tontonton

sound guide
intro words

The Italian Language

The Italian language is famous for its "geminated consonants", which just means it has consonants which you pronounce in two parts ("long" pronunciation), like "big game", you pronounce the g long. Italian is full of long consonants, some of which we have collected to help you practice gemination. Finnish also has a lot of gemination.

Italian (as well as English and Spanish), because of their relatively simple vowel structure, and their plain unmodified consonant usage (that is, consonants without aspiration, palatalization, etc.), writing them in Tone is probably the easiest among any of the languages. Is that a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. A lot of languages beyond these have what we would call more complex sounds (modified base vowels and consonants), which involve a lot more of the mouth. Italian keeps it pretty simple.

However, although Italian uses the Latin writing system, it does not follow a simple pattern when going from writing to pronunciation, there are a lot of rules and memorizations that must occur. See the Wikipedia page to get a sense for how many pronunciation edge cases and rules there are. This makes it hard to translate between Tone and Italian in Latin script, as you basically have to recall from memory how the spelling is pronounced.