How to Spell in Portuguese

Picture this. You're at a bank counter in Sao Paulo, or on the phone with a delivery app, or filling out a form at a Brazilian consulate, and someone asks you to spell your own name. Out loud. Letter by letter. Your mind goes blank, because you learned that the Portuguese alphabet exists, sure, but nobody ever taught you what to actually say when a stranger points at you and asks "como se soletra?"

That moment happens to almost every English speaker who moves to Brazil, dates a Brazilian, or starts learning the language seriously enough to use it in real life. Maybe you're booking a table for two and need to spell your last name for the reservation. Maybe you're texting your partner's family and want to get their names right the first time. Maybe you just want to write your own name at a hotel counter in Rio without the receptionist repeating "como assim?" three times. Whatever brought you here, the moment is small, it's a little embarrassing, and it's completely avoidable once you know a handful of things: the letter names, a few accent marks, and two or three stock phrases that Brazilians use every single day.

This guide covers all of it, start to finish. We'll walk through the 26 letters and how Brazilians actually say them, the accent marks that quietly flip a word's entire meaning, the letter combos that trip up beginners (ch, lh, nh, and the notorious x), the everyday situations where spelling actually comes up, and the exact sentences you need to ask someone to spell something, or spell your own name without freezing up mid-sentence.

Reading a chart gets you halfway there. The other half is training your mouth, because knowing that "rr" makes a strong r sound on paper is a completely different skill from producing it fast, under pressure, while a bank teller waits for you to finish. That's the gap Comigo was built to close. It's a speak-first app where you practice Brazilian Portuguese out loud from your very first lesson, with a capybara named Capy nudging you through real spoken practice instead of silent flashcards. More on that later. First, let's get you spelling.

What "spelling" actually means in Portuguese

The verb you want is "soletrar." It means "to spell out loud, letter by letter," and it's the word Brazilians use when they ask you to slow down and say your name one character at a time. If you're looking for the other English sense of "spell," as in a witch casting one, that's a different word entirely: "feitiço" or "magia." Two unrelated ideas that just happen to share one word in English.

Here's something that surprises a lot of learners: Brazil doesn't really have a national "spelling bee" culture the way the United States does. Not because Brazilian kids are bad spellers, but because Portuguese is significantly more phonetic than English is. In most English words, you genuinely cannot predict the spelling from the sound alone. Think of "though," "through," "tough," and "cough": four words, four wildly different pronunciations of the same four letters sitting in almost the same order. That kind of chaos is exactly what turns spelling into a competitive sport worth televising. Portuguese has its own inconsistencies, which we'll get into, but the letter-to-sound relationship holds far more often than it does in English. According to the Wikipedia entry on Portuguese orthography, the modern spelling system traces back to a 1911 reform in Portugal that deliberately pushed the written language closer to how it actually sounds, specifically to raise literacy at a time when reading and writing were far from universal. That single decision is a big part of why "spelling bee" never became a national pastime the way it did in English-speaking countries: guessing a word's spelling from hearing it is simply an easier, safer bet in Portuguese.

None of that means Portuguese spelling is a free pass, though. There are real traps, plenty of them, and we're about to walk through every one. And given that Portuguese is an official language on four continents, spoken as a first or second language by hundreds of millions of people, getting comfortable with its spelling system is a skill that pays off well beyond a single trip to Brazil.

The Portuguese alphabet: all 26 letters and their names

Portuguese uses the same 26 Latin letters English does, but several of them are said very differently, and three of them are surprisingly recent additions to the "official" list.

Here's the full lineup with the standard Brazilian Portuguese letter name and a common example word for each:

If your teacher goes over the letters and uses "praia" as the example word for P, that's not random: we've got a whole post on saying beach in Portuguese if you want to hear that word used in a full sentence rather than as an isolated example.

Quick heads-up on regional variation, because it trips people up: European Portuguese speakers say a handful of these letters slightly differently, and the Brazilian Portuguese Wikipedia page is a good place to read more about how the two dialects diverged over the centuries. F can be "efe" or "fê" depending on where you are, R sometimes leans toward "erre" and sometimes "rê," and K, W, and Y get names like "cápa," "dâblio," and "ípsilon" that shift a bit by country. Don't stress over memorizing every regional variant with surgical precision. Learn the Brazilian version above, and treat anything different you hear as a normal accent, not a mistake you need to correct.

