I am studying Italian to improve my writing. The excellent thing about learning the Italian phonetics as a first step is that pronouncing and spelling its words becomes a lot easier than I thought it would be.
The Italian alphabet claims twenty-one letters and recognizes five foreign letters. Because only c and g are exceptions to English pronunciation, Italian is easy for me to read.
"Pronounce each letter individually," says Dennis, one of my istruttori from Italy.
Very few pronunciation rules govern the juxtaposition of letters, so Italian sounds just like it looks and vice versa. I love it when I can spell a word properly just by hearing it!
Rather than just memorizing travel-phrases like "Bathroom, please!" I can begin to hear and see how Italian syllables are formed in the palate and which prefixes and suffixes show what parts of speech. For example, if I know the meaning of the verb scrivere (to write), I can constructively deviate into tenses: scrittice (f. writer), scritto (written), and so on into creating grammatically correct sentences.
I am excited about learning Italian the same way I learned American English as a child: through phonics, writing, and practicing with educated people who are native to the language.
