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Four points for Italian: 1. Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.) 2. The group "ch" sounds like a "k" sound, e.g. bruschetta is "broos-keh-

Four points for Italian: 1. Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.) 2. The group "ch" sounds like a "k" sound, e.g. bruschetta is "broos-keh-tah" 3. The groups "gl" and "gn" sound like Spanish "ll" and "ñ" respectively. Those are hard to pronounce for English speakers, the easy shortcut is just imagine that the "g" is silent and that the "l" or "n" are a bit more pronounced. 4. Double consonants need to have a much more pronounced sound, almost as if you pause for a moment on that consonant. It should be easy to tell apart "nonno" ("grandpa") and "nono" ("ninth")

ajmurmann 5y ago
"Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)" This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet and isn't English. The great vowel shift in English changed his vowels get pronounced in English when they were a lot more similar. This even holds for transliteration systems like Hepburn and painting. If you try to pronounce vowels in a language other than English you are likely gonna be less wrong pronouncing it as if it were any other language that's not English. English speakers literally decided to pronounce vowels differently at some point due to fashion. This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries!
- mastazi 5y ago
  > This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries! Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking English, was having trouble reading some Japanese words that were transliterated (Romanji) because she couldn't figure out how to pronounce the vowels, but for me (I'm Italian) it was easy to read them correctly, even though I had never seen those words before and I didn't know what they meant. > This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet Yes and surprisingly it works fairly well even with some non-European languages where the Latin alphabet was adopted, such as Malaysian and Indonesian. However there are some languages that have frequent exceptions, e.g. French comes to mind where there are several word endings like e.g. "-eau", "-aux" and "-aix" etc., other languages also have exceptions like "-de" endings in Portuguese and some diphthongs in German like "ie", "au" etc. PS. it's strange that the Great Vowel Shift is not widely known among English speakers - it caused the English language to have highly irregular phonetics which is one of the most evident features of the language.
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  > This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet and isn't English. That is not actually the case. In Catalan, for example, "e" and "o" may be pronounced either open or close (/ɛ/ vs /e/, /ɔ/ vs /o/), and the difference may only be marked with an accent mark (è, é, ò, ó) if that syllable was to be accentuated according to the rules, or if it happens to distinguish two differently pronounced words that would otherwise be spelt the same. Also, the most prevalent dialect of Catalan will pronounce non-stressed "a" and "e" as schwa (/ə/) and non-stressed "o" the same as "u". I believe something similar to this happens in Portuguese. And don't even get me started on French...
- Symmetry 5y ago
  My last name has an 'ough' in it and that has made me intensely aware of that fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

ajmurmann 5y ago

"Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)" This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet and isn't English. The great vowel shift in English changed his vowels get pronounced in English when they were a lot more similar. This even holds for transliteration systems like Hepburn and painting. If you try to pronounce vowels in a language other than English you are likely gonna be less wrong pronouncing it as if it were any other language that's not English. English speakers literally decided to pronounce vowels differently at some point due to fashion. This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries!

mastazi 5y ago
> This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries! Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking English, was having trouble reading some Japanese words that were transliterated (Romanji) because she couldn't figure out how to pronounce the vowels, but for me (I'm Italian) it was easy to read them correctly, even though I had never seen those words before and I didn't know what they meant. > This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet Yes and surprisingly it works fairly well even with some non-European languages where the Latin alphabet was adopted, such as Malaysian and Indonesian. However there are some languages that have frequent exceptions, e.g. French comes to mind where there are several word endings like e.g. "-eau", "-aux" and "-aix" etc., other languages also have exceptions like "-de" endings in Portuguese and some diphthongs in German like "ie", "au" etc. PS. it's strange that the Great Vowel Shift is not widely known among English speakers - it caused the English language to have highly irregular phonetics which is one of the most evident features of the language.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
> This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet and isn't English. That is not actually the case. In Catalan, for example, "e" and "o" may be pronounced either open or close (/ɛ/ vs /e/, /ɔ/ vs /o/), and the difference may only be marked with an accent mark (è, é, ò, ó) if that syllable was to be accentuated according to the rules, or if it happens to distinguish two differently pronounced words that would otherwise be spelt the same. Also, the most prevalent dialect of Catalan will pronounce non-stressed "a" and "e" as schwa (/ə/) and non-stressed "o" the same as "u". I believe something similar to this happens in Portuguese. And don't even get me started on French...
Symmetry 5y ago
My last name has an 'ough' in it and that has made me intensely aware of that fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)