In the typical Italian phrase book, there is a pronunciation key that tries to teach English-speaking tourists how to correctly pronounce Italian. This is based on the belief that in order to be understood, the tourist must pronounce every word almost like a native speaker would.
The authors of this book set out to devise a more workable and more usable pronunciation system. We considered the fact that it is impossible for an average speaker of English, with no training in phonetics or phonetic transcription, to reproduce the sounds of a foreign language perfectly. Further, we believe that you don’t have to have perfect pronunciation in order to make yourself understood in a foreign language. After all, native speakers will take into account that you are visitors to their country; they will most likely feel gratified by your efforts to communicate and will go out of their way to try to understand you. We have also found that visitors to a foreign country are not usually concerned with perfect pronunciation—they just want to get their message across, to communicate!
With this in mind, we have devised a pronunciation system of the utmost simplicity. This system does not attempt to give a tedious, problematic representation of Italian sounds; instead, it uses common English sound and letter combinations that are closest to the sounds of Italian. Since Italian (like English) depends on one syllable in a word being stressed, we have put that stressed syllable in italics.
Practice makes perfect, so it is a good idea to repeat aloud to yourself the phrases you think you’re going to use, before you actually use them. This will give you greater confidence and will help you to be understood.
You may want to pronounce Italian as well as possible, of course, and the present system is an excellent way to start. Since it uses only the sounds of English, however, you will very soon need to depart from it as you imitate the sounds you hear an Italian produce and begin to relate them to Italian spelling. Fortunately, Italian poses no problems in this regard, as there is an obvious and consistent relationship between pronunciation and spelling.
Divertitevi! Have fun!