Now, about K, W, and Y specifically: for most of the 20th century, those three letters weren't officially part of the Portuguese alphabet at all. You'd see them in loanwords, abbreviations, and foreign names ("km," "watt," "Kant"), but Portuguese-language dictionaries didn't count them as native letters. That changed with the Orthographic Agreement of 1990, an international treaty between Portuguese-speaking countries that took effect in Brazil starting in 2009. One of its most visible changes was formally folding K, W, and Y into the 26-letter alphabet you just saw above. Before that, technically, Portuguese only had 23 official letters. We'll come back to that treaty in more detail later, because it explains a lot about why Portuguese spelling looks the way it does today.

One more practical note before we move on. Certain letters are famous for getting mixed up on a bad phone connection: M and N, B and V (Brazilians ask "de beija-flor ou de vaca?" more often than you'd think), and C and G before a nervous foreigner rushes through them. Keep that in the back of your mind. We'll show you exactly how Brazilians solve that ambiguity a few sections from now.

Vowels: five letters, a lot more sounds

English speakers open a Portuguese textbook expecting five vowels to behave like five vowels. They don't. The letter "e" alone can represent something like five different vowel sounds depending on where the stress falls and whether it's carrying an accent mark, according to the phonetic breakdown on the Portuguese phonology Wikipedia page. This isn't a pronunciation guide (that's a different post), but you can't talk about spelling without at least naming the shapes each vowel can take, because those shapes are exactly what accent marks exist to control.

Nasal vowels deserve a special mention, because English simply doesn't have an equivalent letter for the sound. Whenever you see a tilde over a or o, or certain vowel-plus-m or vowel-plus-n combinations, air routes through your nose instead of only your mouth. Say "não" (no) out loud slowly and you'll feel it: that little buzzy hum at the end is the nasal sound doing its job. It's one of the most distinctive features of spoken Portuguese, and it's also one of the hardest things to get right just from reading a page, which is exactly why the Practice Portuguese team recommends pairing any written alphabet lesson with actual listening and speaking practice rather than treating the page as the whole picture.

Notice "avó" and "avô" sitting right next to each other in that table. Same five letters, minus one accent mark, and the meaning flips entirely from grandmother to grandfather. We'll unpack exactly how that works in the accent marks section below, because it's one of the best arguments for why accents in Portuguese aren't decorative, they're load-bearing.

Digraphs and consonant combos that don't behave like English

A digraph is just two letters that team up to make one sound. English has a few of these too (think "sh" or "th"), but Portuguese leans on a specific set that trips up almost every English speaker the first time they meet them, because none of the four behave the way an English reader's instinct expects.

That last one deserves a second look. In Portuguese, a single "s" sitting between two vowels usually turns into a /z/ sound. Compare "casa" (house, pronounced with a z sound) to "cassa" (a much rarer word, pronounced with a true s sound thanks to that doubled ss). Same starting letters, completely different sound, just because of one extra consonant. That's your first taste of the s-versus-ss maze we'll cover in more detail a bit further down, and it's covered in the same orthography reference we've been citing throughout this section.

The "ch" digraph is worth flagging too, because it's a false friend for English speakers. In English, "ch" usually sounds like the start of "cheese." In Portuguese, it always sounds like "sh," so "chuva" sounds closer to "SHOO-vah" than "CHOO-vah." Get that wrong out loud and Brazilians will still understand you, but it's one of the fastest tells that someone learned Portuguese from a book instead of from actually speaking it.

Two smaller combos are worth a mention while we're here, even though they're not true digraphs: "qu" and "gu." Before e or i, a plain c or g would normally soften (remember, c before e or i makes an /s/ sound, and g before e or i makes a "zh" sound like the s in "measure"). Adding a u after q or g, as in "queijo" (cheese) or "guerra" (war), keeps the hard k and g sounds intact. The u itself usually stays silent in that position. It's a small spelling quirk, but it explains why "quilo" doesn't rhyme with "kiwi" the way you might expect from the letters alone, and it's documented alongside the rest of the consonant system on the Portuguese orthography page if you want the fuller technical rundown.

Everyday situations where you'll actually need to spell things out loud

None of this is theoretical. Spelling out loud comes up constantly once you're actually living or traveling in a Portuguese-speaking environment, far more often than most learners expect before they land in Brazil.

