Le vocali

In the Italian alphabet there are 5 vowels: a, e, i , o, u, as in English, but pronounced differently. In fact, there are only 7 Italian vowel sounds, while in English there are around 15 or so.

Pronunciation errors are predictable and the majority of them involves the vowels pronunciation. Because of that, it's essential to learn how to pronounce vowels correctly in order to avoid fossilization, the process in which mistakes become a habit, difficult to be corrected.



ONE-SOUND VOWELS

The three one-sound Italian vowels are: a, i, u.

Let's listen to their sounds checking the following chart:

TWO-SOUND VOWELS

The two-sound Italian vowels are: e, o. Both of them have a so-called "open" sound and "closed" sound.

There is often no way to know which sound to use in a particular word and it can also vary slightly depending on the regional accent of the speaker, but don't worry about this because the exact same thing happens in English and almost in every other language.

TO SUM UP

The 5 Italian vowels have 7 sounds: "a, i, u" are one-sound vowels, while "e, o" are two-sound vowels.
Below you can see the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) for each vowel and its pronunciation:

STRESSING WORDS PROPERLY

In Italian one syllable always gets more stress than the others. Stress placement in Italian is variable, just like in English (the stressed syllable changes from word to word).

Most words are stressed on the next to the last syllable, for example, "finestra" (window) > fi-ne-stra.

Some words give you a hint as to where to stress them as they have an accent mark above the last letter, for example, "università" (university) > u-ni-ver-si-tà.

Examples: