Italian · Chapter 1 · Lesson 2 · 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
A double consonant in Italian is held roughly twice as long as a single one, and the difference separates words rather than decorating them. English speakers systematically underdo this, which is the commonest thing that marks an otherwise good accent as foreign.
la casa
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why. Read it through once, then come back and continue with the next lesson.
Read the full article · 2 min readLesson 2 of 24 in this chapter