LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "chiedere" in Italian?
KYEH-deh-reh, stress on the first syllable, with an open "eh" right after the initial "ky" sound. In IPA: /ˈkjɛ.de.re/.
Three syllables, chie-de-re, stressed on the first. Chie itself is a single syllable — the i acts as a glide into the e, not a vowel of its own.
Listen: chiedere
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Sound it out
This is the reverse of the rule that makes "ciao" work: there, ci before a vowel keeps the soft "ch" sound and the i is silent. Here, chi before a vowel is a completely different pattern — the h keeps the c hard, and the i becomes a glide (a quick "y" sound) rather than disappearing.
Hear it in a sentence
Posso chiederti una cosa?
Can I ask you something?
Listen: Posso chiederti una cosa?
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"Posso chiederti una cosa?" attaches the object pronoun ti directly onto the infinitive, chiederti, dropping the infinitive's final e before adding it — a standard Italian rule for pronouns attached to an infinitive. Posso ("can I," from potere) plus this fused infinitive is the polite, common way to preface a question before actually asking it, similar to English "can I ask you something?"
This soft opener is used across registers, from a casual aside to a friend to a more careful lead-in with someone you don't know well — the phrase itself signals a small moment of hesitation before the real question comes.
Where English speakers slip
Learners who've just internalized "ciao" 's rule — that ci before a vowel is a soft "ch" with a silent i — often apply the same logic here and soften chi into "shee-EH-deh-reh" or "chee-EH-deh-reh." Chi works the opposite way: the h exists precisely to keep the c hard, so chiedere starts with a "k" sound, not "ch" or "sh."
The other common slip is the stress-pattern overcorrection shared with credere: after meeting several -ere verbs that stress their ending, it's tempting to say "kye-DE-re." Chiedere keeps the stress up front, on chie.