Portuguese · Chapter 1 · Lesson 2 · Grammar primer
The alphabet and its diacritics
The tilde, the cedilla and three accents, none of them decoration. Each one changes the word, and the nasal vowels have no English equivalent at all.
The short version
The tilde is not decoration, it is a vowel
A tilde over a vowel makes it nasal, sending air through the nose as well as the mouth. Portuguese nasal vowels have no English equivalent and are not optional: dropping the nasality gives you a different word, or no word at all. This is the sound worth practising first.
a mae
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why. Read it through once, then come back and continue with the next lesson.
Read the full article · 2 min readLesson 2 of 24 in this chapter