Reading in Italian

Italian is the most consistently phonetic of the major Romance languages. Very nearly every letter is pronounced, and the handful of rules that vary — c and g before different vowels, mostly — are learned in an afternoon and then never trouble you again.

Words tend to end in vowels, which gives written Italian a rhythm you can hear while reading silently. Read along with audio and the correspondence between page and voice is almost one to one.

If you already have some Spanish, a large amount of Italian arrives free. The two share a great deal of vocabulary and structure, and reading one after the other is one of the easier language transfers available.

Double consonants are real

nono and nonno are different words, and the doubled letter is genuinely held longer in speech. It is one of the few places where careless reading changes meaning.

Stress is usually second to last

The default falls on the penultimate syllable, and an accent mark marks the exceptions. Between the two you can stress almost any word correctly on sight.

Verb endings carry the subject

parlo already means "I speak", so the pronoun is usually dropped. Reading teaches you to take the subject from the ending instead of looking for it.