Italian Pronunciation Masterclass | How to speak and sound like a native

1. Intro: Hey, my name is Marco and welcome to my course about Italian pronunciation. This course wants to teach you the basics of Italian pronunciation from syllables and rhythms all the way to vowels, consonants, and we're sounds, including the roles are. And the idea behind this course is to really kind of give you an idea of what mistakes you could be making. Most people are really worried about their broad R, but I can tell you that there are a lot of mistakes. There are a lot more carbon easier to fix. And that really can improve your Italian a lot if you fix them. This course does not really have a minimum level of Italian that you need to have. Obviously, it's tough for beginners since I will assume that you do not know or understand most Italian words, but anyone can improve their pronunciation. I've been learning English for 25 years probably at this point, and my pronunciation is still not perfect. So even if your fluid this course can be helpful for you to improve your pronunciation and it can improve your Italian pronunciation in two ways. Number one, it will make you more confidence. And ideally that will make you speak more, use more words. Just try harder. And number two, if your pronunciation is better, you're going to be clear when you speak, which means that people will understand what you see more often. They will not need to ask you to repeat. When people ask you to repeat, you lose confidence, which again is just a bad loop. So ideally, more confidence, more clarity, focus on the things that really matter. And we'll talk about how important e.g. vowels are and how everybody gets them wrong. For the project of this course, I will have you read a short bit, the very beginning of a very famous Italian book that uses kind of a weird old Italian. And the idea is just have you read it. I will do the same thing. I want you to do the same thing, record yourself and then kinda see what you did wrong. And if you share with us, I will also give you feedback and anybody else can give you feedback. Then when you do it is you're going to be uploading either a video or an audio file that you do not need to show your face. I will not be showing my face for that specific exercise, but just record yourself reading out loud what you see in that page. You'll find all the detail in the project section of this course. And I really do hope that you complete the project because these, of course, my pronunciation, so it makes sense that you try to pronounce words. Well, this is it. Let's just get right into it. Let's start with a first-class immediately. If you enjoyed this course, please consider leaving a review to help other people find it. This course is part of a series. You can find the others are my profile. Check them out to learn more about basic Italian grammar. 2. What should your goal be?: The first question that we should ask ourselves is, why is pronouncing Italian or any other language heart, what makes it hard? The reason, in my opinion is that in order to pronounce Italian, if our native language is English or Spanish or French, or whatever it is, we have to make mistakes. What that means is that we need sounds that in our own native language would be a mistake. And that is hard because we're trained to avoid that sound, right? We cannot trade to speak the correct way according to I really like which which means e.g. if you are from the United States that you don't roll DR. And roll in the art is something that you don't do. So to do it, you need to focus on you to make a mistake. And this is important because when we make a mistake, we feel kind of silly. When we try and make a sound that is not in our language. We tend to feel a bit weird. Just we're overdoing it. And that's okay. We need to be comfortable with that feeling. It tried to make that sound. That sound is not natural to me. Therefore, I don't do it well, or I don't think that I do it well. And therefore, I feel weird when I do it. That kind of feeling is normal and we need to get used to it and we need to accept it. Something else that we need to understand is that not all sounds are equally hard for everybody. So e.g. some seeds will have a very hard time pronouncing. An Italian are enrolled, are. But that may not be as important. And they will often obsess over trying to say that, right, not realizing that they're getting so many other things wrong, there are a lot easier to fix, a lot more common. And they actually make your Italian bad because it's hard to understand. E.g. if you cannot rule the ER, I will see you understand what you're saying. And it's a matter of fact, there are some areas in elite that they're not reliable. They are from Turin or that area, or people don't really want the R. Some people have issues rolling the ER and they don't. So if you cannot do that, that's okay. But focusing on something like same vowels, right? Is much more important because vowels are much more common than our. Vowels are easy to pronounce. And if you mispronounce that, it's actually hard to understand what you mean because if you change a vowel, it could be a completely different word, therefore, different meaning. So something that we really need to keep in mind. We do not want perfect pronunciation. We don't care about that. Look at me. I speak English. I spoken English for 