Portuguese (Portugal) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "janela" in Portuguese (Portugal)?

Q: How do you pronounce janela in Portuguese (Portugal)?

janela is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written [ʒɐˈnɛ.lɐ]. It means “window.” Say 'zhuh-NEH-luh', with a soft 'zh' sound for j and stress landing on the middle syllable.

Say 'zhuh-NEH-luh', with a soft 'zh' sound for j and stress landing on the middle syllable.

janela [ʒɐˈnɛ.lɐ]

Stress falls on the second syllable ne, pronounced with an open 'eh'; both a's, being unstressed, reduce to a light central 'uh' rather than a full 'ah'.

Listen: janela

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Sound it out

j Always a soft 'zh' sound, like the s in English 'measure' — never the hard English 'j' as in 'jump'.

ne The stressed syllable, with an open 'eh' as in English 'bed'.

la Unstressed, so the final a fades to a soft 'uh'.

Hear it in a sentence

Abre a janela, está calor.

Open the window, it's hot.

Listen: Abre a janela, está calor.

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Abre a janela, está calor is another imperative, this time from abrir (to open), again keeping the article a before the noun. Está calor ('it's hot') uses estar because temperature and weather are treated as temporary, changeable states in Portuguese — one of the classic ser-versus-estar contrasts that trips up beginners.

Where English speakers slip

The letter j is the recurring trap here: English speakers reflexively pronounce it as the hard 'j' in 'jam'. In both European and Brazilian Portuguese j is always the soft 'zh' of 'measure' — what's specifically European is how thoroughly those two unstressed a's collapse toward 'uh', more so than a Brazilian speaker would typically reduce them.