Hacking Portuguese now has a brand new section dedicated to Portuguese pronunciation — you’ll find it up top on the menu. The page on Portuguese for Spanish Speakers already had a huge amount of information on pronunciation, but it was getting unwieldy as I kept adding things to it, so instead I’ll be spinning off parts of it into their own permament pages in the pronunciation section.
The first article to go up is all about the Portuguese R, which is interesting enough to deserve a page unto itself (I also made a tl;dr version). Pronunciation being a hard thing to convey in writing, I’m using youtube videos, pronunciation clips from Forvo, and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to illustrate each article. The IPA is an amazing language hacking tool which deserves its own article as well. I was lucky to take a class on phonetics and IPA in college, and I feel it’s served me incredibly well when it comes to learning new languages, so one of my goals is to evangelize and encourage others to learn it.
If there’s a particular pronunciation topic you’d like to see, leave a comment below.
Hey, ive been enjoying your site, i hope you continue with new posts! chao!
Awesome site. I just found it today. I’ve been studying Portuguese for a couple months, and I’m looking forward to learning about some of your methods! Thanks for this site!!!
If you’re still publishing articles, a lesson about the Portuguese letter S would be very helpful to me! Thanks.
Hi Kristen, ‘s’ in portuguese is quite simple!
It’s pronounced like [z] in two cases:
(1) when it comes in between two vowels (casa, usar)
a. The exception is when it’s a double ‘ss’, then it’s pronounced [s] (amassar)
(2) when it comes before an ‘m’ or ‘n’ (abismo).
Everywhere else, ‘s’ sounds like [s]. Cheers!