Portuguese 4: Your First 150 Words

A hundred and fifty words will not let you read a novel. They will let you say who you are, ask for what you want, count, name the day, and understand the small words that hold every sentence together. They are also enough to prove to yourself that remembering a language is a skill with a method, not a gift.

This piece is a deck: 150 Portuguese words on cards, each with an example sentence, scheduled by a spaced-repetition algorithm so that every word comes back just before you would forget it. It explains how the deck was chosen, how the schedule works, and how to use it in ten minutes a day. Your progress is saved in your browser, shared with the trainers in the other Portuguese pieces, and can be exported.

Your device has no Portuguese voice, so the play buttons are hidden.

What is in the deck

The deck holds 150 words. They were chosen by judgement and checked against a published frequency list built from Brazilian film and television subtitles: about four in five have a common form among its 1,000 most frequent entries (counting a verb if any common form of it does), and most of the rest are survival words (onze to dezenove, the weekdays, pão, ônibus). They are not the 150 most frequent words in order; they are the 150 you need to start saying things.

Group	Words	A few of them
Pronouns and people	8	eu, você, ela, nós, a gente
Little words	35	e, mas, que, de, em, com, não, obrigado
Question words	7	o que, quem, onde, quando, como
Verbs	23	ser, estar, ter, ir, fazer, querer
Numbers 0 to 20	20	zero, dois, dez, vinte (um is with the little words)
Days of the week	7	segunda-feira, sexta-feira, sábado
Nouns	33	a casa, a água, o dia, a mão
Adjectives	17	bom, ruim, grande, pequeno, cansado

Notice what comes first: the small words and the verbs. In real speech, words like que, não, de and você appear constantly, far more than any noun. That is the frequency idea from the first method piece, in practice: the words that appear most do the most work. The weekdays are worth a second look, too: from Monday to Friday they are numbered, segunda-feira (“second day”) to sexta-feira (“sixth day”), and in speech they shrink to segunda, terça and so on.

Each word becomes two cards

Each card has the Portuguese, the English, an example sentence and, for nouns, the article, so you learn o or a with the word. Each word becomes two cards: Portuguese to English first, then, once you have passed that, English to Portuguese, which is harder and builds recall. The first direction is recognising; the second is producing, and producing is what you need when you speak.

On gender: nouns in -o are usually masculine and in -a feminine, with exceptions you will meet early: o dia, o problema, o mapa, a mão, a foto. Nouns in -ção are feminine, and many words that end in -e or a consonant give no clue at all (o nome, a noite, o pão, a cidade). Learning the article with the noun from the first day is far easier than trying to guess the gender later.

The examples are Brazilian. Where Portugal uses a different everyday word, the card is still useful there, but expect the local word there: in Portugal ônibus is autocarro, celular is telemóvel and banheiro is casa de banho.

How the schedule works

The scheduler is a simplified SM-2, the algorithm behind many flashcard apps. See the card, try to recall, reveal, and grade yourself honestly: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. A first success returns after 1 day, then 3 days, then the gap is multiplied by an ease factor that starts at 2.5; Hard lowers it and Easy raises it. Again sends the card back four cards later. The buttons show the next gap.

Here is what a card looks like if you press Good every time it returns:

Time it appears	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th
Next gap, in days	1	3	8	20	50	125

Six good recalls take a word from today to a gap of about four months. Press Again once on the way and the card returns the same session, drops its ease a little, and starts the climb over with shorter steps. That is the whole mechanism: the effort goes where forgetting is closest, and you stop spending minutes on words you already know.

Using the deck well

• Say the answer first. Out loud, or in your head, before you press Show answer. Looking is not recalling.
• Grade honestly. If you hesitated or guessed, press Hard or Again. A flattering grade pushes the card too far away and you will pay for it later.
• Read the example. The sentence shows how the word behaves. Say it aloud; play it if you have a voice.
• Do the reviews first. New cards are the fun part, but the reviews are what the schedule depends on. Do not skip them on days you feel behind.
• Keep it small. Ten new cards a day is a good rate. If the deck feels heavy, drop to 5. A smaller habit beats a heroic start.

