German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "aus" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce aus in German?

aus is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /aʊ̯s/. It means “from / out of.” OWS, rhyming with house. The au is the 'ow' of how and the final s hisses rather than buzzes.

OWS, rhyming with house. The au is the 'ow' of how and the final s hisses rather than buzzes.

aus /aʊ̯s/

Stress here depends entirely on the word's job. Introducing a place of origin it is a quiet preposition; heading a separable verb it is the loudest syllable in the construction, as in AUSgehen. That prefix stress survives even when the prefix flies to the end of the sentence, which is why the last word of a German sentence is so often the emphatic one.

Listen: aus

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Sound it out

au The diphthong of house, beginning open and gliding toward 'oo'. Preceded by a small glottal catch, since the word starts on a vowel.

s Unvoiced at the end of a word — a hiss, never the z-buzz English gives the s in cows.

Hear it in a sentence

Ich komme aus Italien.

I'm from Italy.

Listen: Ich komme aus Italien.

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Ich komme aus Italien is the standard way to state where you are from, and aus takes the dative — though country names usually appear without an article, so nothing visibly changes. Italien is stressed on its second syllable, i-TA-li-en, and ends with the reduced ending German gives foreign nouns of this shape.

Where English speakers slip

English readers see au and think of the 'aw' in caught, producing 'awss'. German au is always 'ow'. The final s is the second correction: English voices s after a diphthong almost automatically, so learners drift toward 'owz', but German ends the word on a clean, unvoiced hiss — hold that and the word sounds right immediately.