Introduction

Italian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. By most measures and together with Sardinian, Italian is the closest language to Latin, from which it descends via Vulgar Latin. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and Vatican City. It has official minority status in western Istria (Croatia and Slovenia).

Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania, although Italian is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. Many speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties) and other regional languages.

Italian is a major European language, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the second most widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers (15% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens.

If you choose to learn the Italian language, you’ll need to start by learning it’s alphabet. Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Here are few steps which will help you to learn Italian phonetics:

• If you’re pressed for time, focus on the fundamentals. Study the Italian ABC’s and Italian numbers, learn how to pronounce Italian words, ask questions in Italian, and brush up on the Euro.

• It is also essential to have a thorough knowledge of the Italian vowels and the consonants of the Italian language. Until you have learned the vowels, consonants and phonetic alphabets you cannot jump directly to studying and analysing Italian phonetics. 

• After learning the alphabets, you can start to take up a small group of Italian words and analyze their phonetics. All the words are not pronounced the way they are written. There may be a lot of silent letters in a word.

• Focus and keep in mind where the silent letters are placed generally. One of the best aids you can get is downloading and installing an Italian dictionary with audio features. You will be able to pronounce the words correctly by listening as well as studying the phonetic alphabets. These will enhance your phonetic knowledge. 

• Once you are able to analyze the phonetics for almost every word, you can start practising phonetics for a full sentence. There is a great website that offers great audio as well as phonetic transcription. Visit easypronunciaition.com and you will be directed to a dialogue box where you can write down the Italian sentence you want to analyze. It will then automatically start the transcription and provide you both the written phonetic transcription and audio transcription. 

• Sometimes you might forget how a phonetic alphabet is pronounced but with the help of the audio feature you will remember it easily after listening to it. Isn’t that great? Then again, we have to remember the sound stress. Since stress plays a crucial role in the pronunciation of a language. Audio features will effectively help you in learning sound stress. 

• You can practice all these ways by yourself at home with the help of resources from the internet as well as from offline resources. But the very best way to learn Italian phonetics and master it is to take guidance from a language expert. Since they have got it already, they will know the correct methods of learning and practising it. So taking guidance is essential and the best way, but mastering it depends on your dedication and consistency. Without regular practice, you will never be able to learn it.