20 whatever years. My pronunciation is far from perfect. I make mistakes and that's okay because people understand me. So that's what I care about. You should try to be understood. You try and be confident enough in your Italian or English so that you can speak it and you can be understood. That's your goal. So don't try to be perfect. Try to improve and get to the point where people can understand what you're saying without you having to repeat it, that should be your goal. Obviously also depending on what your level of Italian is, what your actual future goal in Italian is. But your goal should never be perfection. It should be good enough. That's your goal, at least when you start up. 3. Syllables and basic Accent Pronunciation: Before we get into how we pronounce actual letters, something important to understand is how Italian sounds as a language. And to do that, what I recommend you do is open some random videos of Italian YouTubers or whatever you can find people just talking normally, not songs. People talking normally. And try to kind of tell how Italian sounds like. I say this because the way Italia will sound to you depends on how your language sounds. If your native language is French, Italian with sound different to you than if your native language is Spanish or English, or Hindi, or Chinese, or Russian because your reference point is different. Therefore, if you hear Italian, you know how it sounds to you. But in general, what most English speakers will say about Italian is that it sounds like we're singing. It sounds like Italians are singing. Which is in general, very bad way to put it. But the reason why people think that is that we have syllables in Italian, as in most other languages. But we kind of have a stronger rhythm. We accentuate syllables more, which makes it sound like we sing. Again. Please do not go around saying that Italians, seeing when we speak, we don't, and we don't really sound like that. But we have syllables and they're very strong, they're very clear. An example that you could keep in mind of this and either really care about what it means. But it's the first sentence of the Divine Comedy, the most famous piece of poetry in Italian. And the way it sounds, you hear it. Nil matzo Modelica mean the Nostra data. Now, the way Italian poetry works is really telling up the way the Italian language works. Just hear it. The med zodiacal mean, the Nostra vita. It's very clear to me and it should be to you as well if you focus on it, how it's really clear where the path goes, how the language goes up and down. This is a very strong feature of Italian. It's massively important in Italian poetry and literature in general. Now, I don't want to talk about poetry is not really my field, but that is to say that in Italian, as in many other languages, the accent stress of a word will go on one of the syllables or more than one. And generally speaking, we have three most common situations in Italian, which is parallelly trunk a thoroughly piano, Perez Brucella. We have other examples in specific cases when we have pronouns, let's not get there. But the main difference would be if the accent is on the last syllable, parallel Troika, like pedal. On the second last syllable, which is the parallel piano, the most common word, like the word Sadia, or on the third to last syllable, which is a perilous Brucella, like the word tableau. So pero, last syllable, Sadia, second last, double, third, last. Where the accent goes on each word. You do not know because we only show it on pair of electrons. And every word is assumed to be a part of the piano, but some are not, but we do not show those that are not. So you need to remember. But this is extremely important whenever you speak Italian. Because if you say the word tableau as opposed to Tableau, you can hear the difference. The actual word is double. The wrong way to say it is WO. It might sound like a small thing, but this mistake will make it hard for me to understand the human table because it sounds completely different to my year. Now. Obviously, since I've been engaging and talking with people learning Italian for years, I will understand you. But the average Italian might not, because it's not their job, they're not used to it and to them, the word sounds weird. So first thing that most people overlook, focus on the right stress on the right accent. Where does the stress of the word goals? Try to see words the right way? When you don't know how they sound, try to Google Translate and hear how it's pronounced. And an example is this simple sentence which again, don't care about the meaning, just care about how it sounds. Provide a normal Lucille lobby. They're all a b to R TV or swallow. Try and say something like this. Trying to say this sentence. Stop, go back and listen again. How does it differ? What you just said from what I just said. Some of these words are gonna be piano. Somebody words are going to be through trellis and we're going to be thrown out. There is not anything else. It does not matter too much, but get used to the way it sounds. Tried to really make that overly clear. Because if e.g. English, I feel like there's not stress as much as Italian. That's why we sing to English speaker. Because we have this much stronger punctuation in sentences. So get used to having this. When you speak Italian as much as you can. You will feel like you're overdoing it. You will feel like it sounds silly. It probably does, but it sounds better than if you don't try to do it. It may sound overdone, but overdone is better than too little. Because overdone, I can understand too little. Some words I may actually don't understand as a native speaker, this is probably going to be an improvement over not trying. 