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

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

encontrar is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ẽ.kõˈtɾah/. It means “to find / to meet.” eng-kong-TRAH. Two nasal vowels at the front, stress at the back, and a tapped r in the cluster.

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

eng-kong-TRAH. Two nasal vowels at the front, stress at the back, and a tapped r in the cluster.

encontrar /ẽ.kõˈtɾah/

The stress lands on the last syllable because the word ends in r, and no accent is written. What's striking is that the two nasal vowels are both unstressed: Portuguese doesn't require stress to sustain nasality, so "en-" and "con-" hum along quietly before the word's real weight arrives at the very end.

Listen: encontrar

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Sound it out

en The n marks the e as nasal. Say a closed "eh" while routing air through the nose; your tongue should not touch the roof of your mouth to make a separate n.

con A hard k and a nasalized closed "oh." Two nasal vowels in a row at the start of a word is very ordinary in Portuguese, and the resonance runs continuously through both.

tra A dental t, a single tapped r, and the stressed open "ah." The r inside a consonant cluster is always the quick tap, never the throaty h.

r The infinitive marker, often silent. It contrasts directly with the tap two sounds earlier — same letter, opposite treatment, decided entirely by where in the syllable it happens to sit.

Hear it in a sentence

Não consigo encontrar a chave.

I can't find the key.

Listen: Não consigo encontrar a chave.

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"Não consigo encontrar a chave" opens with the nasal diphthong of "não" and continues into "consigo," which has its own nasal — so the sentence is nasal-heavy from the start. "Chave" ends it with a "sh" opening and a raised final e, giving "SHAH-vee."

Where English speakers slip

English speakers pronounce full n consonants in "en" and "con," producing a clunky "en-KON-trar" with four hard segments where Portuguese has two humming vowels. They also stress the middle syllable out of English habit. The r's are the third issue: the internal one is a tap and the final one is breath, and treating both as an English r turns the word into something unrecognizable.