LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "prendere" in Italian?
PREN-deh-reh, stressed right up front, rhyming with "when" plus an r. In IPA: /ˈprɛn.de.re/. All three syllables are spoken, the word never collapses down to one beat the way its French cousin does.
Written as three syllables, pren, de, and re, with the stress sitting on that first syllable rather than closer to the end. That front-loaded stress is called "sdrucciolo" in Italian grammar, and it catches English speakers off guard because most English words of this shape stress a later syllable.
Listen: prendere
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
The spelling is straightforward, the trap is stress placement plus one very specific false-friend habit: this verb has a French cousin, "prendre," that's pronounced almost nothing like it looks, and that memory can quietly sabotage the Italian version.
Hear it in a sentence
Prendo un caffè.
I'll have a coffee.
Listen: Prendo un caffè.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
"Prendo un caffè" uses "prendere" the way English uses "have" or "get" when ordering something, not its literal meaning of "to take." Ordering food or drink with "prendere" is completely standard in Italian and doesn't carry any sense of physically grabbing something.
The present tense "prendo" doubles as a near-future intention here, closer to "I'll have a coffee" than a flat statement about the present moment. Context, not a different verb form, signals that it's an order rather than a description.
Where English speakers slip
Anyone with a little French can be misled by "prendre," the French cognate, which is essentially one syllable with a silent final "e." Carrying that habit into Italian produces something like "prahndr," dropping the last syllable entirely. Italian "prendere" keeps all three syllables, ending on a clearly pronounced "re."
The other common mistake is stressing the middle or final syllable, "pren-DE-re" or "pren-de-RE," because English words with this shape usually don't stress the very first syllable. Italian "prendere" is a "sdrucciolo" verb, stressed on the first of its three syllables: "PREN-de-re."