Guide · Just visiting
You do not need Portuguese here. English will carry you through Lisbon, Porto, Sintra and the Algarve without friction, and nobody will mind. This is about the other thing — that a very small amount of Portuguese, pronounced properly and used at the right moments, changes how a week goes out of all proportion to the effort. Twenty words. Not a course.
Portugal receives more visitors each year than it has residents, and the overwhelming majority of them arrive with nothing — not a word, not a bom dia. That is not a scandal; it is simply what tourism looks like, and the country has organised itself around it gracefully. English is widely spoken and willingly offered.
Which is exactly why the bar is so low. Against that backdrop, a visitor who says bom dia on the way into a bakery is doing something rare enough to register. You are not going to understand the reply, and you do not need to. The return is not comprehension — it is a different quality of thirty-second interaction, repeated forty times over a week.
So quantity is the wrong goal. Ten words pronounced recognisably beat a hundred that have to be decoded. Everything below is organised around saying a very short list properly, rather than a longer list badly — which is the opposite of how a phrasebook is built.
This is the most common way a visitor gets a cooler reception than they expected without ever finding out why. Portuguese and Spanish are close on the page, many Portuguese people understand Spanish well, and the temptation — if you have some Spanish — is to reach for it.
Don’t. Being addressed in Spanish, unasked, is received by a lot of people here, older ones especially, as a quiet suggestion that Portugal is a region of somewhere else. Gracias is not obrigado and hola is not olá. English is a better default; three words of Portuguese is a better one still.
If you do speak Spanish, keep it — it is a genuine head start on reading signs and menus. It is close to no help at all with listening, because European Portuguese swallows the vowels that Spanish pronounces fully, and Spanish speakers routinely find it far harder to follow than they expect.
Twenty is the whole list, not a sample. The pronunciations are rough English approximations aimed at being understood, not at being correct — section 4 fixes the handful that are worth fixing.
| Portuguese | Roughly | When |
|---|---|---|
| Bom dia | bong DEE-a | Good morning — until lunch, not until noon. |
| Boa tarde | BO-a TARD | Good afternoon — from lunch until dark. |
| Boa noite | BO-a NOIT | Good evening / goodnight — after dark, arriving or leaving. |
| Olá | o-LA | Hi. Stress the second syllable. |
| Obrigado / Obrigada | o-bri-GA-du / o-bri-GA-da | Thank you. It agrees with you — see below. |
| De nada | d(e) NA-da | You’re welcome. |
| Se faz favor | sfazh fa-VOR | Please — and how you call a waiter. |
| Desculpe | dsh-KOOLP | Sorry / excuse me. For apologies and for getting attention. |
| Com licença | kong li-SEN-sa | Excuse me — for squeezing past someone. |
| Sim / Não | seeng / nowng | Yes / no. The ão is nasal; see below. |
| Fala inglês? | FA-la ing-GLESH | Do you speak English? Ask it in Portuguese — that is the whole trick. |
| Não falo português | nowng FA-lu por-tu-GESH | I don’t speak Portuguese. Says more goodwill than silence does. |
| Quanto custa? | KWAN-tu KOOSH-ta | How much is it? |
| A conta, se faz favor | a KON-ta, sfazh fa-VOR | The bill, please. |
| Onde é…? | ONG-d(e) eh | Where is…? Point afterwards; nobody minds. |
| Está bom | shta bong | That’s good / that’s fine. Enormously useful, barely any effort. |
| Uma imperial / um fino | OO-ma im-p(e)-ri-AL / oong FEE-nu | A small draught beer — imperial in Lisbon, fino in Porto. |
| Bom apetite | bong a-p(e)-TEET | Enjoy your meal. Said to strangers at the next table, and meant. |
| Saúde! | sa-OO-d(e) | Cheers. Also what you say when someone sneezes. |
| Adeus / Até logo | a-DEUSH / a-TEH LO-gu | Goodbye / see you later. Say one on the way out. |
Six things. Each one fixes a whole class of words rather than a single phrase, which is why they are worth the five minutes.
A man says obrigado to everyone; a woman says obrigada to everyone. It is grammatically an adjective describing the speaker — “[I am] obliged” — so it never changes to match the person being thanked. This is the single most common visitor mistake and it is entirely free to get right.
