Practise Portuguese with strangers

Portuguese practice with Brazilians and Europeans alike

The Brazilian and European split is not something one tutor can teach you both sides of. Random matching exposes you to both, and to Angolan and Mozambican varieties as well. Knowing which forms travel and which do not is a real skill, and it comes only from range.

Você or tu, nasal vowels and Spanish false friends

Two standard varieties and a close cousin in Spanish make Portuguese tricky in chat.

• Brazilian versus European: você or tu, and pronoun placement before or after the verb
• Nasal vowels, which are hard to spell when you are guessing from sound
• The personal infinitive — a structure with no English equivalent at all
• False friends with Spanish, which ambush anyone arriving from Spanish
• Chat abbreviations: vc, tb, blz, pq

Openers in Portuguese

Written in Brazilian Portuguese. The second one asks which variety your partner speaks.

• Oi! Estou aprendendo português

  Hi! I am learning Portuguese

  Brazilian phrasing. Olá and a aprender would be the European equivalent.

• Você é do Brasil ou de Portugal?

  Are you from Brazil or Portugal?

  Worth asking early — it tells you which Portuguese you are about to practise.

• Como se diz ... em português?

  How do you say ... in Portuguese?

  Works identically in both varieties.

• Isso soa natural?

  Does that sound natural?

  Gets you register feedback rather than a grammar ruling.

Mistakes that sound like Spanish, and other giveaways

Several of these ambush learners who arrive from Spanish.

• Sou com fome

  Estou com fome

  Hunger, thirst and tiredness are passing states, so they take estar — and Portuguese phrases them as things you are with rather than things you are.

• Eu gosto isso

  Eu gosto disso

  Gostar always takes de. De contracts with isso to give disso, with ele to give dele, and so on — dropping it is the single most audible learner error.

• A comida está esquisita (meaning delicious)

  A comida está deliciosa

  Esquisito means weird, not exquisite. It is the classic ambush for anyone arriving from Spanish, and you will not find out from context because the sentence still parses.

Warm, fast and in short bursts: how Brazilian chat works

Brazilian chat is warm quickly and generous with diminutives — oi, tudo bem, um minutinho — and a partner may write several short messages in a row rather than one composed paragraph. Read that as enthusiasm, not impatience. European Portuguese chat is noticeably more reserved in its openings, which learners sometimes misread as coldness when it is simply a different default. In both, saudade genuinely has no English equivalent, and asking a partner to explain what they mean by it is one of the better conversations available to you.

Choosing a variety without ignoring the other

• Pick one variety to aim for, but read both. Mixing them inside a single sentence is what actually sounds odd.
• If you already speak Spanish, slow down. The similarity helps comprehension and quietly wrecks your output.
• Learn the chat abbreviations early. vc, tb and pq appear constantly and are invisible in courses.
• Ask partners to write how they would really type it, not how it ought to be written. The gap is the lesson.

Portuguese practice questions

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