LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "sicuro" in Italian?
see-KOO-roh, with the stress on KOO, rhyming with "zoo," and a light, tapped "roh" to finish. In IPA: /siˈku.ro/.
Three syllables, si, cu, and ro, with clear stress on the middle syllable — each vowel keeps its full value, with none of the reduction English speakers might expect on the unstressed syllables.
Listen: sicuro
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Sound it out
"Sicuro" is straightforward once the c is sorted out: before u, c is always hard, so there's no soft-c trap here the way there is in words like "veloce" or "dolce."
Hear it in a sentence
Sono sicuro di questo.
I'm sure about this.
Listen: Sono sicuro di questo.
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"Sicuro" here is masculine because the speaker is male (or defaulting to the unmarked masculine form); a woman saying the same thing would say "sono sicura," changing only the final vowel — a reminder that predicate adjectives in Italian agree with the subject's gender even when that subject is just "I."
"Sicuro di" (sure about/of) pairs the adjective with the preposition "di," which is the standard preposition Italian uses after "sicuro" — English speakers should note it's "di," not a literal translation of "about," since Italian prepositions rarely map one-to-one onto English ones.
Where English speakers slip
The cognate "secure" tempts English speakers into stressing the first syllable, saying "SEE-koo-roh" instead of "see-KOO-roh." The stress needs to land firmly on the second syllable, matching most three-syllable Italian words of this shape.
The other slip is softening the c before u, occasionally influenced by the general wariness English speakers develop around Italian c after meeting soft-c words like "ciao" or "cena." Before u, though, c is always hard — there's no i or e nearby to trigger the soft pronunciation, so "cu" is reliably "koo," never "choo."