Vowels

I've been working on pronouncing vowels more clearly, overcoming my English-language habit of turning unstressed vowels into schwas (ə). In Italian, the rule is that you just pronounce each vowel in turn, so for instance "scuola" has three distinct vowel sounds, "mie" has two. An exception is "i" after "g" or "c", which softens the consonant ... so the "i" in "giorno" or "ciabatta" isn't a distinct vowel sound.

After reading a passage in my Italian lesson book together, we tried reading and (slowly, slowly) translating the first paragraph of Harry Potter e L'Ordine Della Fenice tonight. There were lots of words I didn't know, and quite a few that even Iris (by far the best Italian speaker among us) didn't know, so we looked up several in the dictionary. Mostly the pronunciation wasn't too hard, but a few words threw me. "incartapecoriti" isn't that hard once you break it into "incarta" and "pecoriti". "giallognoli" is harder just because of the "gn", which in Italian is like the "ñ" of Spanish. The word in that paragraph that really twists my tongue, though, is "aiuola" ("distesso sulla schiena in un'aiuola fuori dal numero quattro", tr. "laying on his back in a flower-bed outside number four [Privet drive]"). Five distinct vowel sounds, including four in sequence, although the "u" can be a bit like a "w" (a letter that does not exist in the Italian alphabet). My poor American tongue just struggles with that string of vowels, like the the tongues of Italian-speakers struggle with strings of consonants in words like "world" and "turtle".