5 Strategies to Improve your Portuguese Vocabulary

The Portuguese language is one of the world’s most exotic languages, and its beauty lies in its words. The Portuguese language is estimated to contain 250,000 words, with the most important Portuguese dictionary containing over 171,000 words. This may appear to be a large and intimidating number to someone eager to begin learning Portuguese, but here’s the good news: you only need to know about 5% of the entire vocabulary to be fluent in Portuguese. This implies that if you concentrate your efforts on learning the most commonly used Portuguese words, you’ll be fluent in Portuguese in no time. What’s more, knowing as few as 100 words can help you understand half of the words in a piece of writing or book written in Portuguese. Learn the most commonly used 1000 words and you’ll have a 75% understanding of texts in Portuguese. In addition, each new word you learn helps you guess the meaning of up to 85 previously unseen words. This implies that knowing only 1000 Portuguese words can help you guess up to 85000 Portuguese words. Doesn’t seem so scary now, does it?

Every language, including Portuguese, is built on its vocabulary that evolves over centuries with the language. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the greatest challenges of learning any language, including Portuguese!  

Successful communication or “being able to articulate your thoughts and feelings clearly” is significantly dependent on the richness of vocabulary you build while learning the language. While using intelligible, comprehendible and coherent speech during conversations will make you a great communicator, eloquence in your oration will make you venerable and admirable. Since the entire idea is to convert complex thoughts and emotions into comprehensible and unambiguous speech using words that are convincing, appealing and understandable to a listener, a large vocabulary to tap in will be your greatest asset when building your first conversation in Portuguese. 

Success in a career or business to a large extent depends on the impressive communication skills you demonstrate during presentations or the polite persuasion techniques you resort to when clinching deals!

Apart from this, having a good vocabulary to draw from can also help you write more effectively. 

Since comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, the importance of vocabulary development cannot be underestimated. A rich vocabulary will empower you to improve all your areas of communication – listening, speaking, reading and writing!

1. Prioritize those cognates. 

Both English and Portuguese are derived from a combination of Greek and Latin roots, which means they share many similarities. Words that sound more “traditional” or “sophisticated” by nature may end up being cognates of European Portuguese words.

2. Set realistic, measurable, attainable short and long term measurable goals to learn new words consciously is the best strategy you could start with!

Setting attainable goals is also an excellent way to keep yourself motivated while learning a new language. And while you do so, I recommend you dedicate at least 2 hours learning and 2 hours of practising the Portuguese language. Do not be overzealous or overambitious and bring yourself to the misery if burnout. Simultaneously measure your progress by writing a relevant ‘Must Do’ or ‘Todo’ list that shall serve as a measure for your Portuguese vocabulary progress. Treat learning language as a part of a game where you closely track your progress as a level cleared! Setting these critical criteria would help you reach your goals faster without having to derail from your path. You could, for example,  mark yourself on goals such as:

The goal for a week: Learning 35 words 

The goal for a month: Learning 150 words Goal for three months: 500 words

The goal for six months: 1000 words

The goal for a year: 2000 words and so on and so forth.

3. Start adding commonly used words that you hear repeatedly in almost all conversations by different Portuguese people 

Jot down any new commonly used words you come across in a journal or a diary and start to learn words based on how frequently you hear/read them. Make learning full sentences a priority over learning single-word clusters. Not only will it allow you to broaden your linguistic horizons much more quickly, but it will help you learn contextual phrases, in context. Write down words in the context of full sentences/phrases. Try categorising each new term, phrase, or sentence by a specific theme. Alternatively, convert 20 of the 100 most common words in English, that you usually use, to learn and add to your Portuguese vocabulary for fun. Keep a Portuguese dictionary handy. And on a regular basis try avoiding translations of objects/situations from your native language or English into Portuguese. A good way to improve your vocabulary is to identify and associate each object/ situation/ person/ animal directly with its respective Portuguese name so that when you think of it in Portuguese, you reach a Portuguese word to recollect!

As an example : 

English Portuguese

Olá = Hello

Felicidade = Happiness

Gato = Cat

Cão = Dog

Sorrir = Smile

Português = Portuguese

Sim = Yes

Obrigado = Thank you

Adeus = Goodbye

Amor = Love

4. Do not try to learn sophisticated words that aren’t going to be a part of your day-to-day conversation. 

This is yet another proven method that will take your learning, your confidence, your motivation and your goals, all down the drain! This happens primarily because you didn’t focus on commonly used words that should ideally have been a part of your learning, and the ones that you spent effort with are seen somewhere once in a while, hence it’s only natural that you forgot them. 

5. Use reliable online resources to increase your vocabulary 

Use Spaced Repetition Systems such as Mnemonics, Anki, Memrise and many more to get the best of the internet. This Quizlet flashcard vocab list of European Portuguese verbs is a good online-based option, while the Gengo Flashcards app provides another download-worthy set. Listen to podcasts, music, audio clips, audiobooks, and more audio resources. Pay attention to the terms that are both familiar and unfamiliar to you—and make a note of them (more on this later). By listening to the podcasts a couple of times, you can double-check that you understand how each term is used. Practice Portuguese has a plethora of free podcasts for European Portuguese learners, covering topics ranging from traditional Lusophone legends to everyday activities such as phone calls. Access to read a lot of error-free resources online or offline such as newspapers, literature, children’s books, magazines etcetera. A few options to consider are Portugal’s top news services such as TSF, RTP, SIC Notícias, LUSA, TVI 24. You can find a number of free books from Luso Livros, Instituto Camões and Projecto Adamastor. It’s also helpful to use dictionaries that provide additional context for words and/or encourage further reading such as linguee, infopedia, lexico.pt etcetera. Reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge frequently go hand in hand. The more you read, the more you’ll learn. 

Portuguese is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is the sole official language of Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Brazil, while having co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 50 million second-language speakers, Portuguese has approximately 270 million total speakers. It is usually listed as the sixth-most spoken language and the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers. Being the most widely spoken language in South America and all of the Southern Hemisphere, it is also the second-most spoken language, after Spanish, in Latin America, one of the 10 most spoken languages in Africa. 

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