LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "sapere" in Italian?
sah-PEH-reh, stress on the middle syllable. In IPA: /saˈpe.re/.
Three even syllables, sa-pe-re, each pronounced fully. Nothing here shortens or reduces the way it would in a similarly-stressed English word.
Listen: sapere
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Sound it out
English speakers who know the word "sapient" (as in Homo sapiens) already have a mental picture of this root — but that word's stress and vowel sounds point in exactly the wrong direction for Italian sapere.
Hear it in a sentence
Sai dov'è il bagno?
Do you know where the bathroom is?
Listen: Sai dov'è il bagno?
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"Sai dov'è il bagno?" uses sai, the informal tu-form of sapere, to ask about a fact — where the bathroom is — rather than about a skill or a person, which is exactly what sapere is for. Italian splits "to know" into two separate verbs: sapere for facts and information, conoscere for people and places you're personally familiar with.
Dov'è itself is a contraction of dove ("where") and è ("is"), collapsing two words into one the way English does with "where's." Asking a stranger for the bathroom this casually, with sai, is normal in relaxed settings but would shift to Sa dov'è il bagno? in a more formal one.
Where English speakers slip
The word "sapient," familiar to English speakers from "Homo sapiens," pulls stress and vowel quality in the wrong direction — its English pronunciation, "SAY-pea-ent," has nothing in common with Italian sa-PE-re, which stresses the middle syllable with a closed, unglided "eh."
The other common slip is dropping the final e as if it were silent, an instinct from English spelling that Italian never follows — every one of these three syllables is voiced in full.