4. Accento Grave e Acuto: We quickly said that Italian has accents and sometimes we show it and we show it on parole trunk. Now, I'm Italian, is similar to Spanish in the way we apply accents. So these two signs going up and going down, these are the only two that we really have. We used to have more, but we don't really use them anymore. So forget about them and then we will use them is really similar to the way you use them in Spanish. Metallic accents show where the stress goes, not like in French, where they put like a 1,000 accents on every word. Now, we actually just put one, if any, and most words will not have an accident. The main difference between Italian and Spanish is that in Spanish, you put accents are parallel, truncate. We do as well. And on parole, not piano, which we do not do. So if tabular was a Spanish word, it would have Tinbergen would have an accent on the a, but we do not put it. So spanish is clearer because if you do not know how the word is pronounced, the stress, you can know, but just by reading it. Italian is not the same way because you need to know that award is not piano to pronounce it correctly, if it's not, Carolyn definitely said the word Tabula in Italian. If you read it for first time, you will be tempted to pronounce it as Tavo product piano, but it's not. How do you know it? You've learned it no other way around it. So it's a little bit harder than Spanish is not too bad. Now, there are some cases in which we will write the accent even when it's not needed. And this is sometimes done when words are kind of confusing. An example that is often made is the difference between the word principe, which is principles, and the word principe, which is the plural of the word prints. It's written the very same way, so sometimes you will find it with a little accent. We call it a chain to tonic. Or sometimes we use it on words that to kind of differentiate them just simply e.g. with an accent is the verb to give, and specifically he or she gives. That without the accent is a preposition to completely different part of the speech. So sometimes we will put accents even when they're not required. But generally speaking, do not expect to find an accident Unless it's about Allah trunk. And therefore, a parabola has the accent on the last syllable. We technically have two types of accents in Italian. Or we call a chain to gravity, which is the one that goes down and achieved to acute, which is the one that goes up. And it doesn't really matter. If you type in Italian and you have like autocorrect, it will correct if you put the wrong one. But generally speaking, people don't care. People don't know. Most people when they write an accident, we'll just do a little switch like the Nike logo. So don't worry too much about it. Although technically speaking, five vowels can have their chin to gravity, so the axon going down and only E and 0 can have your chin to acute or in modern Italian, the axon going up. Why is that? Well, technically speaking, we kind of look like French a little bit in that because the attune to a kudo shows a different kind of e or a different kind of 0 depending on which letter it goes on and make the permutation slightly different. I say do not worry about this because we will talk about vowels, vowels in a second. We'll talk about the E, A in Italian. We talked about the 0 or Italian. And we'll see how we have two different ones. And we see how basically any, there is no rule about which one to say when. So as a learner, you should not worry about either of them. But FYI, if you've noticed that we wanted is going up and when it's going down, you're not wrong. We actually have both. 5. Vocali (vowels) in Italian: Okay, we are now at the most important classes. Discourse, in my opinion, which is vowels. Vowels are super important because people don't notice how badly they pronounce them in Italian, especially English speakers. These are the hardest letters for English speakers. It's not the ER, it's vowels. And I don't know why it's so hard, but it's really hard for them to understand how to pronounce them right? Ends. At the same time, people assume it's simple, right? Because, oh, well, Italian polarization is very straightforward. It's always the same, true. However, you pronounce it, right. If you've announced it wrong, wrong all the time. That was a very common, right? If you have a word, half of the letters or take, we're gonna be balanced. It's a very common sounds. So if you've saved wrong, he said it wrong a lot of times. In Italian we have seven bubbles, which is five letters. But as we said, we have E or a with the axis going up and 0 are all with the oxygen going down. We'll see in a second how they sound. Again. Don't worry too much about them because you most situations, they can be kind of randomly used. We'll talk about the ELL specifically in a second, in a future class. But for now, just keep in mind several levels, five letters, the five vowels in Italian would be a 0, 0. Or if you want to say there's several