LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "dieci" in Italian?
DYEH-chee, with the first syllable rhyming with "yeah." In IPA: /ˈdjɛtʃi/. It's two syllables squeezed close together, with all the weight up front.
Written with three vowel letters in a row, i-e-i, but functionally two syllables: die and ci. The i right after d fuses into a quick glide before the e, so it's dyeh-chee, not a slow "dee-eh-chi."
Listen: dieci
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Sound it out
The spelling packs a lot into five letters. The i right after d isn't a syllable of its own, it glides into the following e to form one diphthong, and the c before that final i turns soft, giving you the "ch" sound familiar from "cheese."
Hear it in a sentence
Aspetta dieci minuti.
Wait ten minutes.
Listen: Aspetta dieci minuti.
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"Aspetta dieci minuti" pairs an informal tu-imperative (aspetta, from aspettare, "wait") with dieci minuti stated as a plain duration, no preposition needed the way English sometimes inserts "for" ("wait for ten minutes"); Italian just states the quantity directly after the verb.
Dieci is invariable like every cardinal number below cento, so it stays dieci regardless of the gender of the noun it counts, here masculine plural minuti.
Where English speakers slip
English speakers often insert an extra syllable by pronouncing "ie" as two full vowels, "dee-EH-chee," instead of gliding them into one syllable, "dyeh." The i has to stay a fast glide, not a stressed vowel of its own.
The c before i also gets mispronounced as a hard k sound, "deh-kee," by learners used to English's inconsistent c-before-i rule (compare "city" and "cat"). In Italian, ci is always soft ch, with no exceptions.