Ch 1 · Lesson 5Italian · Chapter 1 · Lesson 5 · Grammar primer
The alphabet: 21 letters, and five on loan
Italian spelling is a faithful servant of sound. Learn the hard and soft c, the double consonants, and the two accents, and you can say any word you can read.
The short version
Italian doubles its consonants for real
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Why?Hide
A double consonant in Italian is held roughly twice as long as a single one, and the difference separates words rather than decorating them: is grandfather, is ninth; carro is a cart, is dear. English speakers systematically underdo this, which is the commonest thing that marks an otherwise good accent as foreign.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 5 of 40 in this chapter