hours are a, E, are all. The first thing you need to understand that the most important thing you need to understand before you understand what kind of sound it is. It's one sound. It does not change. And this is so different in English. It's 0, started as an 0, it ends as a U. In Italian, it is 0. It is one sound and then you chop it, right? So this is why it's also hard to show how Italian vowels sound it other languages. And I tried to pick a few words with help of the Internet. But what you need to understand is that if you're trying to say the letter a and you feel like it's changing. Record yourself, record yourself. That's how you spot you're estates. If you try and say the letter a and you say it's just going somewhere else. If it is not an exactly on the same pitch as it began, you're saying it wrong. It is the most common mistake in English speakers. They trust Kazaa. Here it Kazaa. And they say something like Kazaa, know, it's changing and it sounds silly. But if you fix this mistake in your Italian, the 80 20 rule we were talking about earlier. If you fix this mistake, you're Italian is going to solve exponentially better. Because this is a mistake that you are making. Very often, if you say the word, the letter a wrong, you're saying wrong. Very many sounds. Maybe ten per cent of the sounds that come out of your mouth or wrong because a is a very common letter. So trying to fix the vowels, first off, fixed vowels and then you worry about the goal are. One last thing before we get into each vowel is that when we pronounced multiple vowels one after another in Italian, they do not change in sound. They sound just the way they would sound individually. We have a couple of words here. The word Maestro, which is a, followed by an E, or a maestro, doesn't change. Then we were like, very, very funny word in Italian means just the flowers on the street. Are you wildly? Wildly. You pronounced e or late? I usually just put them all together. It's not like in English or in French. Were multiple vowels put together will change in sound in France with rules in English without, but it's very easy, right? So if you see 21 after another, Don't worry, just say them out loud. Clearly one after another and you're gonna be fine. So here are some of the examples that I found to tell you how our vowel sounds like. These are English words. And again, this is not perfect because people will say these words slightly differently. But in what is the standard US English, most people will agree that this is how you say them. Hopefully, the letter a metal is R, which is very similar to the word partner. We have to ease, as we said. So in Cusa, Bell, Bell, the Abeta, a chimp, gravity and May, May, a accuser. And an example would be the word Dane through May. Then we have e, which is usually double E or BA in English, please. We have the letter 0. Again can be two different letters. It could be all gravity fat or it could be 0 ball. Oh, slightly different to me, this was probably the hardest for me to find because I don't think there is something exactly the same in English. But if you see the word, the letter that you hear in ball, oh, it's close enough, right? It will be close enough. Then lastly, you have the EU. Italy is something like soon. I will see them again so that you can repeat them after me. If you want. E, E 0, 0, 0, we will use them in a second. We will try to read texts and words with those. But for now, try to kind of get used to them. Especially try to cut them short. You will have the tenancy something like I will just change. No, it starts as an address and it does not change. Record yourself. Try to pronounce them. If you cannot pronounce them, right, try again and again. If you fix vowels, vowels, figured out your return is going to improve massively because 50 per cent are vowels. This is the most important thing at a time. So work on it. 6. How to know è vs é, ò vs ó: Talking about 0 and e. People freak out so much about this too. And how we have different sounds for different words and they don't know which one to use. Fair enough. I understand what you're worried. The honest truth is that there is no real rule in Italian and it's just coming down to where you're from. Now, the point with Italian is that nobody speaks Italian. There is proper Italian. There is. It exists. But there is no city in Italy. The Speaks property tight. You study it if you want to be an actor. But otherwise, you just speak with the language from the city. You're from. E.g. if you're from Rome, you're not going to speak properly Italian, going to speak with an accent from Rome, from LAN. Same thing. So these rules exist, but you do not worry about that because we don't either. So I tell you my example, I was born and bred in the north of Italy, close to learn what they do in Northern Italy. We usually mix O's, right? So for warlike example could be postal. We're using open data. But I would say most of all. Why? I don't know what we said that it's normal to me and I would not flip them. I wouldn't say poster and master. Although I'm positive that somebody Italy says it that way. So especially with the, oh, I think it really does it better and you can pick whichever you like and just say one if you want. Really an advanced Italian speaker, or you can do is you can just go. And I want to learn Italian from lung. Q what we do in Milan. And again, rules, but