The Forgotten Cornerstone

PHONOLOGY

Brazilian Portuguese is a syllable-timed language, in contrast to English. This can result in learners having serious difficulty reproducing the appropriate intonation patterns of spoken English. This is less of a problem for European Portuguese speakers, whose Portuguese variety is stress-timed like English. Portuguese contains about 9 vowel sounds (plus 6 dipthongs) and 19 consonant sounds. This is fewer than English, and there are fewer consonant clusters. These differences can result in the following pronunciation issues:

• failure to distinguish minimal pairs such as rich/reach, pack/puck or head/had
• inaudibility of unstressed vowels at the end of a word, e.g., part (for party)
• problems with dipthongs such as in hear/hair
• the inclusion of vowel sounds before, between or following consonants, e.g., estrap (for strap) or monthes (for months)
• nasalization of the final /m/ or /n/, so ran, for example, becomes rang
• the expected problems with words such as then, think or breathe
• failure to discriminate between words such as pig/big or gale/kale
• substitution of ear for hear or high for I.
• ENGLISH AND PORTUGUESE VOWEL PHONEMES COMPARED(http://www.sk.com.br/sk-spell.html)
• probable errors with vowels