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Portuguese (Portugal) · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "aquele" in Portuguese (Portugal)?
Say 'uh-KEH-luh', with the stress and an open 'eh' vowel on the middle syllable, and the surrounding vowels reduced.
Stress falls on the middle syllable 'que', which takes the open vowel [ɛ] (as in 'ele'); the first 'a' reduces to [ɐ] and the final 'e' reduces to the near-silent [ɨ].
Listen: aquele
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Aquele carro é rápido.
That car is fast.
Listen: Aquele carro é rápido.
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'Aquele carro é rápido' uses 'aquele' for something farther from both speaker and listener, distinct from 'este' (near the speaker) and 'esse' (near the listener) — a three-way distance distinction Portuguese demonstratives make that English collapses into just 'this' and 'that'. 'Aquele' agrees in gender/number, becoming 'aquela/aqueles/aquelas' as needed.
Where English speakers slip
Learners often flatten the stressed 'e' to a closed vowel instead of the correct open [ɛ], and also tend to over-pronounce the unstressed first 'a' as a full 'ah' rather than letting it shrink to almost nothing. Getting the stress squarely on the middle syllable 'que' — not the first syllable — is also essential, since misplacing stress here changes the rhythm of the whole word noticeably.