13 Difficult Italian words you're (probably) pronouncing wrong

The beautiful sounds of Italian are part of what makes it such a fun language to learn. 

But copying them isn’t always easy, especially for certain words! 

That’s why we wanted to share the most difficult words in Italian and some tips to help you pronounce them. 

It’s really worth the effort: aside from sounding lovely, having good pronunciation helps you feel more confident when you speak Italian. Plus, some words can completely change meaning with a slight mispronunciation, and you might accidentally say something you didn’t mean to (whoops!).

Euro

This word is pronounced eh-oo-roh .

Since it’s Italy’s currency, you’ll see this word everywhere in Italy. When you pay for your spritz, you might hear: 

- Sono sei euro - That’s 6 euros

Although it's the same word in Italian and English, the pronunciation is different. In English, it sounds like “yur-oh,” but in Italian, each vowel is pronounced separately. The “o” at the end also isn’t as long. 

So summing up the tricky sounds, it’s: 

• “e”: eh as in “bed”

• “u” : oo like in “food”

• The “o” at the end is shorter, like in “not”

💡 Top tip: Vowels are often shorter and clearer Italian . If you think about how we say “oh no” in English, think about how long those o’s are. In Italian, try not to stretch the sound out for as long.   

Aereo

This is another difficult Italian word with lots of vowels. It’s the Italian for “airplane”. 

It’s pronounced: ah-eh-reh-oh 

Here’s an example: 

A che ora parte l’aereo? - What time does the plane leave?

Reading aereo as an English speaker, you might first say “er-ee-oh”. But in Italian the “a” and “e” at the beginning aren’t said together, they’re pronounced separately. So it’s first “ah” (like the “a” in father), then “eh” (like the “e” in bed), making the beginning ah-eh . 

Cameriere

Cameriere is the Italian for “waiter”. 

It’s pronounced: cam-er-yeh-reh

If you have a nice experience in an Italian restaurant, you might want to say: 

Il cameriere è molto gentile - The waiter is very kind

The hardest part about the word is probably the ending. First, we have to be careful to not say “ray” on the end. It’s cam-er-yeh-REH . Then, in Italian, when “i” is followed by a vowel and said quickly, it sounds like Y. So -iere = yeh-reh

Scoraggiare

This is the Italian for “discourage”. 

It’s pronounced: sko-rah-jah-reh

Here’s an example: 

Non voglio scoraggiare nessuno - I don’t want to discourage anyone

The gi becomes more like a “j” sound. This always happens when you have “g” before “e” or “i” in Italian, like we see in gelato.

⚠️Common mistake alert: You also might end up blushing if you get the vowel a tiny bit wrong in this one. If instead of saying “a” ( ah ) you say “e” ( eh ) it would sound like scoreggiare : sko-reh-jah-reh.  

And that would mean “to fart”. One letter really makes all the difference! 

Grazie

Grazie is perhaps one of the most important words you'll learn in Italian, and it means "thank you".

It’s pronounced: grats-yeh  

For example: 

Grazie per l’aiuto - Thank you for the help

It seems simple, but many struggle with the pronunciation! You can learn more about how to pronounce grazie here . 

For now, you should know that the “z” isn’t like in “zebra”; it’s more of a “ts” sound, like in “cats.” And importantly, don’t skip the final “e”. Many say “grazi” (graht-see), but it should sound like “eh” (grats-yeh).

Gnocchi

You'll find these lovely Italian potato dumplings in most Italian restaurants! 

They’re pronounced nyok-kee . 

If you want to order it in a restaurant you might say: Vorrei gli gnocchi - I’d like the potato dumplings

The "gn" combo in Italian is pronounced like the English letters "ny" in words like "canyon". You’ll find it in a lot of Italian words, like lasagne . To make this sound, press your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth.

Next, in Italian, ch is different from English. It’s pronounced like the hard K, in kite, not the soft “ch” in cheese. Lastly, the double "c" in gnocchi makes the sound longer. To get it right, try pausing briefly after "nyok" before saying "kee."

