Italian language tips, culture deep dives, and everything you need to fall in love with Italy.
Vowels are the cornerstone of Italian. The Italian language is heavily vowel-centered and this is what gives it its lovely melodic sing-song sound that we all know and love. The Italian word for ‘vowel’ is actually VOCALE so you can see the relationship between vowels and ‘vocalizing’ because that is what we are actually doing […]
The pattern of syllable stress in Italian is not too dissimilar to English. Typically, the stress falls on the penultimate (second last) syllable or the antepenultimate (third last) syllable depending on the type of word. INFORMAZIONE → information ANDIAMO! → Let’s go! MANGIO → I eat DIVERTENTE → fun BIOLOGICO→ biological MATEMATICA → math Anytime […]
Italian consonants are more or less the same as English consonants but the differences are distinct and consistent. Here we have included the consonant letters that have two different pronunciations depending on the vowel that follows, as well as the consonants that are pronounced differently altogether. You will then find 3 example words with audio […]
The Italian alphabet is pretty easy to get a handle on as it is more or less the exact same alphabet as English. Italian has:○ 5 vowels, exactly the same as English (with 7 vowel sounds in total)○ 16 consonants for “native” Italian words○ 5 consonants used for foreign words only Hear Italian Alphabet. Try […]
Learning accurate Italian pronunciation is essential from the very beginning. It’s important to mention that when we talk about having good Italian pronunciation we don’t mean that you have to fool Italians into thinking that you’re a native speaker with your perfect Italian accent. That would, of course, be incredible, but it’s neither important nor […]
How can I stop making mistakes by speaking Italian? Alan asks: How do I avoid freezing & panicking when Italians approach me to speak? In this episode of Ask Manu Italiano I will give you 4 recommendations and 5 practical tips to avoid the fear of speaking italian. RECOMMENDATIONS PREPARE FOR SITUATION – (collect ideas/expressions/topics […]
Is it possible to speak italian more naturally? Marie asks: “I heard this in Italian and I was a bit confused…or… shouldn’t they have been saying SONO OCCUPATA?“ Every native speaker has their own way of speaking. Some native speaker have strong accent, may use a lot of slang, or maybe combine words a lot. […]
