Italian accent in English

The Italian language
The Italian language stems directly from Latin, just like other Romance languages like Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Romanian and other minority languages

An Italian about the accent
“Are you familiar with the concept of body language? Yeah, the difficult art of communicating without using words!
1)Hand gestures 2)Facial expressions 3)Body postures 4)Eye contact 5)Proximity to the listener
Italians master non-verbal communication, this is why we don’t care about our accent, no matter how weird it sounds!
This make us more confident, we will find a way to speak with our international friends, one way or another!

Peculiarities of pronunciation
The Italian ‘h’ is silent and mostly forgotten about except where it plays the role of modifier with the letters ‘c’ and ‘g’. In that role ‘h’ transforms sounds from soft to hard.
That’s why when you invite your Italian friend out to the restaurant, she tells you that she’s very angry! Angry … why, how have I offended her? Then the penny drops … she’s not angry, but hungry!

There is no approximation of ‘th’ in Italian.
Not being able to perform the necessary tongue yoga to pronounce ‘th’ Italians typically use the following workarounds to the ‘th’ problem.
1. ‘f’, as in “I fink it will be sunny”
2. ‘d’, as in “dis is de station”
3. ‘z’, as in “zese are very nice shoes”
4. ‘t’, as in “my tights (thighs) are aching”

Italian is one of the few languages in which every letter is pronounced, even if that letter is silent or toned down in English.
Hence the English word ‘know’ becomes ‘kenow’ for an Italian, and walking becomes walkin-G.
One Italian once told that he’d visited Laychetser in England, it became obvious that he was referring to Leicester (pronounced ‘Lester’ in English) when he described this Laychester as a big city south of Nottingham.

Italian ‘r’ is rolling. So Italians have nearly as much difficulty flattening out their lovely ‘r’ as English speakers generally do in acquiring its wonderfully tongue vibrating Italian counterpart.

Very few Italian words end with a consonant. This quality renders it exceptionally musical. That’s why many Italians have a habit to loose sounds when they speak English.

Typical mistakes
There are a few words which frequently pop up in spoken Italian, the most common being “niente” and “infatti”. Italians wrongly translate these directly, slipping “nothing” and “in fact” into conversation. A more accurate translation of these words would be "anyway" and "actually".
To agree with a friend, Italians say “hai ragione”. English-speakers tend to say, “you’re right” or “that makes sense”, but English speaking Italians can instead be heard saying “you have reason”.

In Italian, definite articles - “il”, “la”, etc - are essential parts of a sentence. This is easy to forget when speaking English, with Italians adding “the” unnecessarily.
Friendly Italians will often wish people “good work”, much to the confusion of their English-speaking colleagues. It’s a direct translation of “buon lavoro”, whereas “have a nice day” would be more appropriate.

The difference between “to tell” and “to say” in English is hard to grasp for Italians who use the simpler “dire” in their own language. The badly-worded result: “I said him”. It’s almost equally tough to distinguish “to do” from “to make” (both “fare” in Italian).
The word “will” to determine future events causes much confusion, as the meaning is crafted into a whole tense in Italian. It is sometimes used unnecessarily, such as “when I will arrive home tonight” instead of “when I get home tonight”. On other occasions Italians miss it out altogether: “tomorrow I go to work” rather than “tomorrow I will go to work”.

Another features in the videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GKrnCOJqkE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTt8XQCiBgY

Real Italian accent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewrZlfCY8hU