LingoDrop
German · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "wie" in German?
VEE. The w is a v and ie is a long 'ee' — two letters, one vowel, no w sound anywhere.
Question words open their sentence and take the first strong beat, so wie is prominent in a way that most short German words are not. In comparisons — so gut wie neu — it drops back to unstressed, which makes the same word sound noticeably quicker in the middle of a sentence than at the front of a question.
Listen: wie
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Hear it in a sentence
Wie geht es dir?
How are you?
Listen: Wie geht es dir?
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Wie geht es dir? is literally 'how goes it to you', with dir in the dative because that is the case this idiom takes. Geht has a long 'ay' and a crisp final t. In everyday speech the phrase contracts to wie geht's, which is why the ts cluster at the end is worth practising.
Where English speakers slip
The two commonest errors are 'wee' with an English w and 'why' from reading ie as a diphthong. Both are avoided by treating the spelling as a package: w equals v, ie equals long ee. There is also an easy vocabulary mix-up nearby — wie is how, wo is where, wer is who — so the vowel needs to be a clear, long 'ee' to keep them apart.