these rules are really hard to find written anywhere because they change city by city. About the Italian scattered the same row from him learn, we tend to open is a lot. So e.g. we say something like Marietta. Whereas most Italians would say by Geta personally, in that case, even though from blood, I will say my director close by E, because I've always done it. And most words, it doesn't really change anything. It's clear, it's understood. So you should not worry about it, but you should know that this difference exists because it kinda have to pick a side at least. Or to be aware that people will say the same word differently depending on where they're from. Now to me, the biggest example of this is the two words, or the single-walled is zero in on the screen. Now, this word can be read in two ways in proper Italian. If you read Pascal is the fruit, peach. Pascal with an open E. It's pace car. It is the act of fishing. Very different things. So this is where you will pronounce them if we spoke perfect Italian, I gave up on it. I don't care. I just always say Pascal doesn't matter which I'm saying it as I do it this way, or people do it the opposite way as a Pascal for both. So really what I'm telling you, for most words, it does not matter. It really comes down to where you're from and your personal choices really. 7. Consonants: Let's talk a little bit about coercion and D as well. This is kind of an overview of basically all the consonants that we have in Italian. You will notice that we are missing a couple of letters from other languages in Italy. We don't have j, k, x, w, and y. We don't have these five letters in our alphabet. When we see them, we just, it's usually going to be award from another language or the Italian version of a world language. We just say the way we hear it. Whenever we say a word that is e.g. English word in Italian, we said we had an accent. So e.g. if when I say jazz, can we say jets? Because that's the way we see it and it's very hard for us to say jazz. So this is an example and this is very common. We just say the word as it sounds to us in the foreign language, which is actually a great exercise to improve the way you speak Italian because you hear some Italian saying jets. And that tells you something about this z. In Italian, the z, right? So it's actually something very useful here. Italians speak English to improve your Italian. Here the consonants that we have in Italia, which are basically the same as in any other language. Although a few differences interesting to point out. B, as in bat. If you're a Spanish speaker, you will notice that in Italian, B and V are different as they are in English. They're not as clearly different in most Spanish. Accessing and dialects. Ci, si could be two things. We'll see you in a second. But this word has both. It could be or it can be catcher. We'll see the second watts. What data D? Very simple data. Frame. Fa is the way we call the letter firm is the sound. As in English. Very simple. Giga. Exactly like C, G could have two sounds like San Lexi will see you in a second. H occur is what we call the letter. We just don't pronounce it in Italian. Word in Italian would be Hotel. It does not It does not become hotel. Hotel, hotel. It's like if it was not there, we use the H Basically in very, very few instances. And when it's there, it's always gonna be mute unless it follows a C or a G, which we will see again in a second. Les left lateral, simple, mama, non. Now, these two are the same in most languages, so not much to say about it. Be Papa per cui. Example of a letter in italian coup is always going to be followed by you. And it's, it's always great to sound. Cool. An array is in pure rolling. They are, as we said, one of the hardest thing. So we will talk a little bit about later. Saw Xia S can be two things. So we'll talk about it in a second. To talk to the variable z, as in zoo pizza. So most countries in the horse say these were wrong pizza. So the z or zed in Italian sounds like T S in English. It's a very strong sound. Pizza. Just like for the vowels here, my suggestion is try to repeat them. Rewatch the video, try to say them after me, try and see how close or far you are. And some of these will be very, very easy. Some will be harder. Focus on the harder ones will see, my opinion hardest in very few seconds. But try to practice all of them first to understand which are your weaknesses. 8. C and G in Italian: C and G in most languages have different sounds, just like an Italian. So it's nothing new. And I think as Spanish, in Spanish, we have for the c is the same thing for g, slightly different, but these two letters in most languages are weird. And Italians an exception obviously. But it's not too hard because it can only be two sounds. And it's very clear once you learn how to spot it, what is what. So let's start with letter C, but g behaves the very same way. So C could be dura or Deutsche. Dura means hard. Deutsch means sweet literally, or you could say soft. So CI dura will sound like a K in English, whereas a C achieved dolce will sound like CH most of the times in English. How do we write them in Italian? Well, depends on what letter follows. So if we put a vowel after C, There's always going to be available unless there is an age, which we'll see in a second. It will be cat, che, ci, core. Cool. So if followed by a or E, it