This paper presents the work done at Philips Research to extend our American-English large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to two new languages, French and German. The tasks on which the system is tested are very similar for each language: a speaker-independent, continuous-speech, national newspaper reading task with a high-quality microphone. However, an important factor for German is the extension of the recognition vocabulary from 20k to 64k words to achieve comparable out-of-vocabulary rates. A comparison between the different databases used to train the system for the three languages is made, results are accordingly interpreted and the characteristics of each language are pointed out.