LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "triste" in Italian?
TREE-steh, stressed on the first syllable. In IPA: /ˈtris.te/. Both consonant clusters, "tr" and "st," stay tightly fused, with no extra vowel sneaking in between.
Two syllables, tris and te, clearly separated, with the stress up front.
Listen: triste
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Sound it out
"Triste" opens and closes with tight consonant clusters, "tr" at the start and "st" in the middle, both of which Italian pronounces as single fused units with no gap or extra vowel sound between the consonants.
Hear it in a sentence
Perché sei triste?
Why are you sad?
Listen: Perché sei triste?
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"Perché sei triste?" uses "perché," a single word that covers both "why" (in a question, as here) and "because" (in an answer), so context alone tells you which meaning is meant, a genuine ambiguity with no English equivalent. "Sei" is the tu-form of "essere" (to be), the informal "you," appropriate for friends or family. Like "felice" elsewhere in this set, "triste" is an invariable -e adjective, the same form for both masculine and feminine subjects. The question needs no word-order inversion, unlike English's "are you sad," Italian keeps the statement order "[tu] sei triste" and simply adds rising intonation and a question mark.
Where English speakers slip
The most common mistake is inserting a short vowel between t and r at the start of the word, a habit carried over from language backgrounds where "tr" doesn't cluster this tightly, producing something like "tuh-REE-steh." Italian keeps "tr" as one crisp onset with no gap.
There's also a tendency to lengthen or diphthongize the i the way English does in similarly-spelled words like "tribe." Italian "i" here stays a short, pure "ee" with no glide or lengthening.