Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

perder is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /peɦˈdeh/. It means “to lose / to miss.” peh-DEH. Two r's on the page, neither of them an English r — one is breath and the other is nearly silent.

peh-DEH. Two r's on the page, neither of them an English r — one is breath and the other is nearly silent.

perder /peɦˈdeh/

The first-person present hides the family resemblance almost completely: "perco" replaces the d with a hard k sound and hauls the stress to the front, so it neither looks nor sounds much like the end-weighted infinitive it belongs to.

Listen: perder

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Sound it out

per An unaspirated p, a closed e, and a syllable-closing r that becomes a light throat-h. The syllable comes out sounding like "peh" with a slight rasp on the end.

der A hard d before the closed e — no palatalization, since the vowel isn't an i — then the stress, then another r softened to breath. Both r's in this word are of the same non-tongue variety.

Hear it in a sentence

Perdi o ônibus.

I missed the bus.

Listen: Perdi o ônibus.

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"Perdi o ônibus" gives you the past tense and one of the trickier nouns: "ônibus" has a circumflex marking third-from-last stress, so it's OH-nee-boos, and Portuguese always writes an accent on words stressed that far back. The verb "perdi" itself moves the stress to the final i.

Where English speakers slip

The recurring error is an English "per" at the front, which sounds like the start of "perfect" and imports a consonant Brazilian Portuguese doesn't use in that position. The verb's semantic range is the other trap: it covers losing an object, missing a bus, and wasting time, so "perdi o ônibus" is missing a bus, not losing one.