Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

gentil is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ʒẽˈtʃiw/. It means “kind.” zheng-TCHEE-oo. Soft "zh" at the front, nasal first vowel, and the ending is "tchee-oo" rather than anything with an l.

zheng-TCHEE-oo. Soft "zh" at the front, nasal first vowel, and the ending is "tchee-oo" rather than anything with an l.

gentil /ʒẽˈtʃiw/

The l ending pulls the stress to the final syllable, unmarked in writing, matching azul and legal. What's unusual is how much phonetic change is packed into that one stressed syllable — a palatalized consonant and a vocalized l, with the loud vowel wedged between them.

Listen: gentil

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Sound it out

g Before an e or i, g is the soft "zh" of "measure" — never the hard g of "go" and never the English j of "gentle." Portuguese is strict about this.

en An e with the soft palate lowered, so air runs out through the nose. Your tongue stays clear of the roof of the mouth throughout.

til Three letters and three changes: the t palatalizes to "tch" because an i follows, the i is a tense high vowel, and the l closing the syllable vocalizes to a w. So the whole ending is "tchee-oo."

Hear it in a sentence

Ele é sempre gentil comigo.

He is always kind to me.

Listen: Ele é sempre gentil comigo.

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"Ele é sempre gentil comigo" uses "comigo," the fused preposition-pronoun that Portuguese requires instead of "com mim." "Sempre" adds a nasal first syllable and a tapped r in its cluster, so the sentence has nasals in two adjacent words before landing on the vocalized l.

Where English speakers slip

The opening g draws a hard English j — "JEN-til" — from almost every beginner, and the ending draws a real l. Both are wrong: "zheng-TCHEE-oo." The stress is a third issue, since English wants it on the first syllable. Spanish speakers face a fourth problem, since their "gentil" has a completely different initial consonant.