LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "la camera (f.)" in Italian?
lah KAH-meh-rah, stress on the first syllable, with all three vowels kept full and clear. In IPA: /la ˈka.me.ra/. It sounds close to the English word "camera," but it means something completely different.
Three syllables, ca, me, and ra, stressed on the first — another "sdrucciola" pattern, though here it happens to match the stress pattern of the English lookalike, which is unusual for this group of words.
Listen: la camera (f.)
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Sound it out
"Camera" is spelled and stressed almost identically to its English lookalike, which makes the pronunciation easier than most "sdrucciola" words on this list — but the meaning is a false friend worth flagging before it causes confusion.
Hear it in a sentence
La mia camera è piccola.
My bedroom is small.
Listen: La mia camera è piccola.
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The example, "La mia camera è piccola" (My bedroom is small), is a reminder that "camera" in Italian means "room" or, most often in everyday speech, "bedroom" — not a photographic camera, which is "macchina fotografica" in Italian. It's a classic false friend: identical spelling, nearly identical sound, completely different meaning.
As with "macchina" earlier, "la mia" keeps the definite article in front of the possessive, a structural requirement in Italian that has no direct match in English's article-free "my bedroom."
Where English speakers slip
The pronunciation itself is one of the easier words on this list for English speakers, since the stress pattern happens to match the English cognate "camera" almost exactly. The real trap is semantic rather than phonetic: assuming "camera" means the photographic device, which leads to confused sentences if the false friend isn't flagged early.
Where pronunciation does slip is vowel reduction: English "camera" collapses its middle syllable toward a schwa, something like "CAM-ruh," dropping the e almost entirely. Italian "camera" keeps all three vowels distinct and fully pronounced, "KAH-meh-rah," with no syllable dropped.