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Italian Languages:
The importance of sound
Properly speaking a foreign language means diving into another culture, to understand how native speakersexpress themselves, studying the grammar and working on the curiosity and the preparationrequired to learn idioms and its common languageexpressions. It is a true journey into the unknown where we have to abandon the certainties of our mother languageand dedicate ourselves to the complete discovery of a new way of representing and expressing the worldthat surrounds us. Grammar, syntax, vocabulary fields are certainly important toexplore and deepen. Yet today I would like to point out anoften overlooked field, phonetics: to speak well also means to pronounce it right.
In the Italian language we know thatthe similarity between the written form and the oral one undoubtedly makes our languagemore pleasing to our students. With respect to French, Italianhides fewer surprises and words like “casa” (home), “student” (student), “fatto” (done)are pronounced just like they are written. Yet, even in Italian there are cases of inconsistency between spelling and sound,as in the cases of grapheme <c>, <g>, <q>, <h> and certain consonant clusters such as <sc>, which can create a few small problems. Let's go to the heartof speech.
The grapheme <c> is pronounced / k / in front of the vowels “a”, “o”, “u”, such as “caro” (dear), “cute” (skin), “conte (count) and corresponds to the English sound of the letter “k” in the word “king”.