Turkish → Portuguese
Portuguese uses 35 sounds. You already own 22 of them from Turkish. The other 13 are the work — and 11 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 renk (colour).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: time · written "em", "en"
Your /e/ is the one in el (hand).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: yes · written "im", "in"
Your /i/ is the one in iki (two).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: good · written "õ", "om", "on"
Your /o/ is the one in okul (school).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: one, a · written "um", "un"
Your /ɯ/ is the one in kız (girl).
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 iki (two).
the move: close, but not identical
Portuguese: bad · written "u+vowel", "o (in ão)"
Your /j/ is the one in yol (road).
the move: open → open-mid
Portuguese: foot · written "e", "é"
Open e. The accent tells you which: pêlo vs pélo.
Your /a/ is the one in anne (mother).
the move: close-mid → open-mid
Portuguese: grandmother · written "o", "ó"
avó /ɔ/ grandmother vs avô /o/ grandfather — one accent apart.
Your /o/ is the one in okul (school).
the move: plosive → lateral
Portuguese: son · written "lh"
Your /ɟ/ is the one in göz (eye).
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 Turkish 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.
Rhythm and pitch
The layer spelling never records, and the one that makes a correct sentence still sound foreign.
| Turkish | Portuguese | |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Syllable-timed, rising to the end | Stress-timed (Portugal) |
| Stress | Regular by default: the last syllable, and it travels rightwards as suffixes are added (kiTAP, kitapLAR, kitaplarDAN). The exceptions are what make it a real system. Place names are stressed early, on a pattern borrowed from their shape (ANkara, İsTANbul, İZmir); many adverbs and old loans stay on the first syllable (ŞIMdi, YArın, LOkanta); and some suffixes refuse the stress and push it onto the syllable before them — the negative -me-/-ma- above all, so that the same letters can be a noun or a command. | 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
9 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 Turkish 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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