German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "haben" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce haben in German?

haben is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈhaː.bn̩/. It means “to have.” HAH-bn. A breathed h, a long open a, and an ending that collapses onto the n with no vowel left.

HAH-bn. A breathed h, a long open a, and an ending that collapses onto the n with no vowel left.

haben /ˈhaː.bn̩/

First syllable, as with every German infinitive. In relaxed speech the word compresses much further — wir haben becomes something close to 'wir hamm', with the b and n fusing into a single m. That is not sloppy speech but the normal spoken register, and hearing it is often what makes fast German seem unintelligible at first.

Listen: haben

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Sound it out

h A real, breathed h. Word-initial h is always pronounced in German — it is only silent after a vowel, where it marks length.

a Long and open, as in father. The open syllable ha- is what makes it long.

b Fully voiced, since it opens the second syllable rather than closing the word.

en The vowel drops out and the n takes the syllable, so the word ends 'bn'.

Hear it in a sentence

Wir haben viel Zeit.

We have a lot of time.

Listen: Wir haben viel Zeit.

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Wir haben viel Zeit uses viel without an ending, since it modifies an uncountable noun. Zeit opens on the ts of z and carries the 'eye' diphthong, so it comes out 'tsite'. Note that German says 'we have much time' where English prefers 'a lot of time'.

Where English speakers slip

The spelling suggests an English long a to many readers, producing 'HAY-ben'. German a is 'ah' in every position — long here, short elsewhere, but never the vowel of hay. The ending is the second correction: giving it a full e sounds carefully recited, when German lets the n absorb the whole syllable.