Start from zero with the Portuguese words and phrases you will hear on your very first day. Clear meanings, simple pronunciation, one step at a time.
Portuguese looks familiar if you know any Spanish, but it sounds quite different. Sound comes first here.
Portuguese has nasal vowels that no amount of reading will teach you. Every word here comes with a simple respelling.
Greetings, everyday nouns with their article, and the ten verbs that carry most Portuguese sentences. The same core set turns up in every language — see the first 100 words to learn in any language.
Gender, ser versus estar and verb endings arrive gradually, attached to sentences you can already use. There is a reason for that order: why vocabulary comes before grammar.
Learn these and you can already understand and be understood in simple everyday situations.
Pronunciation shown is Brazilian Portuguese, the variety most beginners start with. European Portuguese uses the same words with a different rhythm.
Eight sentences that cover most first conversations in Portuguese.
A realistic order for your first weeks of Portuguese.
Ten at a time, always with the article for nouns. Read each respelling out loud. At five to ten words a day that is under a week, and spaced retrieval is what makes them stay.
Tudo bem alone will carry you through a surprising number of first conversations.
Números, dias da semana and as horas unlock shopping, travel and appointments.
Subject plus one of the ten verbs plus a noun you know. Short and clear wins.
Portuguese looks easy on the page and sounds nothing like it looks. That gap is the single thing that decides how your first few months go, so almost everything below comes back to sound.
The thirty words on this page are survival level. Around 100 words carries you through greetings, ordering and simple questions. Around 500 words covers most routine daily exchanges, roughly the A0 to A1 range. At about 1,000 high-frequency words you can hold a simple conversation without constantly reaching for a dictionary. The research behind those numbers is in how many words you need to speak a language.
Portuguese also hands English speakers a large amount of vocabulary for free, because both borrowed heavily from Latin. English words ending in -tion usually become -ção (nation becomes nação), and -ty becomes -dade (city becomes cidade). Learn the pattern rather than the individual words and you gain several hundred at once.
Decide this early, because unlike the varieties of Spanish, the two differ enough in sound to be confusing if you mix them. They share spelling and grammar almost entirely; what changes is rhythm and vowels. Brazilian Portuguese is more open and evenly stressed, European Portuguese swallows unstressed vowels and sounds faster to a beginner.
Most learners start with Brazilian Portuguese, simply because there are far more speakers and far more material. The pronunciation on this page follows it. Whichever you choose, you will still be understood by the other — but learn one consistently first.
Portuguese has nasal vowels, produced by letting air through the nose as well as the mouth. English has nothing quite like them, and no amount of reading teaches them. They are marked in two ways, by a tilde or by a following m or n:
Portuguese nouns are masculine or feminine, and the pattern is nearly the same as in Spanish: nouns ending in -o are usually masculine, nouns ending in -a are usually feminine. That covers most of what you meet early.
Exceptions exist — o dia, o mapa and o problema are masculine despite the ending — but they are a small list rather than a system. Store the article with the noun from day one: a casa, not casa.
You have a real advantage and one specific trap. The advantage is that most written Portuguese will be broadly comprehensible to you from the start. The trap is false friends, which are common enough between these two languages to cause genuine embarrassment:
The other risk is subtler: relying on Spanish means you read Portuguese well and pronounce it badly, because the sounds diverge far more than the spelling does. Spend your early effort on listening rather than reading.
Both are levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. A0 is absolute beginner. A1 means you can introduce yourself, ask and answer simple questions about your life, and follow slow, clear speech. What A1 level actually means walks through the descriptors in full.
One quirk worth knowing: the main Brazilian proficiency exam, the Celpe-Bras, does not use these labels and does not test beginners at all — its lowest result is intermediate. Portugal uses the CIPLE at A2 as its first certificate. Either way, there is no beginner exam to aim at, so at this stage the level labels are useful for choosing material and nothing else.
Most people who finish a first foreign language start a second sooner than they expected, and it goes faster — not because the second language is simpler, but because you have learned how you learn.
One shortcut is worth knowing when that happens. Once Portuguese is a working language for you, learning the next one through Portuguese rather than back through English removes a translation step. That is what Alemão Básico does for German: the same high-frequency vocabulary approach used on this page, taught entirely in Portuguese.
The vocabulary and grammar are moderately easy, since Portuguese shares a great deal of Latin-derived vocabulary with English. Pronunciation is the genuine difficulty: nasal vowels have no English equivalent and written Portuguese gives you little warning about how a word sounds, so listening matters more here than in Spanish or Italian.
Start with Brazilian Portuguese unless you have a specific reason not to. There are far more speakers and far more beginner material, and the vowels are clearer, which makes early listening easier. The grammar and spelling are nearly identical, so switching later costs you very little.
With 15 to 20 focused minutes a day, most beginners reach A1 in roughly three to five months. Expect reading to run ahead of listening for a while, especially if you already know Spanish.
Five to ten new words a day, always with the article for nouns, and always spoken aloud rather than only read. Reviewing old words matters more than adding new ones, so keep the daily count low enough that revision still fits. How many words to learn per day explains why the ceiling is that low.
These six guides are language-neutral — they cover the method rather than the words, so they apply whichever language you are starting.
Every course begins at absolute beginner level.