Farsi · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "ساحل" in Farsi?

Q: How do you pronounce ساحل in Farsi?

ساحل is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written [sɒːhel]. It means “beach.” Say 'sah-HEL' — a long open 'ah' followed by a stressed syllable rhyming with English 'bell'.

Say 'sah-HEL' — a long open 'ah' followed by a stressed syllable rhyming with English 'bell'.

ساحل [sɒːhel]

sāhel

Stress falls on the second syllable, -hel; the ح here is a plain 'h' sound, identical to ه, despite looking like a different letter.

Listen: ساحل

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Sound it out

سا Pronounced 'sā' — an English 's' plus the long open 'ah' of 'father'.

حل Pronounced 'hel' — the ح is pronounced as a plain English 'h' (it does not add any extra rasp the way خ does), followed by a short 'eh' and 'l'; this carries the stress.

Hear it in a sentence

تابستان به ساحل می‌رویم.

Tābestān be sāhel miravim.

In summer we go to the beach.

Listen: تابستان به ساحل می‌رویم.

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Tābestān be sāhel miravim. — 'In summer we go to the beach.' Be is the preposition 'to', marking sāhel as the destination of miravim ('we go'); as with tābestān in the first entry, the season word needs no extra preposition of its own to mean 'in summer'.

Where English speakers slip

Learners sometimes assume ح must sound different from ه because it looks like a distinct letter (borrowed from Arabic spelling), and try to add extra rasp or a glottal quality. In Tehrani Persian, ح and ه are pronounced exactly the same — a plain 'h', nothing more.