LingoDrop
Portuguese (Portugal) · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "estrela" in Portuguese (Portugal)?
Say "ushTREH-luh", where the initial es- shrinks to a quick "ush" sound, stress lands on TRE, and the final a softens to "uh".
Stress is on the second syllable TRE; the initial es- is unstressed and its s becomes "sh" (syllable-final s), so the whole first syllable compresses to almost just "sh".
Listen: estrela
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Vejo uma estrela no céu.
I see a star in the sky.
Listen: Vejo uma estrela no céu.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
"Vejo uma estrela no céu" uses ver (vejo, "I see") in the first person, uma estrela ("a star") with the indefinite article, and no céu again shows the em + o = no contraction, this time with céu (sky), a common irregular-looking but regular masculine noun. This is a simple, useful first-person present-tense sentence pattern for describing what one observes.
Where English speakers slip
The initial es- is frequently over-pronounced by English speakers as a clear "es", but in European Portuguese it reduces so much that it can sound like barely more than "sh" before the stressed syllable — this heavy reduction of initial unstressed e plus the s-to-sh shift together give the word a noticeably different shape from the fuller, clearer Brazilian pronunciation of the same initial syllable.