Learn European Portuguese Pronunciation

Portuguese pronunciation is known to be quite difficult. It is indeed complex, but the good news is that it is not chaotic.

With the rules presented in this tutorial, you will be able to understand how written Portuguese is actually pronounced.

If you already know how consonants are pronounced, you can skip ahead to vowel pronunciation.

If you already know all this and simply want to improve your European Portuguese accent, see our subtitled video examples.

Let's begin with the basics:

Those were really easy, right?

Let's continue!

Now let's look at the digraphs:

Coda consonants:

Some consonants have a different sound when they occur at the end of a syllable. This is the case with M, N, S, and Z.

Followed by an unvoiced consonant (c, ç, ch, f, p, q, s, t) or a pause:

Followed by a voiced consonant (b, d, g, j, l, lh, m, n, nh, r, rr, v, z):

Between vowels:

Any consonant other than these (M, N, S, Z) will not change. Let's continue.

The sounds of X:

I left X until the end on purpose. It is the only ambiguous consonant in Portuguese:

At the end of a syllable, it follows the same rules as S and Z.

In other cases, it may have one of the following sounds:

That's it. We've seen all the consonant sounds.

Click here to continue to the second part of this tutorial: vowel pronunciation. ⇨

Exercise: pay attention to how the consonants sound:

Continue to the second part of this tutorial: vowel pronunciation. ⇨