LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "leggere" in Italian?
LEDJ-eh-reh, stressed right up front, rhyming with "ledge." In IPA: /ˈlɛd.dʒe.re/. The doubled "gg" is a soft "j" sound held longer than a single one, never the hard g of English "leg."
Written as three syllables, leg, ge, and re, with the doubled g stretched across the middle, pronounced as one long, held soft "j" rather than a quick single sound — and stressed on that very first syllable.
Listen: leggere
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Sound it out
Two rules working together: g before e or i is soft, a "j" sound, and a doubled consonant like this "gg" is held noticeably longer than a single one. Put them together and "leggere" becomes a long, soft "j," not the hard g its spelling might suggest to an English eye.
Hear it in a sentence
Mi piace leggere.
I like reading.
Listen: Mi piace leggere.
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"Mi piace leggere" uses the bare infinitive "leggere" the way English uses the gerund "reading" — as a noun-like activity. Combined with "piacere"'s flipped structure, the literal sense is "Reading is pleasing to me," with "leggere" itself standing in as the grammatical subject of the sentence.
This infinitive-as-noun pattern is common after "piacere" and several other Italian verbs, and it's worth contrasting directly with English, which almost always needs the "-ing" form in this position rather than a plain "to read."
Where English speakers slip
The word visibly contains English "leg" followed by "gere," and that resemblance is a strong trap: many learners pronounce it with a hard g, like the "leg" in "leg day," saying "LEG-eh-reh." The correct sound is a soft "j," "LEDJ-eh-reh," because g before e is always soft in Italian.
The second issue is under-lengthening the doubled g. English doesn't hold consonants longer for double letters, so the "gg" often comes out as a single quick "j" instead of the genuinely held, doubled one Italian requires.