Learn Portuguese for Travel, Work and Study

Portuguese uses the Latin alphabet with a cedilla — ç, always an s-sound — and accents that mark stress or nasality: “ã” and “õ” are vowels sounded through the nose, and the diphthong “ão” of “não”, “pão” and “coração” is the sound foreigners recognise the language by. The spelling is regular once the rules are known, and Portugal and Brazil write the same words with small differences under a shared orthographic agreement. The pronunciation is where they part: a European Portuguese speaker reduces unstressed vowels almost to nothing and pronounces a final “s” as sh, so “Lisboa” is “lizhBOA”; a Brazilian keeps every vowel open, turns a final “te” into “chee” and a final “l” into a w, so “Brasil” is “bra-ZEEW”.

The grammar is Romance and will feel familiar to anyone with Spanish, French or Italian: nouns are masculine or feminine, articles and adjectives agree, and verbs conjugate across the usual tenses, with a future subjunctive — “se eu for”, if I go — that Spanish has lost and Portuguese uses daily. The personal infinitive adds endings to the infinitive to show who is meant, so “é melhor irmos”, it is better for us to go, needs no clause. Object pronouns sit before the verb in Brazil and often after it in Portugal — “eu te amo” against “amo-te” — which is the one grammatical difference a learner hears every day.

Address differs by shore. Portugal keeps “tu” for friends and family and uses “você”, or more often the person's name or title with the third-person verb — “o senhor quer…?”, “a Maria quer…?” — for politeness; dropping into “tu” with a stranger is a misstep. Brazil uses “você” with almost everyone, friend and stranger alike, with “o senhor” and “a senhora” for the elderly and the formal, and much of Brazil never says “tu” at all. In both countries “obrigado” or “obrigada” follows the speaker's sex, and in both “bom dia” on entering a shop and “até logo” on leaving are expected.

European Portuguese is the standard in Portugal and the former African colonies — Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé — and in East Timor and Macau, each with its own accent and vocabulary; Brazilian Portuguese is spoken by the great majority of all Portuguese speakers and has regional accents of its own, from the sung Portuguese of Rio to the clipped speech of São Paulo and the open vowels of the north-east. Spanish speakers follow written Portuguese easily and spoken Brazilian with effort; the Portuguese understand Spanish far better than Spaniards understand them.

Portuguese ranks among the quicker languages to learn from English — the US Foreign Service Institute reckons 600 to 750 hours of class to a working level, as for Spanish and French — and learners with Spanish arrive halfway. Reading comes fast, because the vocabulary is Latin and the grammar visible; speaking follows within months. The long task is listening, and it depends on the voice chosen: Brazilian Portuguese is heard easily and spoken everywhere, while European Portuguese, with its swallowed vowels and sh-sounds, takes the ear a long time, and learners who train on Brazilian material find Lisbon hard for their first weeks. The nasal vowels and the personal infinitive are the grammar's two real novelties.

In Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve a visitor manages in English in hotels, restaurants and shops, and younger Portuguese speak it well; in a provincial town, a café off the tourist streets, a health centre or the immigration office, Portuguese is the only language, and the paperwork of residence runs in it. Brazil is different in kind: English is scarce outside international hotels and business circles, and Portuguese is needed from the taxi onwards. Portugal's technology companies and tourism hire in English; its public sector, schools and professions do not. Universities in both countries teach in Portuguese, with English-taught master's programmes a growing minority, and admit foreign students on a certificate at B1 or B2 or the university's own test.

• Thank you has a gender: A man says “obrigado” and a woman “obrigada”, because the word means “obliged” and agrees with the speaker. Foreigners who copy the person they are thanking get it wrong half the time.
• Puxe means pull: The sign on Portuguese doors reads “puxe”, pronounced “poosh”, and means pull. Every English speaker pushes.
• Saudade: The longing for something or someone absent, mixed with the pleasure of remembering them — the word the Portuguese and Brazilians say has no translation, and the subject of half their songs.
• A Slavic sound from the Atlantic: Foreigners regularly mistake European Portuguese for Russian or Polish: the swallowed vowels and the sh-sounds give it a consonant-heavy rhythm that no other Romance language has.
• Esquisito is weird: Spanish “exquisito” is exquisite; Portuguese “esquisito” is strange. “Pasta” is a folder, “borracha” is a rubber, and a “propina” is a university fee in Portugal and a bribe in Brazil.
• A verb with a person inside: The personal infinitive — “antes de saírem”, before they leave — puts a subject ending on an infinitive, a construction found in no other major European language and used by Portuguese speakers without a second thought.
• Tudo bem?: Brazil's universal greeting and answer: “everything good?” — “tudo bem”. Portugal says “tudo bem?” too, and answers “tudo”.

Portuguese has one certificate system on each side of the Atlantic. Portugal's is CAPLE, the Centre for the Evaluation of Portuguese as a Foreign Language at the University of Lisbon, which issues five diplomas on the CEFR — the CIPLE at A2, the DEPLE at B1, the DIPLE at B2, the DAPLE at C1 and the DUPLE at C2 — sat several times a year in Portugal and at Camões Institute centres and partner universities abroad, and valid for life. Brazil's is the Celpe-Bras, the Brazilian government's certificate of proficiency in Portuguese for foreigners, a single exam that reports one of four levels from intermediate to advanced-superior, sat twice a year in Brazil and at Brazilian cultural centres abroad; it is the only certificate the Brazilian state recognises and the one its universities and professional boards ask for.

Portugal states its conditions in CEFR levels. Portuguese nationality by naturalisation — the path the D7 and Golden Visa residence routes lead to — requires basic Portuguese at A2, proven with the CIPLE, with a certificate from the state's free Portuguese-for-newcomers course at the same level, or with a Portuguese school record; a permanent residence permit asks for the same A2. Portuguese universities ask for B1 or B2 by faculty, with the DEPLE or DIPLE as proof or their own test. Brazil asks for Portuguese in naturalisation, proven with the Celpe-Bras or a certificate from a recognised course, and requires the Celpe-Bras at the intermediate level for foreign students on its government scholarship programme and for the revalidation of foreign medical and other professional diplomas. Neither country tests the language for a visa. With steady classes most adults reach the A2 of Portuguese nationality in about six months and B1 within a year.

Choose the voice before choosing the tools, because a learner's material should match the shore they are heading for: Brazilian Portuguese is abundant — music, television, podcasts, the whole output of a country of two hundred million — while European Portuguese is served by a smaller, devoted set of resources built by people who noticed the gap. In either case the kit is a dictionary that marks gender, a verb table for the conjugations, flashcards with the article glued to every noun, and a daily hour of the chosen Portuguese spoken naturally with the text in view, since in the European variety the whole difficulty is the distance between the page and the ear.

A tutor in Portuguese is, first, the decision about which Portuguese: a Lisbon tutor and a São Paulo tutor will produce different learners, and the choice should follow the destination. Then the ear — the nasal vowels and, for Portugal, the swallowed ones, which only a native speaker's repetition corrects — and the verbs at speed, including the future subjunctive and the personal infinitive that textbooks introduce late and speakers use early. A tutor also settles the “tu”, “você” and “o senhor” question for the learner's actual country.