h

The Italian h is always silent and as such an Italian speaker won’t pronounce it when it occurs in foreign origin words (e.g. hotel). Moreover the letter h in Italian occurs only in the groups ch and gh (see below) and in the present tense of the verb to have. Thus, ho ( [I] have ) is pronounced o and hanno ( [they] have) is pronounced anno, the same as the word anno (year).

a, e, i, o, u

The Italian vowels have only one sound, regardless of what letters they precede or follow, or accent marks on the vowel, with the (minor) exception of e and o.

a

The a is always pronounced as in the English word car.

e

The e has the sound of the e in bed. Actually there are two sounds of e :

an OPEN one, indicated with the grave accent : è  a CLOSED one, indicated with the acute accent : é Note however that such accents are NOT normally written (unless they are required for tonic reasons), and appear only in dictionaries. Moreover, dictionaries report an ideal Tuscan pronunciation which is subject to ample regional variations. For instance the words perché (why) and stélla (star) are usually pronounced in the North as perchè and stèlla. In general a mispronunciation at this level won’t be noticed, or if it is noticed (for instance méla (apple) is pronounced everywhere like that, and if you pronounce mèla it will sound funny) you will be understood. There are words in which a difference in accent causes a different meaning, as in pèsca (peach) and pésca (fishing), but in the North we pronounce both words as the first one and are understood everywhere.