My first time in Berlin I had to transfer from the first bus I took to another at Banhof Zoo. The lady at the hostel I stayed at wrote down the instructions for me to get to Dieter's shop and she spoke english. The way she pronounced zoo was something like a combination of T and S at the same time. It was like tssoo. The oo was suppressed. It's kind of hard to explain without hearing the sound, but I caught on right away because the Z sound in german was similar to the pi looking symbol in the Russian alphabet which is sounded phonetically "tseh". It's all in the matter of hearing the words and doing certain things with your mouth and tongue that makes the difference.