Germanic umlaut

Germanic umlaut is a fancy way of saying that some sounds in German words change when we add certain letters to them. Imagine you have a word like "man" and you want to talk about more than one man. In German, you can add a letter "e" at the end, so it becomes "mane". But that doesn't sound very good, so instead, we change the sound of the "a" to "ä", which makes it sound more like "men".

This change in sound happens because of something called "umlaut". It's kind of like magic - when we see certain letters (usually "e" or "i") nearby in a word, they make the vowel sound change. So in our example, the letter "e" at the end of the word "man" makes the "a" sound change to "ä".

This happens in lots of German words - for example, the word "Hund" (meaning "dog") becomes "Hünde" (meaning "dogs"), with the "u" changing to "ü" because of the nearby "e". It may sound a bit confusing, but it's a cool trick that makes German words sound more interesting!