You can know the grammar perfectly, have a rich vocabulary and write flawless emails: if your pronunciation gives you away the moment you open your mouth, a native speaker knows in three seconds that you are Italian. It is not a drama — an accent is not a defect — but some pronunciation mistakes genuinely make it hard to be understood, and they are worth working on.
The starting point is to understand why certain sounds feel almost impossible: Italian has a far more “regular” sound system than English. In Italian there are five vowels, words are written as they are read, and each letter has (almost always) a single sound. English has a dozen vowel sounds, a spelling that lies shamelessly, and consonants that simply don’t exist in Italian. In this article I have gathered the traps I hear people fall into every day, from the high school student to the manager presenting to clients abroad.
The infamous “th”: two sounds, not one
The th sound doesn’t exist in Italian, so the brain replaces it with something familiar: usually a t, a d or an f. The result is that think becomes “tink”, this becomes “dis” and three gets confused with tree.
In reality th has two distinct sounds, both produced with the tip of the tongue between the teeth:
- voiceless (no voice), as in think, three, bath, mouth
- voiced (with voice), as in this, that, mother, breathe
❌ “I tink dis is de best.” ✅ “I think this is the best.” — tongue between the teeth, a puff of air for the voiceless one, vibration for the voiced one.
The most effective exercise is exaggerated at first: really stick your tongue out, let yourself hear the puff of air. It will sound unnatural to you, but to an English ear it will finally be correct. Naturalness comes later.
The “h” that must be pronounced (and the one that isn’t there)
In Italian the h is silent: we read hotel as “otel”. In English the initial h must be aspirated, that is pronounced with a puff of breath: house, hello, behind, ahead.
The problem is twofold, because Italians make two mirror-image mistakes. First: they skip the h where it is needed.
❌ “I’m ‘appy to ‘elp.” ✅ “I’m happy to help.”
Second: by overcorrection they add an h where there isn’t one, in front of vowels.
❌ “I ate an happle.” (the h is added in front of apple, where there isn’t one) ✅ “I ate an apple.”
The boundary between some pairs of words is precisely the h: eat vs heat, air vs hair, arm vs harm, ear vs hear. Getting it wrong is not a detail: it changes the word.
Long and short vowels: ship or sheep?
This is perhaps trap number one, and it creates embarrassing misunderstandings. In Italian the length of a vowel doesn’t change the meaning. In English it does, and how.
The classic pair is the short i /ɪ/ against the long i /iː/:
- ship (a vessel) vs sheep (the animal)
- live (to be alive) vs leave (to go away)
- bit (a small piece) vs beat (to hit, or to defeat)
- and the pair that makes everyone blush: sheet (a piece of paper) vs a vulgar word that you had better pronounce correctly
❌ “Can I have a piece of shit?” (meaning sheet, a sheet of paper — a real and very frequent mistake) ✅ “Can I have a piece of paper?” — if you aren’t sure about the long i, get round the problem with a synonym.
The short i is not a “short” Italian i: it is a more relaxed sound, halfway between i and e. The long i, on the other hand, is tense and prolonged, like our i but held longer. Training your ear to hear the difference comes before knowing how to produce it.
Word stress: the right syllable changes everything
Italians tend to spread the stress flat or to put it where they would put it in Italian. But in English the stress is strong and its position is fixed for each word — getting it wrong makes the word almost unrecognisable.
Watch out for words that resemble Italian but have the stress elsewhere:
- comfortable → COMF-ta-ble (not “comfor-TAY-ble”)
- vegetable → VEG-ta-ble (three syllables, not four)
- photography → pho-TO-graphy (not “photo-GRAPHY”)
- develop → de-VE-lop
- interesting → IN-tres-ting
Then there is a very useful golden rule: many words change meaning only according to the stress, staying identical in writing. Noun → stress at the beginning; verb → stress at the end.
✅ “I got a PREsent.” (a gift, noun) vs “Let me preSENT the project.” (to present, verb) ✅ “The REcord is broken.” (a record, noun) vs “We need to reCORD it.” (to record, verb)
The same goes for object, project, increase, contrast, permit. An excellent trick for remembering it.
Words written one way and read another
English is the language where through, though, thought, tough and thorough are written almost the same and read completely differently. There is no logic: they have to be learned one by one. The most treacherous for Italians:
| Word | How they often read it | Actual pronunciation (approximate) |
|---|---|---|
| comfortable | “comfor-table” | KUMF-ta-bl |
| Wednesday | “wed-nes-day” | WENZ-day (the d is silent) |
| clothes | “clo-thes” | kloz (almost like close) |
| recipe | “re-cipe” | RE-si-pi (three syllables) |
| iron | “i-ron” | AI-ern (the r almost disappears) |
| vineyard | “vine-yard” | VIN-yard |
| colonel | “co-lo-nel” | KER-nl (incredible but true) |
The letter that most often deceives is the final e: in English it is almost never pronounced, but it lengthens the preceding vowel. Hope is “hohp”, not “hope-eh”; made is “mayd”, not “mad-eh”. Pronouncing the final e is one of the most immediate markers of an Italian accent.
How to really work on pronunciation
Reading this article gives you the map of the traps, but pronunciation improves only with the ear and the mouth, not with the eyes. Three things that work:
- Active listening and imitation (shadowing). Take thirty seconds of a podcast or a series, listen to a sentence and immediately repeat it, imitating rhythm and intonation, not just the words. It is the exercise with the best effort-to-result ratio.
- Recording yourself and listening back. At first it is embarrassing, but hearing the difference between how you think you sound and how you really sound is illuminating.
- Targeted real-time feedback. The real leap happens when someone stops you at the exact moment you produce the sound and has you correct the position of the tongue or the stress. It is exactly what we do in the English lessons: working on the sounds that cause problems for you, not on a generic list.
Nobody is asking you to erase your accent — a little Italian accent is even charming. The goal is to be understood without effort and to avoid those few mistakes that change the meaning or distract the listener.
I have collected the other mistakes Italians most often make separately: false friends, past simple and present perfect, phrasal verbs and the prepositions in, on, at. To train reading and writing against the clock, try the English second paper.
If you want to work on your pronunciation starting from the situations you really need — interviews, presentations, conversation, exams — have a look at the English lessons or write to me to set up a tailored path.
