French → Portuguese
Portuguese uses 35 sounds. You already own 26 of them from French. The other 9 are the work — and 8 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: close, but not identical
Portuguese: time · written "em", "en"
Your /e/ is the one in été (summer).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: yes · written "im", "in"
Your /i/ is the one in lit (bed).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: good · written "õ", "om", "on"
Your /o/ is the one in eau (water).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: one, a · written "um", "un"
Your /u/ is the one in jour (day).
the move: 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 /i/ is the one in lit (bed).
the move: mid → near-open
Portuguese: bed · written "a"
Unstressed a, and a before a nasal.
Your /ə/ is the one in petit (small).
the move: nasal → lateral
Portuguese: son · written "lh"
Your /ɲ/ is the one in montagne (mountain).
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 French 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.
expensive
One tap.
Closest thing you own: — but plosive → tap.
Rhythm and pitch
The layer spelling never records, and the one that makes a correct sentence still sound foreign.
| French | Portuguese | |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Syllable-timed | Stress-timed (Portugal) |
| Stress | This is the one that surprises everyone: French words have NO fixed stress. Prominence lands on the last syllable of the rhythmic GROUP, not of the word — so the same word is stressed differently depending on where it sits. 'Un chocolat' stresses -lat; 'un chocolat chaud' moves it to chaud and the word chocolat loses it entirely. There are no French minimal pairs by stress, because there is nothing to contrast. | 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
10 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 French 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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