If you're studying more formally, spelling and dictation also show up in oral components of proficiency frameworks like the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which many Portuguese courses and certificates use as a benchmark for speaking and listening skills. Even outside a classroom, though, this is a genuinely practical skill. Say you're arranging to meet someone and need to confirm what time it is or when to show up: names, addresses, and confirmation codes tend to ride along in the same conversation, and you'll be spelling half of them out loud.

A small courtesy note: when you ask someone to slow down and spell something for you, Brazilians appreciate a little politeness dressing up the request. Tacking on "por favor" softens almost any ask, and if you want the fuller picture of how please works across different Portuguese phrases, that's worth a quick read too.

Accent marks: five diacritics, five specific jobs

Portuguese uses five accent marks, and each one has exactly one job. Once you know the job, the marks stop looking random and start looking like a system, which, honestly, they are.

Four of these sit on top of a vowel and change how it sounds. The fifth, the cedilla, sits underneath the letter c and changes a completely different letter's sound. Worth knowing upfront so you don't go hunting for it among the "vowel" accents. The Cedilla Wikipedia page has a nice overview of how the mark spread across several European languages, Portuguese among them, from its origins in medieval Spanish scribal practice.

Sources like Practice Portuguese and FluentU both break the diacritics down the same way, and it's worth sitting with the avô and avó example one more time because it's the clearest proof that accents aren't optional flourishes. "Avô" with a circumflex means grandfather. "Avó" with an acute accent means grandmother. Same letters, same order, and the entire meaning of the word hinges on which of two tiny marks sits above that one o. Drop the accent from "café" and you don't just lose a mark, you technically change how many syllables the word has when spoken. That's the kind of thing that makes accent marks feel less like grammar homework and more like essential information you genuinely need.

The grave accent is the oddball of the group. Unlike the other four, it doesn't mark stress at all. It shows up almost exclusively for crasis, the Portuguese grammar move where the preposition "a" fuses with the article "a" to make "à" (and its plural "às," plus combinations like "àquele" and "àquela"). If you want the linguistics behind that particular grammatical phenomenon, the general Crasis Wikipedia page covers the broader concept across several languages, Portuguese being one of the clearer everyday examples of it in action. If you see a grave accent, in short, you're looking at a contraction, not a stress marker, and that single distinction resolves most of the confusion learners have about it.

Circumflex and acute accents cause the second most common mix-up. Both mark stress, but they disagree on vowel quality: circumflex closes the vowel, acute opens it. That's the entire difference between "você" (you, closed) sounding crisp and controlled, and an open é sound feeling wider and more relaxed. English speakers rarely distinguish open and closed vowels this deliberately, since English doesn't build meaning around the distinction the way Portuguese does, so this is genuinely new territory rather than a shortcut you already half-know. Both Practice Portuguese and FluentU offer audio examples alongside their written breakdowns, which is worth seeking out, since open-versus-closed vowel quality is genuinely difficult to internalize from text alone.

The trickiest spelling calls: s, ss, c, ç, and the four sounds of x

Here's where even native Brazilian speakers slow down. The sound /s/ can be spelled four different ways in Portuguese: s, ss, c, or ç, and which one shows up in a given word usually comes down to word history rather than any rule you can apply on the fly. This single ambiguity is the number one reason Brazilians misspell words in casual writing, texting, or on social media, the same way English speakers mix up "their," "there," and "they're" without a second thought.

That last row has a rule worth memorizing precisely, because it's genuinely reliable: the cedilla only ever appears before a, o, or u. Never before e or i (those vowels already push c toward an /s/ sound on their own), and never at the very start of a word. If you remember one rule from this whole section, make it that one.

The letter x is the wilder case. It has four possible sounds, and there's no dependable spelling rule that predicts which one a given word uses, so Brazilians largely just memorize each word individually, the same way English speakers memorize that "colonel" doesn't sound anything like it looks. The Portuguese phonology page lists x among the least predictable letters in the entire writing system for exactly this reason.

A useful, if imperfect, pattern: words starting with "ex" followed by a vowel, like "exame," "exemplo," and "exato," usually take the /z/ sound. Beyond that pattern, though, you're mostly memorizing case by case, exactly like natives do, and there's no shame in occasionally guessing wrong. Even Brazilian teachers get tripped up on rarer x words from time to time.

