Did you know that Italian has two different L sounds?

Find out what they are in episode 5 of 5 Minute Italian.

Hi everyone! Ciao to all and benvenuti at Five Minutes Italian.

Hi everyone and welcome to Five Minute Italian.

I'm Katie and I'm Matteo.

Ciao to all to-tutti.

This week we got a lovely email from Collie who's learning Italian with us.

She told us the story of her Italian great-grandfather,

who moved to Australia with his brother in the late 1800s.

Now the family name was originally Battaglini, which is quite tricky to pronounce because it contains the sound,

Yi.

So, in today's episode, we'll be looking at how to pronounce this sound, which can take a bit of getting used to at first because it's so different to anything we have in English.

Let's get started.

So, when you have a word that has the combination of the three letters, G, L and I, it's pronounced y.

For example, in agio, which means garlic.

And it's spelled a, then we get the letters G, L, I together, followed by O,

A, y, oh, ayo.

So how do you make this sound?

This sound is what's known as a palatal L, which means that it's similar to an L sound.

But instead of bringing the tip of our tongue up behind the teeth like we do in the English L sound, we flatten the whole

tongue right against the roof of our mouths or the palate, which is why it's called palatal

L. So let's try. Now to do this sound, it really helps to make a big smile because when you do

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