How to Pronounce 'Piacere': Italian Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce piacere in Italian?

piacere is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /pjaˈtʃe.re/. It means “to like (lit. to be pleasing).” pyah-CHEH-reh , stress in the middle, rhyming with the "che" in "chevron." In IPA: /pjaˈtʃe.re/ . The opening "pia" glides together into one syllable, and the c is always a soft "ch" here, never an "s."

How do you pronounce "piacere" in Italian?

pyah-CHEH-reh, stress in the middle, rhyming with the "che" in "chevron." In IPA: /pjaˈtʃe.re/. The opening "pia" glides together into one syllable, and the c is always a soft "ch" here, never an "s."

piacere /pjaˈtʃe.re/

Written as three syllables, pia, ce, and re, with "pia" blending its i into a quick glide rather than forming a syllable of its own, similar to the "chia" in "chiamare."

Listen: piacere

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Sound it out

Two things to catch: the "pia" at the start moves as one glided syllable, not two, and the c in "ce" is soft because it's followed by e, the same rule that makes "ciao" start with a "ch" sound rather than a hard "k."

pia A p plus a quick "y" glide into an open "ah" — one syllable, "pyah," not "pee-ah."

ce The stressed syllable, a soft "ch" sound (c before e is always soft in Italian) plus a closed "eh," giving "cheh," not "seh."

re A short, closed "reh" to finish.

Hear it in a sentence

Mi piace questo posto.

I like this place.

Listen: Mi piace questo posto.

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"Mi piace questo posto" reveals one of Italian's more counterintuitive grammar patterns: "piacere" flips the usual subject and object around. The literal meaning is "This place is pleasing to me," where "questo posto" (this place) is the grammatical subject and "mi" (to me) is the object — the reverse of how "I like this place" is structured in English.

Because of that flip, the verb has to agree with the thing being liked, not with the person doing the liking. A plural subject would need "piacciono" instead of "piace" ("Mi piacciono questi posti," I like these places), even though the English sentence still starts with "I."

Where English speakers slip

Seeing "c" followed by "e," English spelling habits (as in "cent" or "cell," where c-before-e makes an "s" sound) sometimes pull learners toward pronouncing "ce" as "seh." In Italian, c before e or i is always a soft "ch," so the correct sound is "cheh," the same as the "ce" in "cell" if English pronounced it the Italian way.

Stress is the other trap: the cognate-free spelling doesn't offer an obvious hint, and some learners land on "PIA-ce-re" instead of the correct "pia-CE-re," stressed on the middle syllable.