Italian All-in-One For Dummies (6 page)

Stupendo!
(stooh-
pehn
-doh!) (
Wonderful!
)
(
Fabulous!
)

Va bene!
(vah
beh
-neh!) (
Okay!
)

Mouthing Off: Basic Pronunciation

Italian provides many opportunities for your tongue to do acrobatics. This is really fun, because the language offers you some new sounds. This section includes some basic pronunciation hints that are important both for surfing through this book and for good articulation when you speak Italian.

Next to the Italian words throughout this book you find the pronunciation in parentheses. The following sections help you figure out how to read these pronunciations — that is, how to pronounce the Italian words. In the pronunciations, the syllables are separated with a hyphen, like this:
casa
(
kah
-zah) (
house
). Furthermore, the stressed syllable appears in italics, which means that you put the stress of the word on the italicized syllable. (See the section “
Stressing Syllables Properly
,” later in this chapter, for more information about stresses.) If you master the correct pronunciation in this chapter, starting with the alphabet, you may even forego the pronunciation spelling provided, and read like a real Italian.

Starting with the alphabet

What better way is there to start speaking a language than to familiarize yourself with its
alfabeto
(ahl-fah-
beh
-toh) (
alphabet
)?
Table 1-1
shows you all the letters as well as how each one sounds. Knowing how to pronounce the Italian alphabet is essential to pronouncing all the new words you learn. Note that the Italian alphabet has only 21 letters: Missing are
j, k, w,
x,
and
y
(which have crept into some Italian words now used in Italy).

Listen to the alphabet on Track 1 as many times as you need to in order to get down the right sounds. In the long run, this will help you be understood when you communicate in Italian.

Vowels

When it comes to vowels, the sounds aren't that new, but the connection between the written letter and the actual pronunciation isn't quite the same as it is in English.

Italian has five written vowels:
a, e, i, o,
and
u.
The following sections tell you how to pronounce each of them.

The vowel “a”

In Italian, the letter
a
has just one pronunciation. Think of the sound of the
a
in the English word
father.
The Italian
a
sounds just like that.

To prevent you from falling back to the other
a
sounds found in English, the Italian
a
appears as (ah) in this book, as shown earlier in
casa
(
kah
-sah) (
house
). Here are some other examples:

albero
(
ahl
-beh-roh) (
tree
)

marmellata
(mahr-mehl-
lah
-tah) (
jam
)

sale
(
sah
-leh) (
salt
)

The vowel “e”

To pronoun the
e,
try to think of the sound in the word
day
, which comes very close to the Italian
e.
In this book, you see the
e
sound as (eh). For example:

sole
(
soh
-leh) (
sun
)

peso
(
peh
-zoh) (
weight
)