English → Portuguese
Portuguese uses 35 sounds. You already own 18 of them from English. The other 17 are the work — and 16 of those are the dangerous kind: close enough to something you already say that you will substitute them without hearing yourself do it.
The silent swaps
Your mouth has something close enough to reach for. These survive for years precisely because they sound right to you — the fix is hearing the difference first, not trying harder.
the move: velar → palatal
Portuguese: wine · written "nh"
Spanish writes this ñ, French gn, Portuguese nh.
Your /ŋ/ is the one in sing (sing).
the move: near-close → close
Portuguese: life · written "i"
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-open → open
Portuguese: spade · written "a", "á"
Your /æ/ is the one in cat (cat).
the move: near-close → close
Portuguese: everything · written "u", "o (final)"
Unstressed final o is /u/ — always.
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: grandmother · written "o", "ó"
avó /ɔ/ grandmother vs avô /o/ grandfather — one accent apart.
Your /ɔː/ is the one in law (law).
the move: near-close → close-mid
Portuguese: fear · written "e", "ê"
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close-mid
Portuguese: grandfather · written "o", "ô"
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: front → central
Portuguese: bed · written "a"
Unstressed a, and a before a nasal.
Your /æ/ is the one in cat (cat).
the move: near-close → close
Portuguese: yes · written "im", "in"
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close
Portuguese: one, a · written "um", "un"
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: approximant → lateral
Portuguese: son · written "lh"
Your /j/ is the one in yes (yes).
the move: approximant → tap
Portuguese: expensive · written "r"
One tap.
Your /ɹ/ is the one in red (red).
the move: near-close → close, front → central
Portuguese: small · written "e (unstressed)"
The vowel that vanishes. Often deleted outright, which is why European Portuguese sounds like a run of consonants.
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close-mid
Portuguese: time · written "em", "en"
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close-mid
Portuguese: good · written "õ", "om", "on"
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
Words you may say identically
Two or more Portuguese sounds landing on one sound of yours. Until the ear separates them, the mouth cannot — which is what the ear trainer is for.
Genuinely new
Nothing in English sits close to these. They sound foreign in your mouth — which is the good news: you can hear that you are not saying them yet.
car
Back in the throat, like French r. Brazil often makes it /h/.
Closest thing you own: — but labiodental → uvular.
Rhythm and pitch
The layer spelling never records, and the one that makes a correct sentence still sound foreign.
| English | Portuguese | |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Stress-timed | Stress-timed (Portugal) |
| Stress | Contrastive, and unmarked in writing — the single most common cause of not being understood. Dozens of noun/verb pairs differ only in where the stress goes, and every unstressed vowel collapses to /ə/. | Contrastive and written. The default is the second-to-last syllable; anything else takes an accent, and the accent also picks between open and close vowels — avó /ɔ/ is a grandmother and avô /o/ is a grandfather. |
What you have that Portuguese doesn't
25 sounds with no job in Portuguese. They are not mistakes — but they are where an accent leaks in, because a sound you own is easy to use when a hard one is due.
The honest caveat
This is a prediction from the shape of two sound systems, not a recording of you. It says what your inventory makes likely — it cannot know that your English has a regional variety that already owns one of these, or that you learned Portuguese from someone whose accent you copied. A teacher listening to you beats it. Use it to know what to listen for.
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