Vorrei

This is a great word to use when you’re ordering food and drink!

It means “I would like”, and it’s pronounced: voh-ray

For example:

Vorrei una pizza margherita - I would like a pizza margherita 

The double "rr" in Italian is rolled, which can be tricky. Katie struggled at first, but here she shares tips on how she trained herself to pronounce the Italian R sounds (4:12 - 7:50). Don't worry if you're still working on it—even native speakers take time to learn to roll their "r"s.

One tip is to practice saying "tuh-duh" really quickly, as that mimics the position your tongue needs to be in to start rolling. Also, placing your tongue toward the middle of your mouth helps air flow and makes your tongue vibrate naturally.

Ghiaccio

This is the Italian for “ice”. 

It’s pronounced gyah-choh . 

If you order a coke in Italy, you might say:  

Una Coca-cola con ghiaccio per favore - a coke with ice please

The rule for gh in Italian is similar to the rule for ch. Putting the letter “h” in makes it a hard “g”, as in “go”, not like the “j” sound like in gelato ( jeh-lah-toh ). 

Next, when the letter “i” is followed by another vowel in Italian, it sounds like a “y”, so we get: gYah-choh. Finally, the "c” followed by “i" makes a soft "ch" sound, like in the English word "cheese." 

Chiacchierare

This word means “to chat” in Italian. 

It’s pronounced kyak-kyeh-rah-reh . 

You could say: 

Mi piace chiacchierare con gli italiani - I like to chat with Italians

Chiacchierare is one of the longest and most difficult Italian words to pronounce, so let’s break it down step by step: 

• “Ch” is pronounced as a hard k sound

• The letters “i’” are pronounced as a y sound

• The double “cc” is long, almost as if there’s a little pause between them

• The “o” at the end is shorter, like in “not”

So chiacchierare becomes kyak-kyeh-rah-reh. 

Pesce

This is the Italian word for “fish”. 

It’s pronounced peh-sheh . 

If you want to try it on the menu, you might ask: Qual è il pesce del giorno? - What’s the fish of the day? 

In Italian, when you see the letters “sc” followed by an “e” or “i,” they create a “sh” sound, similar to the sound in the English word “show.” 

⚠️Common mistake alert: It’s easy to get this word confused with another word in Italian: pesca (peach), which is pronounced peh-skah . In this case, since the “sc” is not followed by an “e” or “i,” it doesn’t create the sh sound. 

Asciugamano

This is Italian for “towel”. It’s a combination of the word asciugare (to dry) and mano (hand), but it’s not just a hand towel. It’s the word for any type of towel. 

It’s pronounced: ah-shoo-gah-mah-noh

Here’s how you might use it: 

Hai un asciugamano per la spiaggia? - Do you have a towel for the beach?

Remember how we were saying that “sc” next to an “e” or “i” is a sh sound? The same is true here. That’s why it’s pronounced: ah-SHOO-gah-mah-noh

Aglio

Aglio is the Italian word for “garlic”. 

It’s pronounced al-yoh .

If you’re not a big fan, you might ask for a dish: 

senza aglio - without garlic

The "gli" in aglio can be tricky, but once you learn it, you'll be able to say many Italian words like famiglia (family). It sounds a bit like an "l" followed by a “y”, but with your whole tongue flattened against the roof of your mouth, not just the tip. Here you’ll find a video lesson on how to get the pronunciation right . 

Tip: Try saying "l" in English while smiling, as in "lead." Notice how your tongue naturally touches the roof of your mouth? That’s how to position it for gli .

Svegliare

This is the Italian for “to wake up”. 

It’s pronounced: zvel-yah-reh . 

Here’s an example:  

Non voglio svegliare i vicini .  - I don’t want to wake up the neighbors

The word starts with an “s”, but it’s pronounced more like a z. Then there is also the gli like we saw in aglio , pronounced like an “l” followed by a “y” but with your whole tongue flat against the roof of your mouth. 