How to ask someone to spell something (and spell your own name)

This is the part that actually solves your bank-counter moment. Here are the phrases Brazilians use constantly, whether they're taking a phone order, checking someone into a hotel, or just trying to catch a name they didn't hear clearly.

Once someone asks "como se soletra," the answer is simple: you say each letter name, one at a time, using the names from the alphabet table way back at the start of this post. Say your friend asks how to spell "computador" (computer). You'd answer letter by letter: "C, O, M, P, U, T, A, D, O, R," using "cê, ó, eme, pê, u, tê, á, dê, ó, erre." Or picture spelling "obrigado" (thank you) after someone asks you to repeat it on the phone: "ó, bê, erre, i, gê, á, dê, ó." If you want to hear that word in a fuller conversational context first, we've got a dedicated post on how to say thank you in Portuguese. Even the app's own name is a decent practice word: spelling "Comigo" out loud is "cê, ó, eme, i, gê, ó," and if you're curious where that name comes from and what it means, there's a whole post on Comigo in English explaining it.

Here's the honest limitation of every chart you've scrolled past so far, including the ones above: a table tells you that "erre" is the name of the letter R, but it can't train your mouth to actually say it under real conversational speed, with a real Brazilian on the other end of the line who isn't going to slow down for you. That's the whole gap between knowing Portuguese spelling and being able to use it. Comigo is built specifically to close that gap: every lesson is a spoken conversation, not a silent flashcard deck, so you say the letters out loud, get live pronunciation feedback on each one, and build the actual muscle memory that turns "I know the chart" into "I can spell my name for a stranger without freezing."

Spelling emails, handles, and phone numbers out loud

Letters aren't the only thing you'll end up spelling. The moment you give someone your email address or Instagram handle in Brazil, you're reading out symbols too, and those have their own spoken names that no textbook alphabet chart prepares you for.

So "joao.silva@email.com" comes out as "jota, ó, á, ó, ponto, esse, i, ele, vê, á, arroba, e-mail, ponto, com." It sounds like a mouthful the first time you hear it, and it is, but it becomes automatic fast once you've done it a handful of times. The same goes for reading out a phone number: Brazilians typically say digits individually rather than grouping them the way some English speakers do, so a number like 98765-4321 gets read "nove, oito, sete, seis, cinco, quatro, três, dois, um," sometimes with a quick "sim" thrown in afterward to confirm you got it right, the same casual yes you'll hear peppered through half of Brazilian small talk.

This is exactly the kind of thing that looks trivial on a page and feels genuinely hard the first time a barista or delivery driver rattles it off at full speed. Spelling out an email address is a five-second task for a fluent speaker and a small ordeal for a beginner, purely because nobody drilled the symbol names out loud before the moment actually arrived.

The Portuguese spelling alphabet: "A de Amor" and other clarifying tricks

English speakers do this too, usually without thinking about it: "B as in boy," "S as in Sam." Portuguese speakers do the exact same thing, and it matters even more in Portuguese because a handful of letters, M and N for instance, or several of the vowels, sound close enough over a bad phone line that a listener genuinely can't tell them apart without help.

In everyday Brazilian speech, people don't reach for one memorized official list. They improvise on the spot, using the pattern "[letter] de [common word]," picking whatever ordinary word comes to mind fastest. If you were spelling the name "SILVA" over the phone, you might hear something like this:

There's no exam to pass here. Any common word starting with the right letter works, and Brazilians switch words constantly depending on what pops into their head. That flexibility is actually good news for you as a learner: you don't need to memorize a fixed script, you just need enough vocabulary to grab a word on the fly, which is exactly the kind of on-your-feet speaking skill that only builds through actual conversation practice rather than passive reading.

There is, however, a more formal reference version, more associated with European Portuguese and official contexts, that uses Portuguese city names for every letter. You'll see it in some phone-support scripts and reference guides, and it's worth knowing it exists even if casual Brazilian speech rarely sticks to it word for word.

That list comes from spellingalphabets.com's Portuguese reference page, and it's a handy thing to recognize if you ever hear it, even though you're far more likely to encounter someone improvising with "de amor" or "de igreja" in everyday Brazilian conversation instead.

Then there's a third option, reserved for formal, technical, or international situations: the NATO phonetic alphabet. Pilots, radio operators, IT support staff, and the military use it worldwide precisely because it's understood across languages, sidestepping the need for a Portuguese-specific or English-specific list entirely.

