Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "achar" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

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

achar is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /aˈʃah/. It means “to think / to find.” ah-SHAH. The ch is a "sh" sound, never the English "ch" of "chair."

ah-SHAH. The ch is a "sh" sound, never the English "ch" of "chair."

achar /aˈʃah/

ah-SHAH, back-weighted. The present tense flips it forward to AH-shoo, and that form is so ubiquitous in Brazilian speech as a hedge — "acho que" for "I reckon" — that most learners meet it long before they ever see the infinitive written down.

Listen: achar

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Sound it out

a An unstressed open "ah" opening the word. Short and quick, but clearly a vowel — don't let it turn into a schwa.

ch Always "sh" in Portuguese, with no exceptions in native vocabulary. The only reason "tchau" has an English-style ch is that its spelling was rigged with a t to force it.

ar The wide-open stressed vowel takes up nearly the whole syllable. The r behind it is a trailing exhalation rather than a consonant, and it's easy to miss it happening at all.

Hear it in a sentence

Acho que é verdade.

I think it's true.

Listen: Acho que é verdade.

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"Acho que é verdade" is the everyday shape this verb takes: "acho que" plus a clause, exactly parallel to English "I think that." The "que" reduces to a quick "kee," and "verdade" ends with a breathy internal r and a palatalized "djee," so the sentence closes on very Brazilian sounds.

Where English speakers slip

Reading ch as English "ch" produces "ah-CHAR," which is the single most predictable error with this word. It's "sh." The semantic range is the other pitfall: "achar" means both to find physically and to hold an opinion, so "achei minha chave" and "acho que sim" use the same verb for jobs English keeps separate.