Portuguese for travelers: what you actually need

Spanish will not carry you

Every American I meet here assumed Spanish would be close enough. On paper it looks that way: the two languages share a great deal of vocabulary, and if you read a Brazilian menu with high school Spanish you will get most of it.

Spoken at normal speed, you will catch maybe a third. The relationship is also lopsided. Brazilians tend to understand your Spanish better than you understand their Portuguese, which produces a conversation where they answer happily and at length and you have no idea what was said.

A handful of words are traps. Propina is a tip in Spanish and a bribe in Portuguese. Esquisito means weird, not exquisite. Pelado means naked. Borracha is rubber, not a drunk. And the one you will meet on your first day: the door that says puxe means pull.

The twenty words that do the work

Opening and closing. Oi (hi). Bom dia before noon, boa tarde in the afternoon, boa noite after dark. Tchau on the way out.

Politeness. Por favor. Obrigado if you are a man, obrigada if you are a woman, always matching yourself and never the person you are thanking. De nada. Com licença to squeeze past someone. Desculpa when you bump them.

The all-purpose one. Tudo bem? It is a greeting, a question, and an answer. Someone says tudo bem?, you say tudo bem, and a complete friendly exchange has taken place. Learn this one first.

Getting things. Eu queria… (I would like), which is softer than eu quero and the phrase I would put in front of every order. Quanto é? A conta, por favor. Sem gelo (no ice). Sem açúcar (no sugar).

Bailing out. Não falo português. Você fala inglês? Pode falar devagar? (can you speak slowly?). And onde fica o banheiro?

Two you will hear back. Pois não? means “how can I help you,” not “no.” Pode ser means “that works for me.”

One quirk worth knowing: Brazilians often answer a yes or no question by repeating the verb rather than saying yes. Ask tem? (do you have it?) and the answer is tem, which means yes.

The sounds English speakers get wrong

Fix these five and your accent improves more than another fifty words would.

• Words ending in -o sound like “oo.” Obrigado is oh-bree-GAH-doo.
• D and T soften before an “ee” sound. De becomes “jee,” te becomes “chee.” Boa noite is BOH-ah NOY-chee. Onde is OWN-jee. This single habit is most of what makes a foreigner sound Brazilian instead of Spanish.
• R at the start of a word is an H. Rio is HEE-oo. Recife is heh-SEE-fee. A double R does the same: carro is CAH-hoo.
• A final L is a W. Brasil is brah-ZEEW. Legal is leh-GOW.
• -ão is nasal. Não, pão, São Paulo. It is roughly “ow” pushed through your nose. Nobody gets it on the first day.

Two more: lh is the “lli” in million (mulher, filho, ilha), and nh is the “ny” in canyon (banho, senhora). An S between two vowels is a Z, so casa is CAH-zah. And in Rio you will hear an S at the end of a syllable come out as “sh.” That is a Rio accent, not a rule to copy, but it helps to recognize the word.

How much English you will actually meet

Front desks at mid-range hotels and up in Rio, São Paulo, Foz and Salvador usually have at least one English speaker on shift. Guides and tours sold to foreigners, yes. Waiters in the tourist strips of Rio and Floripa, some.

App drivers and taxi drivers, rarely. Pharmacies, bus stations, small neighborhood restaurants, and essentially anywhere outside a state capital, plan on none. Younger people are likelier than older ones, and it is worth asking rather than assuming either way.

Download the offline Portuguese pack in Google Translate before you fly, not when you land. Camera mode on a menu is genuinely good. In a loud bar, type rather than speak.

What I would tell you not to worry about: nobody will be short with you. Brazilians will pull out a phone, use their hands, find a relative who studied English, and generally treat the language gap as a shared problem to solve.

Trying counts for more here than almost anywhere

In a lot of countries a bad accent is tolerated. Here it is rewarded, because almost no foreigner tries, and because Brazilians are not used to anyone learning their language on purpose. Four words of clumsy Portuguese will get you a warmer reception than a paragraph of correct Spanish.

If you take one habit from this page, take this one: greet the person before you transact. Say bom dia to the woman behind the bakery counter before you point at anything. Say boa tarde when you get in an elevator. It costs you nothing, it takes a second, and it changes the temperature of every exchange you have for two weeks.

Nobody is going to correct your Portuguese. They are going to be glad you tried.