German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "traurig" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce traurig in German?

traurig is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈtʁaʊ̯.ʁɪç/. It means “sad.” TROW-rikh. The au is 'ow' as in house, and the -ig ending is pronounced like ich, not like the 'ig' in English big.

TROW-rikh. The au is 'ow' as in house, and the -ig ending is pronounced like ich, not like the 'ig' in English big.

traurig /ˈtʁaʊ̯.ʁɪç/

TRAU- carries the beat, with the -ig suffix unstressed. That suffix is one of German's most useful spelling-to-sound rules: whenever a word ends in -ig, the ending sounds like the word ich, and the stress is never on it. Southern speakers say a hard 'ik' instead, but the hiss is the standard taught form.

Listen: traurig

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Sound it out

tr A t followed by the uvular r, which stays brief in this cluster.

au A diphthong that opens on 'ah' and glides toward 'oo', as in English now.

r A second r, this one a full consonant because a vowel follows it.

ig The adjective ending, pronounced as the soft ich-laut in standard German. A written g at the end of -ig becomes a hiss, not a hard consonant.

Hear it in a sentence

Warum bist du traurig?

Why are you sad?

Listen: Warum bist du traurig?

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Warum bist du traurig? opens with warum, which stresses its second syllable, va-RUM — unusual for German and worth noticing, since almost everything else in this sentence is front-stressed. Bist is the du form of sein, and the whole question ends on the soft hiss of the -ig ending.

Where English speakers slip

Almost everyone reads -ig as a hard g, giving 'TROW-rig'. In standard German the ending is a palatal hiss, identical to the ch in ich. The word also carries two different r sounds — the first squeezed into a cluster, the second standing alone before a vowel — and English speakers tend to make both of them the same bunched American r.