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Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "il tavolo (m.)" in Italian?
eel TAH-voh-loh, stress firmly on the first syllable, every vowel kept short and pure. In IPA: /il ˈta.vo.lo/. Like "macchina," this is a word stressed further from the end than English learners usually expect.
Three syllables, ta, vo, and lo, stressed on the first — a "sdrucciola" word, stressed on the third-from-last syllable rather than the more common second-from-last pattern.
Listen: il tavolo (m.)
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Sound it out
"Tavolo" is fully regular once you know where the stress goes — the trap isn't any single sound, it's the rule of thumb that Italian stress "usually" falls one syllable from the end, a rule this word simply doesn't follow.
Hear it in a sentence
Questo tavolo è troppo piccolo.
This table is too small.
Listen: Questo tavolo è troppo piccolo.
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The example, "Questo tavolo è troppo piccolo" (This table is too small), uses "troppo" directly in front of the adjective to mean "too" in the sense of excess — the same slot English fills with "too" before an adjective. "Piccolo" then agrees with the masculine "tavolo."
"Questo" agreeing with masculine singular "tavolo" would shift to "questa" for a feminine noun and "questi"/"queste" for plurals — a small set of forms worth having automatic since demonstratives show up constantly in everyday Italian.
Where English speakers slip
The most common mistake is stress placement: many learners, having absorbed the general (and only roughly true) guideline that Italian words are usually stressed on the second-to-last syllable, guess "ta-VO-lo." "Tavolo" is one of a large class of "sdrucciola" words stressed one syllable earlier, on "TA," and there's no shortcut to knowing which words fall into that class besides learning them individually.
The second habit is letting the two unstressed o's reduce toward schwa, the way English collapses unstressed vowels almost automatically. Both o's in "tavolo" stay full, clear "oh" sounds, just shorter and quieter than the stressed a.