German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "wohnen" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce wohnen in German?

wohnen is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈvoː.nən/. It means “to live / reside.” VOH-nen. The w is a v, the o is long and pure, and the h is silent.

VOH-nen. The w is a v, the o is long and pure, and the h is silent.

wohnen /ˈvoː.nən/

Everything hangs on WOH-, and the long o dominates the word — it is genuinely held, unlike an English 'oh' which is really a vowel plus a glide. The silent h is doing the same job here that it does in Bahn and sehen, marking length rather than adding sound.

Listen: wohnen

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Sound it out

w Pronounced v, as German w always is outside a handful of foreign names.

oh A long, steady o with no glide off the end. The h is a silent length marker.

n A straightforward n closing the syllable.

en The ending is a schwa and an n, said quickly and without weight.

Hear it in a sentence

Ich wohne bei meinen Eltern.

I live with my parents.

Listen: Ich wohne bei meinen Eltern.

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Ich wohne bei meinen Eltern uses bei, which always takes the dative, so Eltern gets the dative plural and meinen its matching ending. Eltern opens with a glottal stop, and note that this is the verb for residing — leben would mean being alive, which is a different claim entirely.

Where English speakers slip

Pronouncing the h gives 'vo-hnen' with an audible breath in the middle, and English speakers also tend to let the o glide toward a w at the end. Hold it flat and silent-h. The word choice matters too: learners reach for leben when they mean to say where they live, and the two are not interchangeable in German.