German Clothing and Shoe Sizes Spoken

A size is one of the few numbers you have to act on the second you hear it. A price you can read off the till display. A date you can write down and check later. A size arrives as a question from someone standing in front of you holding a garment, and the only acceptable response is a number back.

What makes it harder than it looks is that a size carries no unit. There is no Euro on the end, no Grad, no Uhr. A size is a bare two-digit number in a sentence full of other bare two-digit numbers, and the one word that would label it is the word most likely to be left out.

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German clothing sizes spoken aloud: the frame around the number

German uses the same continental scale as most of Europe. Women's clothing runs roughly 32 to 46, men's jackets and suits 44 to 60, and shoes 35 to 48. A German 38 in a dress is about a UK 12 and a US 8. The scale itself is the easy part. The forms it turns up in are what you are actually listening for:

Notice what the number never does. It takes no ending, unlike an ordinal in a date. It attaches to no unit word, unlike a temperature or a weight. It is simply the cardinal achtunddreißig, identical in every respect to the 38 you would hear in a house number or a count of chairs. Everything difficult about a size is either in the frame around it or in the number itself.

The tens come last, and that is where two real sizes split

German says the units digit before the tens. Achtunddreißig is eight-and-thirty. Every guide to German numbers says this, and most learners can recite it long before they can hear it.

Sizes are where that gap gets expensive, for a specific reason. In most contexts the reversal is survivable because the two candidate numbers are wildly different and context picks one. A jacket that costs either 46 or 64 euros is obviously 46. But on a clothes rail, the numbers that sound alike are both real sizes:

Each pair is identical for the whole first half of the word. Sechsund… tells you nothing. The distinguishing syllable, dreißig against vierzig, lands at the very end, after your ear has already committed. And both members of every pair are sitting on the same rack, so there is no context to rescue you.

If the reversal itself is still costing you a beat of thought, that is the thing to fix before anything on this page, and it is covered from the ground up in German numbers 1 to 100 and why German numbers are backwards.

Größe is often not said at all

The frame word is the first thing to disappear in real speech. Haben Sie das in achtunddreißig? works perfectly well without it, and so does an answer that is nothing but a number. Which leaves you in a shop, hearing a bare two-digit number, having to work out from context whether it is a size, a price, a quantity or a discount.

The corpus has a clothes-buying conversation that makes the point exactly. The word Größen is spoken, right in the question. The number that comes back is not a size:

That is the everyday shape of the problem. The labelling word sits behind the number, so you cannot use it to prepare. By the time Stück arrives, the number has already gone past. The same thing happens with Prozent in a sale and with Euro at the till, which is why the bare number is the skill and the unit is only the confirmation.

Shoe sizes and the half that arrives late

German shoe sizes run about 35 to 48 on the continental scale, and they are spoken exactly like clothing sizes: Größe zweiundvierzig, or Schuhgröße zweiundvierzig when it has to be explicit. The complication is the half size.

Half sizes show up mostly in sports and imported brands, and when they do, the half is welded onto the end of the number as einhalb:

This creates a specific and nasty timing problem. Zweiundvierzig is a complete, finished-sounding word. Your ear closes the number, files it, and starts processing the next thing. Then one more syllable arrives and the answer you already committed to was wrong by half a size. You have to hold the number open past the point where it sounds done.

Some speakers break it apart into zweiundvierzig ein halb, which is easier to catch because the pause warns you. The written form 42,5 can be read as zweiundvierzig Komma fünf, and that comma is genuinely spoken, unlike the comma in a price. The rules for halves and the einhalb family are set out in German fractions spoken, and the spoken comma is in German temperatures spoken.

Children's sizes are a height in centimetres

German children's clothing is not sized by age. The number on the label is the child's height in centimetres. Labels run in steps of six the whole way, 50, 56, 62 and on up to 176, at which point they meet the adult range.

Which means buying for a child starts with a measurement, and the measurement is a three-digit number:

Three-digit numbers have their own stacking rules, and if einhundertdreiundvierzig is a mouthful to unpick then the place to work is German numbers 100 to 1000. Once the hundreds are automatic, a children's size is just an adult size with a hundert in front.

S, M and L in a German mouth

Letter sizes are used in Germany too, especially for casual clothing, and they are not pronounced the English way. German letter names apply:

The one that catches English speakers is X, which is iks. Iks-ell does not sound like "ex-el" and it goes past quickly. The other two worth knowing are men's shirts, sized by collar width in centimetres and asked for as Kragenweite einundvierzig, and men's suits, where Konfektionsgröße fünfzig is roughly half the chest measurement in centimetres.

Where you actually hear a size

• Being asked in a shop. Welche Größe haben Sie? with someone waiting. No time to work it out.
• Stock checks. In achtunddreißig haben wir nur noch das in Blau. The size lands mid-sentence with no pause around it.
• The fitting room. Asking for the next size up or down means producing a number, not just recognising one.
• Buying for someone else. A size read to you over the phone or from a message, with no garment in hand to check it against.
• Shoe shops. The one place a half size is likely, and the one place a half size matters.
• Returns and exchanges. Explaining what was wrong usually means naming both the size you got and the size you wanted.

How to train this specifically

1. Work the pairs that share an opening. 36 against 46, 37 against 47, 38 against 48. Same first half, different ending. This is the single highest-value thing on the list because both options are plausible sizes.
2. Learn your own sizes as sounds, not translations. If you wear a 38, achtunddreißig should arrive as a fact about you, not as a number you decode and then convert.
3. Practise holding the number open. Half sizes and the einhalb suffix punish anyone who closes the number early.
4. Get the three-digit range automatic too. Children's sizes, collar widths and chest measurements are all centimetre numbers, and they run longer than anything on an adult label.
5. Ask for it again without apologising. Welche Größe, bitte? is a normal thing to say, and it is faster than guessing wrong and starting over.

All of it rests on hearing a bare two-digit number correctly the first time, with no unit word to confirm it and no time to think. That is exactly what the app trains for German numbers, with real recorded audio rather than text on a page. A size gives you nothing to lean on, so the number has to be automatic on its own.

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