Portuguese Vowel Sounds
Here’s a trick that I figured out to speak Portuguese with less of a foreign accent. It goes back all the way back to elementary school. Do you remember when you were learning your vowels, and we learned that there are 5 vowels and each vowel has two sounds, long and short?
Well in Portuguese (and also in Spanish), each vowel only has one sound. So therefore, rather than 10 vowel sounds in English, Portuguese and Spanish only have 5. The trick if you are an English speaker is to throw out the other vowel sounds because they do not exist in Portuguese. See the table below.
| Vowel | English Pronunciation |
Portuguese Pronunciation |
| a | ă, ā | ŏ |
| e | ĕ, ē | ā |
| i | ĭ, ī | ē |
| o | ŏ, ō | ō |
| u | ŭ, ū | ū |
Here’s a little example that me and some friends were discussing over dinner one night. The word entendo (I understand). My friends were pronouncing the word:
And the more correct pronunciation would be:
One last point because the phonics are confusing because of where you want to accent the syllable. In general, when a word has no accent marks, then the accent should be placed on the second to last syllable. This is also key for proper pronunciation, and makes the first long a sound a little lighter than the second one in the example above.
Note: I am no expert on Portuguese, but hopefully someone will find this helpful.
Robert, I posted on Mike´s blog calling the attention to the fact that there are only 5 vowel sounds in spanish, but in portuguese, there are many more. First, you have open and closed vowels. Than you also have nasalised dithong vowels (like in pão, mãe, põe).
Check out the post and also this video from an english teacher, teaching about vowel sounds in portuguese.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGjLYgA2gtA
I watched the video and I think it is two views of the same thing. Here are two reasons why:
1. I tried to make the point about accents at the end of the post (probably not very well). The accented vowels (as in Spanish) indicate that that syllable should be accented. If there are no accents, then the accent by and large should be on the second to last syllable. When you accent the syllable, then at times there might be subtle changes in the pronunciation of the vowel, but a short-o is still a short-o. Either way, it is far more important to hit the accent on the right syllable than to modify the sound of the vowel.
2. I view dipthongs as being an extension of the above rule. In English, you are never sure which vowel sounds you are blending, and it is much more straight forward in Portuguese. Using the examples above, pão, would be short-o + long-o. mãe is short o + long a. And so on.
Anyways, my point was actually entirely different. One of the key things for English speakers is to remove certain vowel sounds such as short-e and short-i from their pronunciation.