Not “now”. Start to say “ow”, send it through your nose, and stop before your mouth closes — English “owng” is a passable approximation. Portuguese has more nasal vowels than most European languages and this one carries a lot of words.
Dois is “doysh”, três is “tresh”, pastéis is “pash-TAYSH”, Portugues is “por-tu-GESH”. Do this one thing and you stop sounding like you are reading Spanish aloud.
Desculpe is “dsh-KOOLP”, not “des-cool-pay”. Se faz favor collapses to “sfazh fa-VOR”. This is the sound Portugal is famous for being hard to understand, and imitating it makes you far easier to understand in return.
Milho is “MEE-lyu”, vinho is “VEE-nyu”, Espanha is “esh-PA-nya”. Same trick as Italian gl and Spanish ñ.
One pastel de nata, two pastéis de nata. Ordering “two pastel de nata” is the most audible tourist tell in the country, and fixing it costs one syllable.
Where you will spend most of your twenty words, and where the Portugal-specific facts actually live.
Not a mug of coffee. It is the default order, it costs about a euro standing at the counter, and in Lisbon you may hear it called uma bica, in Porto um cimbalino. If you want something longer: um abatanado. Milky and large: um galão (in a glass) or uma meia de leite (in a cup). Asking for “a coffee” and being handed a thimble is the most reliably surprised tourist moment in Portugal.
The bread, olives, cheese and paté that arrive before you ordered anything are a chargeable item. You are perfectly entitled to decline them and it is not rude: Não queremos o couvert, obrigado. Or eat them and pay the few euros — just know it was a choice, because a lot of visitors discover it on the bill and assume they were scammed. They were not.
Se faz favor, or Desculpe, with eye contact. Not a click, not a raised hand held aloft, and not garçom — that is Brazilian and lands oddly here. Service is unhurried by design; the bill in particular will not come until you ask.
A conta, se faz favor. Card is multibanco — Posso pagar com multibanco? Tipping is modest and optional: rounding up, or a euro or two per person for a good meal, is normal. Nobody expects a percentage.
A small shop, a bakery, a lift, a doctor’s waiting room, a train compartment: bom dia on the way in and adeus or até logo on the way out. Entering in silence is read as rude in a way it simply is not in London or New York, and this one habit will change more interactions than the other nineteen words combined.
Open in Portuguese and accept the reply in English without embarrassment. Nobody expects a visitor to sustain a conversation — the attempt is the entire content of the gesture, and it has already landed by the time they answer you in English. Being switched is not a failure and it is not a verdict on your accent.
Por favor is understood everywhere but se faz favor is what people here actually say, and it is the shibboleth that separates a visitor who looked things up from one who did not. Pair it with obrigado/obrigada — correctly gendered — at every exchange.
Not a study plan — a checklist that fits in a departure lounge:
Three free places to hear it before you go:
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Thinking of staying? Everything above stops being enough the moment you have an address here — different problem, different answer: moving to Portugal, and actually learning Portuguese.
No. Lisbon, Porto, Sintra, the Algarve and every place a visitor is likely to go run comfortably in English, often better than the equivalent places in France or Spain. Nothing on this page is required. It is all optional and it is all disproportionately rewarded, which is a different thing from necessary.
Genuinely not. Portugal is unusually relaxed about this and English is widely and willingly spoken. The gap this page is aimed at is smaller and more interesting: the difference between a transaction that is fine and one where someone smiles first.
You will often be understood, and that is exactly what makes it a trap. Portuguese people are far more likely to understand Spanish than the reverse, but being addressed in it — unasked, by a visitor who did not check — is received by plenty of people, particularly older ones, as a small statement that the two countries are interchangeable. English is a better default. Three words of Portuguese is a better one still.
On paper they are close enough that a Spanish reader can follow a Portuguese menu. Out loud they are not close at all: European Portuguese crushes its unstressed vowels and turns final s into “sh”, which is why Spanish speakers often find it far harder to understand than they expected. If you speak Spanish you have a real head start on reading and almost none on listening.
For twenty words, near enough — but know that its Portuguese course is Brazilian, so the audio is teaching you a different accent and it will hand you você where Portugal uses tu or no pronoun at all. For a week that barely matters. If the trip turns into a move, it starts to matter a great deal.
Obrigado if you are male, obrigada if you are female, said with the stress on GA and used constantly. It is the highest return on effort available anywhere in the language.
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