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German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "müssen" in German?
MUESS-n. A short front-rounded ü — say the 'i' of sit with rounded lips — then a hissing double s and a syllabic n.
The beat sits on MÜS- and stays there, but as with können the vowel underneath it swaps out in the singular: ich muss has a plain short u with no rounding of the front-vowel kind at all. Learning the modals means learning that the stressed syllable keeps its position while changing its colour.
Listen: müssen
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Ich muss jetzt arbeiten.
I have to work now.
Listen: Ich muss jetzt arbeiten.
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Ich muss jetzt arbeiten puts the modal second and the infinitive last, with the time word wedged between them — the standard shape of a German modal sentence. Jetzt begins with a y sound and ends in tzt, three consonant sounds with no vowel to break them up, which makes it one of the more compressed words a beginner meets early.
Where English speakers slip
'MOOSS-en' is the default English attempt, keeping the lip rounding but leaving the tongue back where u lives. Bring the tongue forward to the position for the i in sit and hold the rounding. Then keep the ss unvoiced — buzzing it is a second, independent error that turns the hiss into a z and makes the word sound like a different language altogether.