Now that we already mentioned it, you might ask yourself what in the world is a vowel. They are the sounds that are not consonants (which is not really helpful we admit) and they are the letters that sound in themselves. In German there are eight vowels: a, e, i, o, u, ä, ö, ü.

Vowels make it only possible that more consonants are but together. They make the sounds in-between. Otherwise we would have words like in the first example. The second example is easy to pronounce. Note that both examples are invented. They don't mean a thing (at least not in German).

almost impossible to pronounce   easy to pronounce     brgm   barogem