German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "hören" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce hören in German?

hören is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈhøː.ʁən/. It means “to hear / listen.” HUR-en, but with a long ö: say 'ay' as in day, hold the tongue still, and round your lips hard.

HUR-en, but with a long ö: say 'ay' as in day, hold the tongue still, and round your lips hard.

hören /ˈhøː.ʁən/

HÖ- is the louder half, and the long ö carries a good deal of duration, which makes the word feel slower than its two syllables suggest. The umlaut here is part of the root rather than a grammatical change — compare Horn, which has the un-umlauted vowel — so it never disappears as the modals' umlauts do.

Listen: hören

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Sound it out

h A breathed h opening the word, always pronounced in German.

ö Long and front-rounded. Begin with a long 'ay', keep the tongue exactly where it is, and push the lips into a tight circle. There is no English vowel here and no r hiding inside it.

r A genuine uvular consonant this time, because a vowel follows it.

en An unstressed ending: a schwa plus n, both very light.

Hear it in a sentence

Ich höre gern Musik.

I like listening to music.

Listen: Ich höre gern Musik.

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Ich höre gern Musik uses gern, which is how German expresses liking to do something: there is no verb for it, so the adverb does the work. Musik takes its stress on the second syllable with a voiced s in the middle, mu-ZEEK, which is another borrowing escaping the first-syllable rule.

Where English speakers slip

English speakers reach for the vowel of her or heard, which is close in lip shape but has an r built into it and the tongue in the wrong place. German ö has no r-colouring whatsoever. Build it from 'ay': say day, sustain the vowel, then round the lips without letting the tongue retreat. If it starts sounding like 'oh', the tongue has slipped backwards.