How to pronounce difficult Italian words: general tips

Now you’ve seen some of the most difficult Italian words to say, here are some tips to help you improve your Italian pronunciation over time:  

• It’s like going to the gym! Don’t feel that good pronunciation is something you’re born with or not, it takes training. Even Italian bambini aren’t born speaking perfectly. It takes practice to get used to the sounds.

• Italian is a highly phonetic language, meaning words are almost always pronounced as they’re spelled . Once you get used to the spelling rules like the ones in this lesson, you’ll be able to pronounce most Italian words with ease.

• Listen to Italian words over and over. Listening to Italian songs or watching Italian videos and movies is a great place to start. Even if you don’t understand much at first, your brain can start to absorb the sounds and over time the words start to feel more familiar to you. 

13 Difficult Italian words: Review

The words in this lesson can be hard to pronounce due to tricky Italian sounds. The good news is that with practice, they get easier, and you’ll soon find you can say the same sounds in other words, too! 

Let’s recap how to say some of the most difficult Italian words: 

Euro	Euro	Eh-oo-roh
Aereo	Airplane	Ah-eh-reh-oh
Cameriere	Waiter	Cam-er-yeh-reh
Scoraggiare	To discourage	Sko-rah-jah-reh
Grazie	Thank you	Grats-yeh
Gnocchi	Potato dumplings	Nyok-kee
Vorrei	I would like	Voh-ray
Ghiaccio	Ice	Gyah-choh
Chiacchierare	To chat	Kyak-kyeh-rah-reh
Pesce	Fish	Peh-sheh
Asciugamano	Towel	Ah-shoo-gah-mah-no
Aglio	Garlic	Al-yoh
Svegliare	To wake up	Zvel-yah-reh

K: Ciao a tutti e benvenuti! Hi everyone and welcome to “Learn Italian with Joy of Languages”. 

M: Before we get going, we have a little favour to ask. If you’re listening to this on your podcast app, could you hit the subscribe or follow button? This way you’ll get notified when we release a new episode and you’ll help our podcast grow so we can keep making free lessons like this. Grazie! 

K: It wouldn’t be fair of me to talk about how to pronounce Italian words better, without mentioning that I’ve made loads of pronunciation mistakes in the past. Some embarrassing ones. 

M: I remember that! Katie’s pronunciation is really good now, and Italians are always telling her that, but there was a time when she didn’t sound so Italian. 

K: I really had to work on pronunciation. And that’s normal. Don’t feel like you’ve either got it or you don’t, it takes practice. 

M: We’ll help you improve your pronunciation by learning how to say some of the hardest words to pronounce in Italian, for Katie and for lots of other Italian learners. We’ll show you eight words in order of difficulty. By the end you’ll get to hear the hardest one!  

K: The first word is aereo, which means airplane. 

M: Not easy, there are lots of vowels in this one. 

K: Sometimes in English, vowels get put together to make a new sound. Think of the word “read” (r,e,a,d) for example. The “e” and “a” blend together and become more like an “ee” sound. Imagine if you didn’t say the vowels together, but you pronounced each vowel separately. It would be more like “ree–ad”.

M: When you see two vowels in Italian, you have to remember to say them separately. That’s why in this case, we have to say each vowel individually:

A - E - R - E - O 

Aereo 

K: Can you hear how the “ah” and “eh” are said separately? Then at the end, the “eh” and “oh” are said separately? Let’s hear it just a couple more times. 

M: A - E - R - E - O (x2); Aereo x 2

K: Another one with vowels to sound separately is a word you’ll need a lot in Italy: euro. 

This one has loads of vowels, but we thought it’s even harder than aereo because it’s easy to forget it has to be pronounced differently to English. In English we say “yuro”, but in Italian it’s: 

M: euro x2 

You have to pronounce the “e” and then the “u” after. 

