LingoDrop
German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "es" in German?
ESS. A short open e as in bed, a small glottal catch before it, and a clean unvoiced s.
Never stressed. It is so weak that German routinely swallows it into the preceding word: geht es becomes geht's, gibt es becomes gibt's, and the vowel disappears altogether. If you hear a stray ts at the end of a verb, an es has just been absorbed into it.
Listen: es
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Hear it in a sentence
Es tut mir leid.
I'm sorry.
Listen: Es tut mir leid.
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Es tut mir leid is literally 'it does sorrow to me', which is why mir is in the dative — the sorrow is happening to you rather than being something you do. Leid ends in a devoiced d, so it sounds like 'lite', and the whole phrase is best learned as one rhythmic block rather than four separate words.
Where English speakers slip
English voices the s at the end of short words almost automatically — as, is, has — and that habit turns es into 'ez'. German keeps it a hiss. The other adjustment is the glottal catch at the start, which stops es from gluing itself to the previous word; German only glues it on deliberately, in the contracted 's forms.