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

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

importante is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ĩ.poɦˈtɐ̃.tʃi/. It means “important.” eeng-poh-TAHN-tchee. Two nasal vowels, a breathy r, and a "tchee" at the end.

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

eeng-poh-TAHN-tchee. Two nasal vowels, a breathy r, and a "tchee" at the end.

importante /ĩ.poɦˈtɐ̃.tʃi/

The default hands the weight to the third syllable: a word ending in -e is stressed on the second-to-last. No accent required. What makes the word feel long isn't stress but nasality — two of its four syllables hum, and neither of them needs to be loud to do so.

Listen: importante

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Sound it out

im Say "ee" while routing air out through the nose. The m before a p is purely an orthographic convention — Portuguese writes m rather than n in that position, but the lips never actually meet.

por Unaspirated p, a closed "oh," and then an r closing the syllable as a light rasp from the throat. Nothing here resembles the English "por" of "portable."

tan The loud syllable, and its a picks up nasal resonance from the n. This is where the hum is most audible in the whole word.

te The e at the end is heard as "i," dragging the t into "tch." Four syllables in, and the word still finishes on a distinctly Brazilian sound.

Hear it in a sentence

Hoje é um dia importante.

Today is an important day.

Listen: Hoje é um dia importante.

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"Hoje é um dia importante" strings vowels across every word boundary, and Brazilians glide right through them: the silent h in "hoje" means the sentence effectively opens on a vowel, and "é um dia" runs together as one continuous stream ending in that palatalized "DJEE-ah."

Where English speakers slip

English speakers articulate both n's and the m as real consonants, turning a smooth four-syllable word into a series of stops. Let all three be nasal resonance instead. The ending is the second habit: "im-por-TAN-tay" is what the spelling suggests and "eeng-poh-TAHN-tchee" is what Brazilians produce.