Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

lento is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈlẽ.tu/. It means “slow.” LEN-too, with the first vowel humming through the nose and no real n consonant.

LEN-too, with the first vowel humming through the nose and no real n consonant.

lento /ˈlẽ.tu/

The loud syllable is the nasal one here. The nasal sits in the loud syllable, which is where Portuguese nasals are easiest to hear — a good word to practise on before tackling the harder cases where the nasal is unstressed, like "pensar" or "brincar."

Listen: lento

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Sound it out

len A true l with the tongue tip touching, then a closed e turned nasal by the n. The tongue must not rise a second time to make a separate consonant.

to Hard t, ending on "oo." Coming straight out of the nasal, this syllable should feel abruptly dry and oral.

Hear it in a sentence

O trânsito está lento hoje.

The traffic is slow today.

Listen: O trânsito está lento hoje.

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"O trânsito está lento hoje" contains "trânsito," which carries a circumflex over a nasal vowel — the accent marks third-from-last stress while the vowel is nasalized by the n. So the sentence has two nasals in adjacent words, one accented and one not.

Where English speakers slip

The full n is the standard slip: "LEN-toh" with the tongue on the ridge and an unraised final o. Nasalize and raise. In practice Brazilians also say "devagar" far more often than "lento" in everyday speech, so learners who only know one of them will miss half of what they hear about traffic.