You can confirm the full standard list on the NATO phonetic alphabet Wikipedia page, and the Portuguese-language Wikipedia has its own entry on the same system under Alfabeto radiotelefônico if you want to see it explained natively in Portuguese, which is also a nice bit of reading practice once your comprehension gets there.

So which one should you actually use? It depends entirely on context. Chatting with a friend or spelling your name at a bakery counter, improvise a common word the way Brazilians do naturally: "de amor," "de igreja," whatever comes to mind. On a formal call, filling out paperwork over the phone with a company, or talking to anyone in aviation, tech support, or the military, reach for the NATO alphabet instead, since it's the version everyone on the other end will already recognize instantly, no explanation required.

Why some Portuguese spelling changed recently: the 1990 Orthographic Agreement

Here's a fact that surprises a lot of learners: Portuguese spelling, as you see it written today, is younger than plenty of the songs on your parents' playlist. For most of the 20th century, Portugal and Brazil actually used two different spelling systems for the same language. Portugal had codified its own rules back in 1911, Brazil went a separate direction over the following decades, and the result was a language with two competing "correct" ways to write the same words, depending on which side of the Atlantic you were standing on.

Representatives from Portuguese-speaking countries signed a treaty in Lisbon in 1990 to fix that split. It's officially called the Orthographic Agreement of 1990, and its whole goal was unifying spelling across Portugal, Brazil, and the other Lusophone nations under one shared standard. It didn't happen overnight, though. The rules became mandatory in Brazil starting January 1, 2009, and Portugal didn't fully require them until 2015, with a long transition window where old and new spellings coexisted side by side in newspapers, schools, and official documents for years.

Two changes from that agreement are the ones you'll actually run into as a learner. First, it's the reason K, W, and Y are officially part of the 26-letter alphabet you learned earlier in this post, rather than outsiders limited to loanwords. Second, it trimmed a batch of silent consonants that European Portuguese had been carrying around for historical, etymological reasons, letters that sat on the page but were never actually pronounced out loud. Some European spellings that used to carry an extra silent consonant, like an older "acção" or "actor," moved closer to how Brazilian Portuguese had already been writing and pronouncing the same words for decades, becoming "ação" and "ator." The exact word-by-word details get technical fast, and reference sources differ on some specifics, but the headline is simple: a language that had drifted into two spelling systems spent the 2010s quietly merging back toward one, guided by the same orthographic agreement that added K, W, and Y.

If any of this makes Portuguese sound intimidating, take a breath. Every language goes through spelling reforms; English just hasn't had one that stuck in over a century, which is arguably why English spelling is such a mess in the first place. Brazil and Portugal, along with the other countries covered on the Portuguese language Wikipedia page, now share one modern standard, which makes life noticeably easier for anyone learning the language today compared to a generation ago.

Is Portuguese harder or easier to spell than English?

Easier, and it isn't particularly close.

English spelling is legendarily inconsistent. The same sound gets spelled a dozen different ways ("their," "there," "bear," "fair," "where"), and the same letters can represent wildly different sounds depending on the word, the classic "though, through, tough, cough" problem that makes English spelling bees a genuine test of memorization rather than logic. There's no reliable system you can lean on. You mostly just have to know each word by sight, one at a time, the hard way.

Portuguese isn't perfectly phonetic either, and this post has walked through plenty of proof: the four sounds of x, the s-versus-ss-versus-c-versus-ç maze, five different vowel sounds hiding inside the single letter e. Real traps, real memorization required. But the gap between how a Portuguese word is spelled and how it's pronounced is consistently smaller than the equivalent gap in English, and that's not just a hunch, it's backed by how the language's own spelling history unfolded. The 1911 Portuguese spelling reform mentioned earlier existed specifically to tighten the connection between letters and sounds, a project English has essentially never undertaken at that scale, and you can read more about how that plays out across the writing system on the Portuguese orthography and Portuguese phonology pages.

For a deeper look at the language's difficulty as a whole, not just its spelling, we've got a full breakdown in Is Portuguese Hard to Learn? that covers grammar, verb conjugation, and pronunciation too, since spelling is really only one slice of the bigger picture. And if you're curious about the scale of who you'll actually be spelling things for, Portuguese is the native language of well over 250 million people across Brazil, Portugal, and several African nations, so this isn't a niche skill you're building. It's one you'll get to use constantly, in dozens of countries, for the rest of your life.

