LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "capire" in Italian?
kah-PEE-reh, stress in the middle, rhyming with "see." In IPA: /kaˈpi.re/. Three clean syllables, with the final "re" fully voiced rather than swallowed the way a silent English "e" would be.
Written as three syllables, ca, pi, and re, each pronounced in full. English readers often expect a word ending in "-ire" to drop or soften its last letter (compare English "fire," "hire"), but Italian "re" is a complete, spoken syllable.
Listen: capire
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Sound it out
Nothing here hides behind a spelling rule, the letters map directly onto their sounds, which actually makes this a good word for noticing how differently English and Italian treat a final "e."
Hear it in a sentence
Non capisco questa parola.
I don't understand this word.
Listen: Non capisco questa parola.
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"Non capisco questa parola" shows the everyday negative construction, "non" placed directly before the verb, with nothing else needed to negate the sentence, unlike English which inserts "do" ("I don't understand").
Notice the verb form here is "capisco," not "capisce" or "capire" itself: "capire" belongs to the group of "-ire" verbs that insert "-isc-" before the ending in most present-tense forms (io capisco, tu capisci, lui capisce), a pattern worth learning as a set rather than word by word.
Where English speakers slip
Because "capire" faintly echoes English "capable" or "capacity," some learners stress the first syllable, "CA-pi-re." Italian actually stresses the second syllable, "ca-PI-re," in the infinitive.
The other habit is treating the final "e" as decorative, the way it often is in English spelling, and clipping the word to something like "kah-PEER." In Italian that "e" is a full syllable and needs its own clear "reh" at the end.