German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "wissen" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce wissen in German?

wissen is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈvɪ.sn̩/. It means “to know (a fact).” VISS-n. A v at the front, a short i, an unvoiced double s, and an ending that collapses onto the n.

VISS-n. A v at the front, a short i, an unvoiced double s, and an ending that collapses onto the n.

wissen /ˈvɪ.sn̩/

The front syllable holds the beat, but this verb has one of the most disrupted paradigms in German: the singular forms abandon both the vowel and the consonant of the stem. Ich weiß has a diphthong and an ß where the infinitive has a short i and a double s, and only the stress position survives the transformation.

Listen: wissen

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Sound it out

w English v — the tongue plays no part, only the teeth and the lip.

i Short and lax, as in sit. The double s that follows guarantees the shortness.

ss An unvoiced hiss. Double s never buzzes, which distinguishes it from a single s between vowels.

en Reduces to a syllabic n: the vowel disappears and the n becomes the whole syllable.

Hear it in a sentence

Ich weiß es nicht.

I don't know.

Listen: Ich weiß es nicht.

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Ich weiß es nicht shows that broken form in action, and weiß is pronounced identically to the colour white — same diphthong, same unvoiced ending. Nicht sits at the very end to negate the whole statement, and es slips in unstressed between the verb and the negator.

Where English speakers slip

Voicing the double s is the main sound error, since English readers see a vowel-s-vowel pattern and buzz it. In German, ss after a short vowel is always a hiss. The larger difficulty is choosing this verb at all: wissen is for knowing facts and kennen is for knowing people or places, and no amount of correct pronunciation rescues the wrong one.