How to Pronounce 'Andare': Italian Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce andare in Italian?

andare is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /anˈdare/. It means “to go.” ahn-DAH-reh , three even beats with a hard stress on the middle one. In IPA: /anˈdare/ . Every vowel stays pure and full-voiced, including the final e, which is a real sound in Italian and never goes silent the way it would at the end of an English word.

How do you pronounce "andare" in Italian?

ahn-DAH-reh, three even beats with a hard stress on the middle one. In IPA: /anˈdare/. Every vowel stays pure and full-voiced, including the final e, which is a real sound in Italian and never goes silent the way it would at the end of an English word.

andare /anˈdare/

Three syllables, an-da-re, with all the weight sitting on the middle one, da. Because that syllable is stressed and open (it ends in a vowel), Italians hold the a in it just slightly longer than the a in an — a small stretch that helps the stress land clearly without anyone raising their voice.

Listen: andare

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

The one habit to unlearn before reading this word is vowel reduction. English constantly flattens unstressed vowels into a colorless "uh" — the a in "about," the second a in "banana" — but Italian never does that. Every vowel keeps its full textbook value whether it's stressed or not, so once you stop hunting for a schwa that Italian simply doesn't have, andare reads exactly the way its letters suggest: three clean vowels, one stressed syllable in the middle, nothing swallowed at the end.

an A crisp, open "ahn" — start from the "a" in "father," not the flatter vowel in English "an" or "and," and let a little air pass through the nose on the n. Unstressed, but still a full, clear vowel, not a mumble.

da The stressed syllable, said with real emphasis: a bright "DAH." The d itself is dental, made with the tongue tip touching the back of the upper front teeth rather than the ridge behind them the way English d does, and it comes out with no puff of air afterward.

r A single quick tap of the tongue tip against the ridge behind the upper teeth, closer to the flicked sound in the middle of American English "butter" or "ladder" than to any English r. It happens once, not rolled and not dragged out.

e A clear, closed-ish "eh," like the e in "bed," held for a full beat. Nothing about Italian spelling makes this letter silent — it's the last sound of the word, said out loud every time.

Hear it in a sentence

Dobbiamo andare adesso.

We have to go now.

Listen: Dobbiamo andare adesso.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Andare is the all-purpose Italian verb for "to go," and it's irregular in most of its conjugated forms (vado, vai, va, andiamo...) even though the infinitive itself is perfectly regular to read. In a sentence like "Dobbiamo andare adesso," it sits untouched right after dovere ("we must"), which is the standard Italian pattern: a conjugated modal verb followed by a bare infinitive, with no equivalent of English "to" needed in between. That's also why andare shows up constantly in its infinitive form in phrasebooks and menus of obligation or intention — dover andare, volere andare, potere andare — long before a learner ever needs to touch its irregular present tense.

Where English speakers slip

The biggest trap is visual: andare looks enough like English words such as "wander" or "ponder" that English speakers instinctively want to stress the first syllable and treat the final e as silent, the way English spelling normally works ("date," "care," "wander" itself). Do the opposite on both counts — the stress falls on da, not an, and that final e is a real, audible vowel that has to be pronounced, never dropped and never left to fade into a schwa.

The other slip is the r. English r is a glide made by curling or bunching the tongue without ever touching the roof of the mouth, so English speakers default to that same gesture in andare and produce something a native listener won't quite recognize as an r at all. The Italian sound is a single tap of the tongue against the ridge behind the teeth — phonetically almost identical to the flapped "t" or "d" Americans already make in the middle of "butter" or "ladder." Borrowing that flap, rather than the English r glide, gets it right in one try — just don't roll it into a long trill, which is reserved for words spelled with a double rr.