FCI 035 – Italian Pronunciation Guide

Make no mistake, learning a foreign language as an adult is NOT easy. Luckily, there are some aspects of the Italian language which are so simple that a child can understand them. To wit, I’d like to offer an Italian pronunciation guide, “co-produced” by my three year-old daughter, Demetra. More on that later…

As far as acquiring languages go, Italian is actually pretty easy for English speakers. The vocabulary isn’t a big problem, because many of our words use the same Latin or Greek roots as Italian.

And as for a general Italian pronunciation guide, I can offer you this comforting rule: there are only 7 Italian vowel sounds (one each for a, i and u; two each for e and o) compared to 27 or so in English—depending who you ask.

What’s more, Italian vowels are “pure.” A sound written with a single letter has a single, unchanged value—it’s ALWAYS the same. So even if you’ve never seen a particular word before, you are (in theory) able to pronounce it perfectly the first time you encounter it.

The bad news, of course, is that Italian grammar is quite complex and difficult. Most Italians will admit this to you, immediately followed by the statement, “Even the majority of Italians don’t follow the proper grammar rules.” So at least they’ll cut you some slack.

But let’s not worry about that today. For now, let’s just try to sound like an Italian, even if our grammar is not perfectly accurate just yet.

Italian Pronunciation Guide

During the podcast, I discuss some of the most common mistakes by English speakers when learning Italian.

As we’ve already mentioned, we English speakers (Americans in particular) tend to mush our vowels, slopping them around in our mouths with no attempt to distinguish an “a” from an “e.”

This problem becomes even more apparent, ironically, with Italian words that are close to their English counterparts, because you think that you’re pronouncing them correctly, when actually it’s so far off that Italians won’t understand you. Similar words with different sounds: culture vs. cultura; umbrella vs. ombrello; traffic vs. traffico.” These words are mispronounced ALL THE TIME (while “sciopero” is hardly ever mispronounced, since it has no English equivalent–but that’s a whole other topic).

There are other examples, the double consonants being among them. Even within English, the British do a bit better than the Americans on this. The word “butter,” comes to mind. A Brit will pronounce it “but-ter,” while we Yanks tend to turn this word into “buder.” The double “T” becomes one “D,” for some reason. And during the podcast, listen how my three year-old says, “spa-gheT-Ti,” NOT “spu-geDi.”

Even among we Italian-Americans, who “should” know better, this tendency is evident. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve read within an Italian-American Facebook Group how much so-and-so goobah loves his “moma’s” meatballs. The word “mamma” (the most important word in the Italian language!) has two “M’s” in it!!  Yet I see it written with just one M all the time.  And what’s even worse, they put an “O,” where an “A” should be—it’s mAm-ma, NOT mOma!! Cretini…

Beyond that, here are my Top 3 Tips for improving your pronunciation:

* Focus on the sound of the word. Don’t worry about how it’s written or the meaning. When practicing your diction, ONLY concentrate on the sound itself and try to replicate that. Find a short (2-3 minute) recording of an Italian person ...