will become sweet. Dolce. Otherwise it's dura. And always were followed by h, which can only happen if there isn't a or E. It becomes again curve. So again, K, key, COO, or sharp, G, G, sharp shoe. This is weird. Spanish does the opposite thing. Where if they want to have the church sound, they have to put an age. We flipped it completely. And so it's kind of hard to remember. And often you make mistakes. But it's a very clear rule. When, you know the rule, when you remember make that mistake anymore. G is the exact same thing. So it's going to be, I'm just going to read them out loud. This is going to be either the g dura hard G or G. G dolce software suite. Suite G is going to be Gei De go, gu. John, Jay Zhe, job, you. This is slightly different. Thinking in Spanish, you would have the sound, which we don't really have any Italian, and it's very hard for us to pronounce the sound in Spanish, or if you try to learn Arabic or rubbish, have a lot of these sounds. German, sounding really foreign to us. So forget about them, is, is gonna be good. And again, just like for C, it's very simple once you remember the rule. Because if you just read the word, even know what letter is going to go after it and therefore, you know how it's going to be pronounced. 9. Digrams: gl, gli, sc, sch, gn: Something else that is mildly annoying in Italian is what we call the Grammy or sequences of usually two letters that slightly change. So usually, usually Italian. When you read two letters in a row, you read the letter separately. We were making the example with flowers, right? Maestro does not change. Or are you wildly crazy example? It does not change. Sometimes it does though. A few of these examples are, the most common are here. So the main ones, the ones that I've been talking about here and the ones that you should worry about. Although it's not really that much. And if you compare it to most other languages, it's really simple stuff. Is g, l, S, C, S, C H, and G, N. Start with jail because it's the most annoying one. Because if GL is followed by E, Italian I in English, it becomes year. This sound is very hard for known Italian speakers. It's somewhat similar to the way someone from Spain would say the double L. Although it's slightly, there is more Jie in there. So it's example of a word could be ideal. Value would mean garlic. If you're speaking English, the closest is something like Boolean that it's kind of similar. Although this is a sound that for a native English speaker is very hard to make. Just like we were talking about. The R, Do not obsess about it. Other sounds are more common and more important to get right, but the correct way to say is something like year, ideal. Now, if gel is followed by other letters, so other vowels, because all we're going to be always gonna be a vowel after GL is going to be glow, right? So glad. Gla, glow. Blue. Example, the word Sigma. Sigma would be like the jingle sequela. It's not C here. It's singular. If it was spelled like this, would be, see, it spelled like this, therefore, sigma. Another example we have here is S C or S C, H in there together because the age after the C is the same as before. Um, if it's as C followed by a or E, Italian is going to sound like a shirt, like SH, like finish. That sounds so e.g. if it's a, C followed by R, or S, C, H followed by a or E is going to sound Scott. Scott school, e.g. schema, Scott Key. We saw biscuit and or Pascal, many examples here. And finally, the easiest of them is gn. When we have g n, It's going to sound like the weird Spanish letter n. So it's going to sound like seniority, normal. So this is kind of simple because most people can pronounce the word senior and I've heard it. So it's the same thing just with a GAN as opposed to that weird thing. Therefore, italian, we will say something like normal, not normal or abnormal, as you would say in English. Mine, e.g. Alessandro, man, you Magno. 10. R, r, r! Rolling the infamous R: And finally, as promised as advertised, a couple of things about elderly. The roles are the dreaded sound, as I was saying, to not obsess about the R, especially if you are in degree speaker, French speaker. It's going to be very hard. But if you want to know something about it, Here it is. First of all, the world are Italian is very similar to the world or in Spanish. So if you speak Spanish is the same thing, although it's slightly less strong in Italian. So come away. A common mistake that Spanish natives, speakers make with the speak Italian, especially when R is the first letter of a word, they make it sound very, very strong. So an example would be the word aroma in Italian, aroma. Whereas the Spanish speaker might say something like aroma, it sounds stronger, I overdid it. But one of the ways to spot a Spanish speaker is when they overdo the Italian. That's a very common mistake for them. For English speakers, some areas have the roles are, I'm thinking e.g. famous Scotland and some areas of England have the world are some other areas as well. But in general, it's very hard because most English speakers do not really do it and do not know how to do it. And I faced this with several American, US students. And some of them really got to the point where they were telling me, I think I cannot physically make it like they thought they had some issue in their mouth to where they were not unable physically, anatomically