E - U - R - O (x2), euro x 2 K: All these vowels might be hard to say, but if you just remember the rule that you’re meant to pronounce each one, and not blend them together, then you’ve got it. It might help you to see the word written down and you can go along the word slowly, reading it out loud and pausing at each letter. K: There’s another very common word with a few vowels to say. It’s the Italian word for “waiter”.. 

M: cameriere (x2)

K: This is number three on the list because as you say the vowels one after the other, it makes a new type of sound. So it’s not just remembering to say each vowel, but remembering to say the first vowel in a certain way. Let’s listen to the end, which is spelt i-e-r-e. 

M: -iere (x2). 

K: As you move from saying the i to the e, you’ll notice that the “i” sounds more like a “y”. This happens a lot to the letter “i” in Italian. When followed by another vowel, it makes a “yuh” sound. So instead of eee-eh-reh, it’s yeh-reh. Matteo will emphasize it for us. 

M: Camer-YEH-REH x2 

K: Just like in the word ieri (yesterday), spelt i-e-r-i. The first “i” sounds like a “y”. Ieri (x2). 

M: This also happens in our next difficult to pronounce word in Italian. A word that you probably want to know if you're visiting Italy in the summer! Do you know how to say “ice”? [...] ghiaccio (x2) 

K: Spelt “g-h-i-a-c-c-i-o”. Although it has a lot of letters, this word only has two syllables. 

In the first syllable, we have “g”, “h”, “i” and “a”. The “i” followed by the “a” takes on a “yuh” sound. So the first syllable sounds like GYA (x2). Ghiaccio (x2)

M: We also have the “gh” at the beginning, which is a hard gh. This happens any time you have a “g” and “h” together in Italian. So the beginning of the word is: g, g. GYA-CHO. 

K: Finally, the last syllable is spelt “c”, “i”, “o”. When “c” is followed by “i” in Italian, it turns the c into a soft “ch” sound. So we get “cho” (x2). Careful, because the “i” isn’t pronounced in these situations, so we don’t get “chee-oh”, but rather “cio”. 

M: GYA-CHO (x2). 

K: Just like ciabatta bread. In Italian, we don’t say “chee-ah-ba-tah”, but rather: cha, cha-bah-tah.

M: Ciabatta

K: Our next word is an ingredient which is used a lot in Italian cooking, but contains a tricky letter combination. Do you know how to say “garlic” in Italian? 

[...]

M: Aglio (x2)

K: Spelt a,g,l,i,o. The gli combination in Italian is pronounced “lyuh” (x2). We don’t exactly have this sound in English, but it’s like an L followed by a Y. 

M: Aglio (x2)

K: To make it sound really Italian, push your tongue up flat against the roof of your mouth: “lyuh” (x2), aglio (x2). We can learn something from the last sound, too. As English speakers we tend to want to say “agli-ou”, with a long “o” that slides all over the place, like ou. In Italian, it’s a short, clear “oh” (x2). 

M: Aglio (x2)

K: Next, another common word, “to wake up” in Italian can be difficult, for a couple of reasons! 

M: Svegliare - to wake up. 

Svegliare x2

K: Spelt s,v,e,g,l,i,a,r,e. Svegliare has the g,l,i: lyuh sound we just spoke about . But there’s another difficult part about the pronunciation of svegliare. The “s” at the beginning is actually pronounced more like a z. So we have this funny zv combination at the beginning: it’s not sveh, but zveh (x2)

M: Svegliare (x2)

K: For this next word, it’s one you might spot on the menu in Italy. It’s a type of pasta made with potatoes. 

M: Gnocchi! Mmm…now I’m hungry for lunch. 

K: Spelt “g,n.o,c,c,h,i”. There are three reasons why this word is difficult. First of all, the “gn” sound at the beginning. If you put the letters n and y together in English , then that’s how you say it. A bit like the “ny” we have in the English word “canyon”. ny, ny. 

