LingoDrop
German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "klein" in German?
KLINE, rhyming with mine. The ei is 'eye', exactly as in the surname many English speakers already pronounce correctly.
One syllable holding the whole beat, and the adjective endings that follow are always unstressed. In kleinen and kleines the extra syllable is a schwa, so the diphthong stays the loudest and longest part of the word regardless of how much grammar is stacked onto the end.
Listen: klein
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Ich habe einen kleinen Hund.
I have a small dog.
Listen: Ich habe einen kleinen Hund.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Ich habe einen kleinen Hund puts two matching -en endings side by side, on einen and kleinen, because Hund is masculine and in the accusative. Hund ends in a devoiced d, so it sounds like 'hoont' — a good reminder that this rule applies to nouns just as much as to verbs.
Where English speakers slip
'Kleen' is the standard misreading, from the habit of treating ei as 'ee'. A useful anchor is the surname Klein, which English speakers already say as 'kline' — the German word is identical. After that, the work is in the endings, where beginners tend to give the -en a full vowel instead of the light schwa German actually uses.