German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "ich" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce ich in German?

ich is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ɪç/. It means “I.” Something like 'ikh' — the vowel of sit, then a soft hiss made at the front of the mouth. Never 'ick', never 'ish'.

Something like 'ikh' — the vowel of sit, then a soft hiss made at the front of the mouth. Never 'ick', never 'ish'.

ich /ɪç/

A single syllable with nowhere for stress to move, but inside a real sentence ich is usually the quiet part: German pushes the emphasis onto the verb or the new information, so Ich komme lands hardest on komme. Only when you are contradicting someone — ICH, not you — does the pronoun take the beat itself.

Listen: ich

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Sound it out

i The short, lax vowel of English sit or bin, not the 'ee' of see. Keep it clipped; a long vowel here immediately sounds like a foreign approximation.

ch The famous ich-laut. Put your tongue where it goes for the y in yes, then blow air through without voicing it — a whispered, hissy h. It lives at the hard palate, nothing like the throat-scrape in Scottish loch.

Hear it in a sentence

Ich komme aus Berlin.

I'm from Berlin.

Listen: Ich komme aus Berlin.

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Ich komme aus Berlin puts the pronoun first and the conjugated verb immediately after it, the verb-second pattern that governs nearly every German statement. Say ich and komme as one smooth unit; the ch flows straight into the k with no pause. Berlin takes its stress on the second syllable, ber-LEEN.

Where English speakers slip

'Ick' and 'ish' are the two wrong roads, and English speakers take one or the other almost without exception. The German sound sits between them: further forward than a k, less rounded and less buzzy than sh. A quick fix is to whisper the English word huge — the breathy hiss at the start of it is very nearly the German ch. Adding lip-rounding turns it into sh, so keep your lips relaxed and spread.