M: Ny, ny, gnocchi (x2)

K: The last part of the word is spelt “c,h,i”. Did you notice how it sounds like “key?”. The ch in Italian is actually opposite to the “ch” in English words like “church” or “cheese”. In Italian, ch makes a hard “k”. 

M: So it’s not gnoCi, but gnocchi. 

K: So far so good, once you know that gn sounds like ny, and that ch sounds like k, you can pronounce it nearly correctly: 

M: Gnocchi

K: But there’s one last detail in this word that can take a while to master: the double c! 

M: When we have a double letter in Italian, it sounds longer. Gnoc-chi ( x 2). It helps to imagine a little pause between them. So we’ve got nyok, then kee. Knyok-kee (x2). 

K: For me Italian doubles are probably the trickiest pronunciation point to learn in Italian, because it can take a while to be able to hear and pronounce the longer sound. 

M: Yes, Katie and our other friends who have been living in Italy for years and speak fluent Italian still get them wrong occasionally. But it’s not a big problem and we still know what you mean, so don’t stress too much. 

K: This brings us to the trickiest word in my view, because it’s the only one where I really stressed about getting the double letter right, because I was scared of saying something rude by accident! 

M: Ah I think I know where this is going. 

K: It’s the word anno, with two nns. This means year. But if you say ano, with one n, it means…

M: Anus. 

K: When I realized I’d probably been making this mistake for a long time in Italian, I was really embarrassed and then for ages I tried to avoid saying the word “year” in Italian at all. 

M: What did you say, 12 months ago?

K: Something like that, I’d say things like molto tempo fa (“a long time ago”). But once I learned the trick about doing a little pause between the double letters, I started to feel a lot more confident about saying it. 

M: With “year” we say: Anno (x 2), with a long double n. Try to do a little pause between the two nns. An-no (x2). 

K: Let’s hear some of those tricky words again. We saw how the vowels are said separately in “plane”. 

M: Aereo. A-E-RE-O. Aereo. 

K: And euro. 

M: Euro. E-U-RO. Euro. 

K: We also saw a couple of words where i followed by another vowel makes a “y” sound. Like in the yeh-reh ending of the word waiter. 

M: Cameriere. CAM-ER-YEH-REH. Cameriere

K: And in the word “ice”, which is just two syllables.  

M: Ghiaccio. GYAH-CHO. Ghiaccio. 

K: We saw that “gli” sound, which is like an “l” followed by a “y”, and you push your tongue at the roof of your mouth. Like in “garlic”

M: Aglio. ALYO. Aglio. 

K: And “to wake up”, which also had that “z” sound at the beginning

M: Svegliare. ZVEH-LYAH-REH. Svegliare. 

K: And Italian potato dumplings. We start with the NY sound, and also need that long double kk. 

M: Gnocchi. NYOK-KHI. Gnocchi. 

K: And finally, you learnt from my embarrassing mistake, so now you know that you need to say double consonants when you see a word like “year”. 

M: Anno

K: But that’s not the only embarrassing mistake you can make if you get the pronunciation wrong. If you head over to our blogpost, we’ll show you how to make sure you don’t accidentally say the word “fart”. 

M: Katie! Where are your manners? But it’s actually quite easy to make this mistake, all it takes is just saying one vowel wrong when you’re trying to say another common Italian word. 

K: So to see that word and more click the link in the description.  

K: See you next time or as we say in Italian.

Alla prossima!

Time to check your understanding and remember everything you just learned! Below you’ll find a mini-quiz and some vocabulary cards to help it all go in.

Quiz

How much did you learn? Find out in the quiz!

Click here to take the quiz for this episode: 13 Difficult Italian words you're (probably) pronouncing wrong

Vocabulary

Scoraggiare = To discourage

Asciugamano = Towel

Vorrei = I would like

Chiacchierare = To chat

Pesce = Fish

Ghiaccio = Ice

Svegliare = To wake up

Aglio = Garlic

Cameriere = Waiter

Aereo = Plane

Flashcards: 13 Difficult Italian Words

Not sure how it works? Click here to watch the tutorial