LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "mai" in Italian?
MY, rhyming exactly with the English word "my" or "pie." In IPA: /mai/. It's a single syllable and a single diphthong, with no pause in the middle.
Just one syllable. "Ai" here is a true diphthong, a single glide from "ah" to "ee" produced as one uninterrupted sound, the same shape as the vowel in the English word "my" — one of the easier sounds in Italian for an English mouth, even though the spelling looks unfamiliar.
Listen: mai
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Sound it out
There's no trick in the spelling: "ai" reliably makes the same diphthong as the vowel in English "my" or "pie" whenever it appears in Italian, so this word can be sounded out almost exactly the way it looks once you know that one pattern.
Hear it in a sentence
Non sono mai stato a Roma.
I have never been to Rome.
Listen: Non sono mai stato a Roma.
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Italian negates "never" in two parts, "non" before the verb and "mai" after it, exactly like "non...niente" (nothing) or "non...più" (no longer) — dropping either half doesn't work the way a single "never" does in English. "Sono mai stato" also uses "stato," the past participle of "essere" itself, since "essere stato" (to have been) is how Italian expresses ever having been somewhere.
Because "essere" is the auxiliary, "stato" agrees with the subject in gender: a woman would say "sono mai stata," with an added "a." That agreement is easy to miss for English speakers, since the English translation, "I have never been," carries no such marking at all.
Where English speakers slip
The single biggest trap is English spelling habit: in English, "ai" almost always signals the vowel in "mail," "rain," or "wait" (the /eɪ/ sound), so it's instinctive to read Italian "mai" the same way and say something closer to "may." Italian "ai" is a completely different diphthong, the open "ah" gliding up to "ee," the same sound as English "my," not "may."
A smaller issue is splitting the diphthong into two syllables, "AH-ee," the way some English speakers do with borrowed words like "naive." In Italian, "ai" stays fused into one uninterrupted glide and one syllable.