How to Pronounce 'すみません': Japanese Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce すみません in Japanese?

すみません is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /sɯ̥.mi.ma.seɴ/. It means “sorry / excuse me.” su-mi-ma-sen, five beats — the opening "su" is whispered and the final "n" is a beat all by itself.

How do you pronounce "すみません" in Japanese?

su-mi-ma-sen, five beats — the opening "su" is whispered and the final "n" is a beat all by itself.

すみません /sɯ̥.mi.ma.seɴ/

sumimasen

Five morae, of which the last is nothing but a hum. That final ん is where the timing usually collapses: English speakers treat it as a consonant tacked onto "sen" and finish early. Hold it. The word should take five counts, and the fifth is spent entirely on nasal resonance with no vowel at all.

Listen: すみません

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Sound it out

su The u sits between silence and a voiceless s, so it typically devoices: what you actually hear is a brief hiss before the m. Think "s'mimasen," not "soo-mimasen."

mi Lips together, then a short tight i. Half the length English gives "me."

ma Same m, now with an open a. The two m-morae in a row are a good test of even timing — neither should dominate.

se Clean s into a short e as in "set," without the upward glide English adds at the end of "say."

n The moraic ん takes a full beat on its own. Utterance-finally it's produced far back, close to the ng of "sung" with the mouth still open — hum it and let it end there rather than closing to a crisp English n.

Hear it in a sentence

すみません、聞こえませんでした。

Sumimasen, kikoemasen deshita.

Sorry, I didn't hear you.

Listen: すみません、聞こえませんでした。

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すみません、聞こえませんでした ends with ませんでした, which piles two more moraic ん-adjacent structures into one breath and finishes on another devoiced ta-ending. The sentence is essentially a rhythm drill: hold the ん in すみません, hold it again in ませんでした, and don't let でした collapse into "desh-ta" so fast that the beats disappear.

Where English speakers slip

Two habits show up together. First, learners pronounce the su with a full rounded "soo," when native speech whispers it away. Second, they clip the ん, producing a four-beat "soo-mi-ma-sen" that lands like an English word with stress somewhere on "MA." Whisper the opening, keep all four vowels short and equal, and give the closing nasal its own honest count.