Recently I had lunch at my favourite lunch place.

It’s a busy little diner that does great lasagne, BLT’s (bacon, lettuce and tomato toasted sandwich), salads, soups – you could say they have a reasonable menu to choose from. As it is my favourite place I have lunch there frequently and most of the time they know what I drink: a latte.

When I had lunch there the other day I remembered that I had almost given up on ordering a latte when I first arrived in London, and that it took weeks of pronunciation practice to not hear the frustrating “What?” in response to my order.

In Germany we call an espresso with lots of milk a “latte macchiato”. We pronounce the double “t” as the t in the English word “rat”, making “latte” a rather short word. The second part we pronounce quite Italian, or what we think is Italian.

I think that many Germans, just like I did, think that “latte macchiato” is an internationally valid expression for this kind of drink. So of course, when I started going to my favourite lunch place, I ordered a “latte macchiato”. Nobody understood. I had to repeat it several times until they guessed what I wanted. That happened so many times that I started drinking cappuccino. At least I could pronounce that!

It took me some time to figure out that first of all, “latte macchiato” is not an internationally used term. There is no “macchiato” in the UK. It’s just “latte”. But not with a short “t”. The “a” is a very drawn out letter, the “t” is somewhat soft and the “e” is pronounced almost like the word “hey”.

Nowadays I order “laaathey”. Works every time! Try it for yourself!