to produce a role are. Now, while that is the case, that's It's possible there might be some situation with your I don't really know how it works, but there is a very low likelihood that you are able to say. This is a very uncommon occurrence. So if you cannot see it, most probably is because you do not know how to say it. And it is very hard to, but I'm going to try my best to tell you how it sounds. So if you are from the US or from Australia or New Zealand or do I assume it's the same? It's not the case in the UK though. You have something that we call flapped t. So a flap t is when you have a t between two vowels. And the accent is not on the vowel that e.g. if you take the word Italy and Italian, You see that difference in Italian. The a has the accent stress. Therefore, you do not have that, but you say Italy, Italy, Italy in some countries, but other countries say easily. Now, that sound is, in my opinion, as close as it gets in American English, Australian English, I believe as well to the roles are. So if you manage to take that sounds, that you can make it longer and stronger, you really, really, really close to where old are. So rather than try to focus on the R, tried to see what your mouth is doing, where your throat is doing, what your tongue especially is doing. When you do that easily. If you're from US or Australia or other countries where they do that. Because if you manage to understand that you, you're more likely to produce a correct roles are. Now what's funny that is, sometimes people manage through all the are almost without thinking about it. And then I go, you did it the ER and then they're unable to do it again because they do not know what they did. So it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of practice. It's my opinion, not really worth it. But if you want to speak perfectly Italian, obviously you have to roll the fun factor is that not everybody in Italy can roll the R. Again, some people are physically, anatomically unable to do it. But it's also very common. Imperfect speech and what we call every motion, which would be something like a floppy, are something like that, like a weak R, which is very common in some areas, specifically in the northwest of Turin. Because some say it's, it's not really clear why that happens. But in the past, people that were nobles, people that were rich, they were from families that ties with French people. So people wanted to sound more French, which was to not overdo the world are anymore. And to this day, some people from those areas, especially those that are from well-off family, tend not to say they are not anymore because it sounds good or anything, but just because they're used to it. And if they were born hearing like that and knowing that good or whatever. So it is not that uncommon for Italian is not too old. They are. 11. Two types of S: And as the last consonant and the last letter that we're going to talk about is the S. Now, the S can be two different things. It could be essays sorta, such as sleep. In English, essays, like a snake. Or it could be a sound such as e.g. in a zoo. In English, it's usually going to be z. In Italian, That's an S. So if you were to write in Italian the word zoo as we hear it, it will be with an S, not be with z. Although the Italian word for X2 is with a z, but we say Zoar because as we said, we mispronounce English words or words from any other language for that matters, it's not only about English. Now, how do we choose which words have as disorder or a seesaw? Laura, so cert or it's entirely up to where you're from. Once again, in my specific case, I mix. In proper Italian, You mix. And again, there are rules. Technically speaking, an example is an S before an L with sunlight, which is the reason why some Italians, when we speak English and we're not really good, we instead of say, sleep, will say sleep. It's a very common mistake. The returns will make Italians, especially from Rome. And up, I would say, it's a very common mistake that we make because when we speak Italian and we have S L, It's always going to be z. Should you bother learning all these rules? No, you should not. E.g. in the South. So I would say Naples itself, where the Spanish presence was a lot stronger in the past. And they're dialects and accents are much closer to Spanish. Whereas again, in the North it's more French and German. They actually always use the sorta. The example is the word Kazaa. Now, in Italian is the way I would say it. And actually Italian, this is what we call it as setInterval, calico and S between two vowels. The ESA, intervocalic, or in Italian would always be Sonora, the chasm. However, in the south of Italy, just like in Spanish, every S is always going to be sorted out. So someone from Naples with this word as kasa, which should you do if you have to pick one? Pick? Because that is never wrong. Whereas some words if you put the essay Sonora would sound very weird. The ones that we also in the North use the asset for big assets, the S soda, if you want to pick one or mix-and-match as we do, it doesn't really matter too much in this case, even less than four, E and 0. But if you want to pick one, pick the assets or the castle. 