How to Pronounce 'A Tarde': Portuguese (Brazil) Pronunciation Guide

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

a tarde is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a ˈtaɦ.dʒi/. It means “afternoon.” ah TAH-djee. With the article it's the noun for afternoon; the same word without one means "late."

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

ah TAH-djee. With the article it's the noun for afternoon; the same word without one means "late."

a tarde /a ˈtaɦ.dʒi/

Loud on "tar-," exactly as in the adverb spelled the same way. What's worth attention here is grammatical rather than rhythmic: Portuguese distinguishes the noun from the adverb purely by the presence of an article and by position in the sentence, since the two are phonetically identical. "Boa tarde" and "está tarde" contain the same syllables doing completely different work.

Listen: a tarde

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Sound it out

a The feminine article, telling you this is the noun rather than the adverb. It's an open "ah" on its own quick beat and it's the only thing distinguishing the two uses in speech.

tar A crisp dental t, a wide-open stressed a, and an r ending the syllable, heard as a light rasp. Nothing about the sound changes between the noun and the adverb — only the article does.

de The closing e lands as "i" and pulls the d into "dj" — the sound that opens English "jeans," arriving straight out of a breathy r.

Hear it in a sentence

Boa tarde! Posso ajudar?

Good afternoon! Can I help you?

Listen: Boa tarde! Posso ajudar?

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"Boa tarde! Posso ajudar?" is the standard afternoon greeting, used from roughly midday until dark. "Posso" has a double s kept unvoiced, and "ajudar" contains a soft "zh" and a vanishing final r — so the exchange moves from a breathy rasp into a palatal fricative.

Where English speakers slip

Beyond the usual hard-d error at the end, the practical difficulty is knowing which greeting to use when. "Bom dia" runs until midday, "boa tarde" until dark, and "boa noite" after that — and Brazilians switch on the actual light level rather than the clock, so an overcast afternoon can get an early "boa noite."