Making the words stick

The deck does the scheduling. Three small habits do the rest.

Use what English gives you. Many Portuguese words resemble English ones because both borrowed from Latin: importante, família, problema, restaurante, and the whole family of -ção words that match English -tion (informação, estação). Treat these as free. But watch for false friends: puxar means pull, not push; esquisito means strange, not exquisite; pretender means to intend; livraria is a bookshop, not a library (biblioteca); atual means current; parentes are relatives, not parents (pais). When a card looks too easy, check the example sentence.

Attach a word to something real. Say a casa when you look at your house, a água when you pour a glass. Naming things in your own life gives the word a second route back into memory.

Meet the words again outside the deck. A word you have only seen on a card is fragile. Listen for the small words in any Portuguese audio, even if you understand little; the next time a card comes up, you will already know the sound of it.

Saving and moving your progress

The deck saves to your browser on this device, in a record shared with the trainers in the other Portuguese pieces. Clearing your browser data erases it, and a private window forgets everything when you close it. Export gives you a code to paste into a note; import restores it on this or another device.

Your first two weeks

Ten to twenty minutes a day, in this order: review the cards that are due, do one drill, then read or listen to something short. This table pulls the four Portuguese pieces together.

Days	Deck	Drill	Outside the page
1 to 2	10 new cards a day	Pronounce it: every chip. Nasal or not: 15 words.	Read the vowel table aloud.
3 to 5	10 new, plus reviews	Trainer: regular verbs; eu and the ele form.	Say your name, where you live and what you do, out loud.
6 to 9	Reviews first, then 10 new	Trainer: add nós and the eles form, then the core five. Ser or estar once.	Five minutes of beginner listening.
10 to 12	Reviews, then new	Trainer: add the other irregulars and the vowel changes.	Write five true sentences with ser, estar, ter, ir, fazer, each with a contraction.
13 to 14	Reviews only if you are behind	Trainer: everything you have, with tu if it matters to you.	Take the quizzes. Export your progress.

Where to go next

• 🌐 A dictionary with verb tables. The Dicionário Priberam, free online, shows both Brazilian and European spellings and conjugates every verb.
• 🌐 Hearing real voices. Forvo has single words recorded by speakers from Brazil, Portugal and elsewhere, labelled by country, so you can compare accents word by word.
• 🌐 The language’s institutions. Portugal’s Instituto Camões promotes the language abroad and lists courses and certificates; Brazil’s proficiency exam is the Celpe-Bras.
• 📘 A grammar to keep. John Whitlam and Agripino S. Silveira, Modern Brazilian Portuguese Grammar: A Practical Guide (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2023): a reference, not a course; look things up when a sentence puzzles you.
• 📘 A frequency dictionary. Mark Davies and Ana Maria Raposo Preto-Bay, A Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese (Routledge, 2008), the 5,000 most frequent words of Brazilian and European Portuguese with example sentences.
• 🗣 Comprehensible input. Videos and podcasts made for learners, slow and with visual support; search for português para estrangeiros or Brazilian Portuguese for beginners and keep whatever you can mostly follow.
• 🗣 A person. A paid tutor or a language-exchange partner, one session a week, as soon as you can say twenty sentences. No app replaces talking to someone.

What sticks

• The 150 words are the ones you need to start saying things: small words and verbs first.
• Each word is two cards: Portuguese to English, then English to Portuguese, which builds recall.
• Learn the article with every noun; -o and -a follow the pattern, with early exceptions such as o dia and a mão.
• The scheduler widens the gap after each success (1, 3, 8, 20 days and so on) and sends a miss back sooner.
• Say the answer before you look, grade honestly, and do the reviews before the new cards.
• Cognates are free words, but check the false friends: puxar, esquisito, livraria, parentes.