Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

entender is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ẽ.tẽˈdeh/. It means “to understand.” eng-teng-DEH. Two nasal e's at the front, then a hard d and a vanishing r.

eng-teng-DEH. Two nasal e's at the front, then a hard d and a vanishing r.

entender /ẽ.tẽˈdeh/

Three syllables, all spelled with the letter e, and the spelling tells you nothing useful about any of them: the first two are nasal, the third is oral, and only the third is stressed. That last syllable takes the weight because the word ends in r.

Listen: entender

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Sound it out

en A nasalized closed e opening the word. No tongue contact for the n — the nasality lives inside the vowel itself.

ten A dry dental t and another nasalized e. The t stays hard because the vowel after it is a nasal e, not an i, so no "tch" appears here.

der Hard d again for the same reason, carrying the word's only oral vowel and its only stress. Whatever r you produce at the end should be inaudible from across a table.

Hear it in a sentence

Você entendeu a pergunta?

Did you understand the question?

Listen: Você entendeu a pergunta?

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"Você entendeu a pergunta?" uses the past tense, where the ending -eu is a closed e plus a w glide in one beat. The final r-less "entendeu" then links straight into the article "a," and "pergunta" contributes a breathy r and its own nasal, so the question is a compact tour of the word family's sounds.

Where English speakers slip

English speakers give both n's full consonant value, producing "en-ten-DER" with a clattery middle. Portuguese hums through those syllables instead. The other frequent slip is palatalizing the t and d out of overenthusiasm — "en-TCHEN-djeh" — when neither is followed by an i-sound. And in conversation, Brazilians constantly say "entendi" as a one-word acknowledgment, which learners often don't recognize as this verb.