams and others, COERLL, University of Texas at Austin), each CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The peso and pesó pair and the th comparison follow the FSI Spanish Basic Course, a U.S. government publication..

Spanish. The tap and the trill, from the open phonetics textbook ¿Cómo suena?, which counts one touch of the tongue for the tap and three for the trill. A written rr gets the trill, and a single r between vowels gets the tap. A single r at the start of a word, as in rojo, or after n, l or s, as in enredar, alrededores and Israel, gets the trill too. One pair is about stress: peso and pesó have the same sounds, but the stress moves, and the written accent marks the stressed syllable. One more pair, casa and caza, only works in the center and north of Spain, where z sounds like the th in "thin." That's called distinción. In most of Latin America and the south of Spain, the two words sound the same. That's called seseo. The r page has more on the trill, and the Spanish pronunciation page covers how the r varies by region.

French. The u of vu against the ou of vous, u against i, and three nasal vowels, from the open textbook FREN 140: Basic French Pronunciation. In Parisian French, FREN 140 says, un and in now sound the same, while the south of France and Québec keep them apart. That's why this list has no un pair. Two rows are near pairs and say so: bon and bonne, and plein and pleine, differ in more than one sound. The first word has a nasal vowel and no n. The second has a vowel that isn't nasal, followed by an n you say. See French pronunciation and the nasal vowels page.

German. Umlauts and the letters v and w, from the open textbook Deutsch im Blick. It describes the umlaut as moving a vowel from the back of your mouth to the front, as in schon and schön. In words like Vieh, German v sounds like English f, and the w in wie sounds like English v. A few words keep a v sound for the letter v, such as Vase. The German pronunciation page covers the rest.

Why are there no recordings?

This site hasn't yet found and checked recordings it can use. Each pair says so, and links to its two Wiktionary entries instead.

Recordings will be added only from real speakers, and only with a license this site has checked file by file. Computer voices won't stand in for a person. Some Wiktionary entries have audio of their own, which no one here has listened to or checked. Use those clips to hear the sound, but don't treat any single clip as the one right way to say it.

Where does each row come from?

Each row has three parts. Each part has a source.

The pair. Most pairs appear as pairs in the textbooks above. Six were put together by this site from a textbook's rule. For those six, the textbook describes the sounds but doesn't list the pair: caro and carro, casa and caza, the French lu and lit, plus three French nasal pairs, son and sang, ton and temps, and vin and vent.

The IPA. IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet. Each word's IPA comes from Wiktionary, read through kaikki.org, and is copied as written. That's why Bruder shows ˈbruːdɐ and Brüder shows ˈbʁyːdɐ: the two entries write the r with different symbols. Only the vowel changes between them. Two forms had no IPA in the dictionary data, so they follow the textbook instead: ahorra from ¿Cómo suena? and pleine from FREN 140's rule.

The hint. It gives both meanings and what the textbook says about the sound. Where a hint says "say ee" or "round your lips," it repeats the textbook's own instruction.

Tomorrow morning, do a Cold Say-Back on one pair before you play yesterday's recording: say both words from memory, without the list, then check them against the hint. Play the recording for step 5 after that. The Cold Say-Back page explains the rule.