German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "sehen" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce sehen in German?

sehen is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈzeː.ən/. It means “to see.” ZAY-un. A buzzing z, a long 'ay', a silent h, and a soft unstressed ending.

ZAY-un. A buzzing z, a long 'ay', a silent h, and a soft unstressed ending.

sehen /ˈzeː.ən/

First syllable, with the h creating a visible but soundless boundary between the two vowels. That silent-h pattern runs through a whole family of common verbs — sehen, gehen, stehen, nehmen — and in every one of them the stress sits on the syllable the h is marking.

Listen: sehen

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Sound it out

s Voiced at the start of a word before a vowel, so it buzzes like z.

eh Long 'ay', flat and steady. The h is silent and only signals length.

en An unstressed syllable with a schwa, kept audibly separate from the long vowel before it.

Hear it in a sentence

Ich sehe das Meer vom Fenster aus.

I can see the sea from the window.

Listen: Ich sehe das Meer vom Fenster aus.

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Ich sehe das Meer vom Fenster aus wraps the viewpoint in a two-part frame, vom ... aus, with vom being the compulsory contraction of von and dem. Meer has a doubled e marking a long 'ay', followed by the vocalised r, so it comes out close to 'MAY-uh' — the same vowel as in sehe itself.

Where English speakers slip

Reading the h aloud gives 'zeh-hen', with a breath in the middle that German does not have. It is silent between vowels, full stop. The initial s is the other habit: English hisses it, German buzzes it. Get both and the word slots neatly beside gehen, which has exactly the same shape and the same two traps.