LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "di" in Italian?
DEE, one short, clipped syllable. In IPA: /di/.
Just one syllable, a single tight i vowel, held briefly rather than drawn out; this is a short function word, not a name like the letter "D."
Listen: di
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Sound it out
There's no trick to the spelling, the challenge is keeping the vowel short and unstressed: as a tiny preposition, di gets swallowed quickly in normal speech rather than pronounced with the weight of a standalone word.
Hear it in a sentence
Questo è il libro di Marco.
This is Marco's book.
Listen: Questo è il libro di Marco.
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"Questo è il libro di Marco" shows di doing the job English possessive 's does: Italian has no apostrophe-s, so possession is expressed with di plus the owner's name, il libro di Marco literally "the book of Marco," which is why the translation restructures it as "Marco's book."
Di is one of Italian's small set of simple prepositions that get fused with articles in other contexts (di + il becomes del, for example), though here it stands alone since Marco is a proper name and takes no article.
Where English speakers slip
Over-stressing di as if it were a content word, giving it the same weight as libro or Marco, is a common misstep. In fluent speech it's light and unstressed, leaning on the word after it, closer to how English speakers barely stress "of" in "cup of tea."
Trying to translate word-for-word and mentally reaching for an apostrophe-s construction causes hesitation over word order. Di always goes between the thing owned and the owner (libro di Marco), never as a suffix attached to the owner's name the way 's attaches in English.