12. Doppie: Double Consonants: The final topic that I quickly want to touch upon before we actually read something is the topic of Duck, Duck, PA, or double consonants. Only with consonants, although sometimes with vowels as well, is something that is hard for Spanish speakers. Anesthetized French speakers mostly is not really a huge problem for English speakers. So discourse being in English, you don't really care too much about, but I will still make a point about it. Basically, almost all consonants in italian can be doubled. And when they are. It's pretty common that it happens. It depends on Latin. Depends on the word, but let's not get there. But when it happens, when you do is you just make a little pie as you make that letter longer. E.g. we have a few examples here. Difference between Caddy in CAD KD. Can you hear in the second word and making it the longer oral. So you might say, I'm making a little pause, right? Caddy cut the paper. But it's pretty important because Papa means Pope. And Papa means food, as you would say, to little child. So might be confusing if you use the wrong one. I'm gonna get slightly different, but doesn't matter. Gona, go low. Just to hear different vowel, consonant, in this case the L. Barrow, beer. Beer. Below. This is the case also for other sounds such as e.g. capsule becomes capsule journal because it just becomes stronger, just becomes longer. You can do basically with any, almost with any consonant. And you could technically do this with vowels as well. So, although it's extremely rare for it to happen, and basically only happens in the plural, almost only in the plural. Because whenever we had the same vowel twice, you just eat Italian became what vowel. So it's very common that happens. Some examples could be a theory, which is the plural of a terrier. A theory, or print GPE, which is the plural of print GPO, GP. This work could also be spelled with only one eye. Again, for the same reason I was telling you it's not uncommon. It's actually very common than what we had two vowels in Italian. They became one because we don't really have them. We don't really like them. But it's just the same thing. If you have two letters that are the same, one after another, there just stronger. Why am I telling you this? Well, this is important when you speak and when you hear, listen. Because if you say a word that's supposed to have two letters as if you had one is going to be hard for the person to understand, as we were making examples before. There are words that are basically one letter apart. If you say the wrong one because you mispronounce is going to be confusing. But even more importantly, if you hear something, you should be able to tell whether the letter of the word that they're saying has two letters are not set up e.g. they are telling you the name of the title of a newspaper article for you to Google. And they say a few words. You need to be able to tell whether they have one or more letters because you want to type it right. Now with the Internet, that's not as important anymore. Obviously, we can easily fix are the way we spell. But I was born without the hinterland. Basically, I have to learn to write with my hands. So it kind of have a secret for writing the right way. Not super hard. But again, especially if you're a Spanish speaker, this is something you need to pay attention to. 13. Outro: I really hope that this course was helpful for you. And the goal of this course was not to pick on your mistakes and make you feel bad. But just to show you that you probably see a lot of things in Italian that are not properly set, but you need only focus on a few of them. If you save hours the right way, it does not matter if you cannot say the r. If you can tell when it's when it's sure. That's gonna be massive improvement over a mistake that is actually going to make the word sound completely different. Imagine saying that cheese, just spelled capsule, but you flip it and say charcoal. I'm not going to understand what you're talking about. And I've been teaching it for years, but I'm not going to understand that because it's so different cultural charcoal, it's so different. I just do not know. It's the same word. So the way I would like you to practice is I'm going to have a little text and I would like you to read it out loud, record yourself. And then you can listen to the way I say it and kind of tell what is my mistake. What did I get right in? What did I get wrong? If you're comfortable with it, most definitely upload it as a project. That's in my opinion, a great thing. And also really try to understand what words did I say wrong? What sounds are different? Slow it down, slow yours down, and slow miter mine down. What sounds good or bad. And then as you prove, maybe try and do it again, storytelling for it for a month and then try and read the same text again and then compare it. Oh, okay. I improve the debt, but I still make the same mistake. Keep that as a reference. The same texts, try and read it out loud once a month. Trying to record yourself and listen and see if you can tell it improvement. And hopefully you will be able to tell improvements over, over time. I really think this is going to be very helpful for your pronunciation, but please let me know what you think about this course. And if you'd like more courses like this. If you enjoyed this course, please consider leaving a review to help other people find it. This course is part of a series. You can find the others are my profile. Check them out to learn more about basic Italian grammar.