I'm Teaching Italian at night to adults and have been going around and around trying to teach this sound.

(actually having fun in the process) This one lady from Costa Rica just dosen't get it. Most of the Spanish

speakers do. Well, all my students are Spanish speakers accept two.(One of which is somewhat fluent in Italian

or understands fluently so to speak) Some bilingual and some monolingual Spanish speakers.

I know that a non-native Italian speaker has difficulty in pronouncing correctly the Italian syllable “gli”

either when it is part of a word (tiglio, figlio, aglio, glicine, negligente, etc.) or when it is the plural

of the definite articles ‘il ‘ and ‘lo, which is used before masculine nouns beginning with a vowel, with s + consonant or gn, ps, x, z .

Anyway, I'll try to give you some suggestions for a correct pronunciation.

1-Generally speaking, "gli" must be pronounced more or less as “lyee” , i.e. like the double 'l' or "y" in Spanish

or even better similar to English (mi)lli(on), when it is followed or not by another vowel (a, o, e,).

For example, the nouns “aglio”,“figlio”, “figlie”, “figlia”, “figli” “tiglio”,"coniglio”, “conigli”, “

tagliatelle” , “figliolo”, “garbuglio”, and the pronouns “egli”, “glielo”, “gliela”, “gliene” or the plural preposition “degli”.

2- When on the contrary the syllable "gli" is followed by a consonant like in “glicine” ,”negligente”, “anglicano”, “glicemia”,

“glicerina”, “glissare”, etc., it must be pronounced hard as 'glean'.

3- However there are words like “glioma”, “neuroglia” , “ganglio” in which, for etymological reasons, the ‘g' and the ‘l' are pronounced as two separate sounds, i.e. hard as in

English ‘glean', though they are followed by a vowel. This happens because these medical terms derive from the Medieval Greek “glia” where the ‘g' has a hard sound.

So I think that the best way to teach English speakers how to pronounce “gli” properly is just to teach them these rules of grammar and pronunciation.

For Spanish speakers. ya ye "yi" yo yu - lla lle "lli" llo llu

gli - figli - sons - figle - daughters

Thanks villa for this post, these sounds are so difficult for us native English speakers as there just isn't anything phonetically identical in English, but this goes a long way towards getting it right.

Truly the best way to describe the sound to English speakers is that it is like the "ll" in million as you said.
Years ago, I studied the Thai language and they have a sound like the "ng" in song, but it is used at the beginning of words. Even though we have the sound in English, it was hard to make it at the beginning of a word. Same thing with the "gli" in Italian I think.

i try to remember the "lli" in the word million.
helps a little but i still have a hard time just saying "gli" without it being in a word.

Welcome to the historic Ye Olde Tavern. Yee

Don't pronounced the "g".