Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

difícil is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /dʒiˈfi.siw/. It means “difficult.” djee-FEE-see-oo. Palatalized d at the front, accent in the middle, and a w where the final l is written.

djee-FEE-see-oo. Palatalized d at the front, accent in the middle, and a w where the final l is written.

difícil /dʒiˈfi.siw/

Same story as its opposite "fácil": an l-final word would normally take end stress, so the acute accent is there to override that and hold the weight in the middle. The pair fácil/difícil is a tidy demonstration of one accent rule doing identical work in two related words.

Listen: difícil

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

di The classic Brazilian conversion: d followed by an i becomes the affricate that opens English "jeep." A crisp "dee" is correct in Lisbon and immediately foreign in São Paulo.

fí The accent marks this as the loud syllable and the vowel as a tense, high "ee." Everything before and after it should be noticeably lighter.

cil Soft c giving an s, a quick unstressed "ee," and then an l that vocalizes to w because it closes the syllable. Three letters, and only the first two involve the tongue.

Hear it in a sentence

O exame foi difícil.

The exam was difficult.

Listen: O exame foi difícil.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

"O exame foi difícil" hides a nice x lesson: in "exame" the letter x is pronounced as a z, giving eh-ZAH-mee — one of four different values that letter takes in Portuguese. "Foi" is a one-syllable diphthong, and the adjective then closes the sentence on its vocalized l.

Where English speakers slip

The opening d catches nearly everyone: "dee-FEE-sil" keeps a hard d and a real l, missing both Brazilian features. Say "djee" and finish on a w. Spanish speakers have the added handicap that their "difícil" is spelled the same and pronounced with neither change, so the transfer feels perfectly reasonable and is entirely wrong.