Practice out loud, not just on paper

Every table in this post is accurate, and every table is also, on its own, close to useless for actually spelling something out loud under pressure. Reading that "nh" sounds like the "ny" in canyon is one thing. Producing that sound instantly, correctly, while a Brazilian waits for you to finish your name, is a completely different skill, and it only comes from saying it out loud, over and over, until your mouth doesn't need your brain's permission anymore.

That's the exact gap Comigo exists to close. It's not a flashcard app you swipe through in silence. Every lesson is a real spoken conversation with Capy, a capybara companion who talks with you and gives live feedback on your pronunciation, word by word, so you're not just memorizing that "erre" is the letter R, you're actually saying it until it's automatic. Whether you're prepping to greet someone with boa tarde, asking how are you, confirming plans and saying até logo before you hang up, or just getting ready to spell your own name at a counter in Rio, the fastest path there is speaking it out loud, not staring at another chart.

Start with the alphabet. Practice the tricky letters, "erre," "eme," "ene," the ones that sound similar when you're nervous. Then practice a full sentence: "o meu nome soletra-se," followed by your own name, letter by letter, out loud, until it stops feeling like homework and starts feeling like something you just know how to do.

FAQ

Is the Portuguese alphabet different from the English alphabet? Not in terms of letters. Portuguese uses the same 26 letters as English. What's different is how those letters are pronounced (the letter names are completely different from their English counterparts) and the fact that K, W, and Y weren't officially recognized as full members of the Portuguese alphabet until the 1990 Orthographic Agreement took effect in Brazil in 2009.

How do you say "letter" in Portuguese? "A letra." As in "qual é a próxima letra?" (what's the next letter?). Don't confuse it with "carta," which also means "letter" but in the sense of a written message you'd mail to someone, not an alphabet character.

Do Brazilians have spelling bees? Not really, and not as a national tradition the way the United States does. Because Portuguese spelling is more consistently phonetic than English, thanks in large part to that 1911 reform covered on the Portuguese orthography page, guessing a word's spelling from its sound is a much safer bet, which removes a lot of the competitive tension that makes English spelling bees exciting to watch in the first place.

What's the hardest Portuguese word to spell? There's no single "hardest" word, but the categories that trip people up most are words with x, since it can sound like /ʃ/, /ks/, /z/, or /s/ with no reliable rule, and words where /s/ could plausibly be spelled with s, ss, c, or ç. Even native Brazilian speakers occasionally have to stop and think about those, the same way English speakers pause before writing "necessary" or "definitely."

How do I spell my name over the phone in Brazil? Say "o meu nome soletra-se" and then say each letter of your name using the Brazilian letter names from the alphabet table earlier in this post. If a letter is ambiguous, M and N are common culprits, clarify it the way locals do, with "[letter] de [common word]," like "eme de Maria" for M or "ene de Nazaré" for N.

Is Portuguese phonetic? Mostly, but not perfectly. It's dramatically more consistent than English, where the same sound can have a dozen spellings. But Portuguese still has real exceptions, especially around x, the s/ss/c/ç cluster, and the five different sounds the letter e alone can represent depending on stress and accents, as detailed on the Portuguese phonology page.

Why did Portuguese spelling change recently? Portugal and Brazil had used two different spelling systems since the early 1900s. The Orthographic Agreement of 1990 unified them into one standard, becoming mandatory in Brazil in 2009 and in Portugal by 2015. It officially added K, W, and Y to the alphabet and dropped a number of silent consonants that European Portuguese had carried for historical reasons.

Do I need to know how to spell in Portuguese if I only speak casually? Yes, more than you'd expect. Even a casual conversation over what time to meet, or wishing someone well going into a new year, tends to involve names, addresses, or confirmation details that someone will eventually ask you to spell out loud. It's a small skill that pays off constantly.

Does capitalization matter when spelling something out loud? Not really, since spoken letters don't carry case the way written ones do. What does matter is stress and accent marks, since "soletrar" a word correctly usually means naming any accented letters too, so someone reading back "café" out loud would say "cê, á, efe, é com acento," meaning the e carries an acute accent. Leaving that detail out is a common beginner mistake, because a listener writing the word down has no way to guess it was accented otherwise.