How to Pronounce 'Apaixonado': Portuguese (Brazil) Pronunciation Guide

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

apaixonado is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /a.pajʃoˈna.du/. It means “in love.” ah-pie-shoh-NAH-doo. The x here is a "sh," and the "ai" before it is one diphthong.

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

ah-pie-shoh-NAH-doo. The x here is a "sh," and the "ai" before it is one diphthong.

apaixonado /a.pajʃoˈna.du/

Five syllables, and the fourth carries the accent. The long run-up is the striking part: four unstressed vowels precede the accent and Brazilian Portuguese keeps every one of them clear, so the word takes noticeably longer to say than an English speaker's instinct suggests.

Listen: apaixonado

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Sound it out

a An unstressed open "ah" opening the word, short and quick, easily absorbed into whatever comes before it in connected speech.

pai A tight p and "ai," an open a gliding to a y — the vowel of "high." One beat, and it happens to be spelled identically to the word for father.

xo The letter x is a "sh" here. That's one of its four Portuguese values — it can also be "ks," "z" or "s" — and only the individual word tells you which.

na An n opening its own syllable, nasalizing nothing, and the wide-open stressed a. This is the loud beat after three quiet ones.

do A hard d, since an o follows rather than an i, finishing on a rounded "oo."

Hear it in a sentence

Ele está apaixonado por ela.

He is in love with her.

Listen: Ele está apaixonado por ela.

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"Ele está apaixonado por ela" uses "por" rather than "de" — you are in love by someone in Portuguese, which is not guessable from English. In speech "está" clips to "tá," and "por ela" links the breathy r into the vowel so it firms into a tap.

Where English speakers slip

Reading x as "ks" gives "ah-pike-soh-NAH-doo," which is the instinctive English approach and wrong here. Breaking the "ai" diphthong is the second error. And the preposition is the grammatical trap: "apaixonado por" is fixed, and "apaixonado de" is not Portuguese.