LingoDrop
German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "leer" in German?
LAIR, or 'LAY-uh'. German ee is a long 'ay', not the 'ee' of English see, and the r softens into a vowel.
There is one syllable and it is a long one, and the length is spelled out for you by the doubled vowel — German has three ways of marking a long vowel, and this is the least common of them, appearing in only a handful of words. Adjective endings add unstressed syllables without changing it: leere, leeres.
Listen: leer
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Die Flasche ist leer.
The bottle is empty.
Listen: Die Flasche ist leer.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Die Flasche ist leer opens with Flasche, which has a short a kept short by the sch cluster and ends in a schwa. The adjective then stays bare and finishes on a vowel rather than a consonant, so the whole sentence trails off softly.
Where English speakers slip
The doubled e looks like English see or three, so learners say 'leer' with an 'ee' vowel. German ee is 'ay' — the same value as the eh in zehn. That single correction fixes Tee, Meer, See, Beet and every other ee word at once, which makes it one of the highest-value spelling rules to get straight early.