Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "a gente" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

Q: How do you pronounce a gente in Portuguese (Brazil)?

a gente is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a ˈʒẽ.tʃi/. It means “we / us (informal).” ah ZHEN-tchee. Soft "zh," a nasal vowel, and a "tchee" ending.

ah ZHEN-tchee. Soft "zh," a nasal vowel, and a "tchee" ending.

a gente /a ˈʒẽ.tʃi/

No accent needed — the first syllable is loud by rule. The grammar is the interesting part: "a gente" means we but takes a third-person singular verb, so it's "a gente vai" rather than "a gente vamos." It has largely displaced "nós" in everyday Brazilian speech, which makes it far more useful than its textbook position suggests.

Listen: a gente

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Sound it out

g Before an e the letter g is the soft "zh" of "measure," never the hard g of "go." The vowel that follows is what decides.

en An e that the n turns nasal, carrying the stress. Air through the nose while the mouth holds the vowel; the tongue never rises for a separate consonant.

te The closing e is heard as "i," which drags the t into "tch." So the phrase runs from a palatal fricative through a nasal to a palatal affricate.

Hear it in a sentence

A gente vai ao cinema hoje.

We're going to the movies today.

Listen: A gente vai ao cinema hoje.

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"A gente vai ao cinema hoje" uses the singular verb "vai" with a plural meaning, which is the whole point of the construction. "Ao" is the fused preposition and article, and "hoje" has a silent h — so the sentence links almost continuously from start to finish.

Where English speakers slip

The hard English g gives "GEN-tay," wrong at both ends. Make it "zh" and finish on "tchee." The grammatical trap is bigger: conjugating it as a plural — "a gente somos" — is the classic learner error, and it's the third-person singular every time.