English for Portuguese speakers

1. Portuguese → English word transformation rules

A large share of English vocabulary can be predicted from Portuguese. Both languages drew on the same Latin stock, so their endings correspond with striking regularity. Once students internalise these patterns they stop memorising individual words and start converting them — one of the highest-leverage things you can teach early.

Present it as a conversion ladder — the meaning stays; only the ending shifts:

   Portuguese           English
   informação     →     information
   universidade   →     university
   generoso       →     generous
   rapidamente    →     rapidly
   possibilidade  →     possibility

One caveat to flag for students. The pattern predicts spelling and meaning, not pronunciation, and not every word obeys — livraria looks as if it should become library and does not (see §8). Teach the rules as a strong first guess, then confirm. They are right far more often than wrong, which is exactly why they are worth drilling.

2. Cognates

A cognate shares an ancestor in two languages and still looks and means roughly the same. English and Portuguese have them by the thousand. It helps students to sort them into three groups.

Perfect cognates — identical spelling and meaning:

hospital · animal · natural · normal · total · local · social · central · popular · original · superior · horrível

Near cognates — small, predictable spelling changes, same meaning:

The exceptions to watch — words that look cognate but are not (the false friends of §8). Minuto → minute is a true cognate; pretender → pretend is not. The habit to build: when a student meets an unfamiliar English word with a Latin shape, their first guess should be the cognate meaning — with the false-friend list kept in reserve.

3. The Latin layer: English's two vocabularies

English carries two words for a great many ideas: a plain Germanic one inherited from Old English, and a Latin one that arrived later through French and scholarship. Both survived. The Germanic word is everyday and blunt; the Latin word is formal and careful. Your students already own the second column — which is why their English can sound oddly ceremonious long before it sounds fluent.

Worth naming explicitly in class, because it explains the whole register system in one image — and it warns students that reaching for the Latin-looking word raises the formality every time. A student who says “I shall commence my meal” has not made an error; they have made a register mistake, which is harder to hear and harder to unlearn.

4. Recognising academic English

The same advantage scales up. The core vocabulary of essays, research, law, and medicine is overwhelmingly Latin in origin, which puts it directly inside a Portuguese speaker's reach.

analyse · interpret · establish · determine · significant · consequence · evidence · concept · justify · demonstrate

For most learners, academic vocabulary is the last mountain. For Portuguese speakers, much of it is already familiar terrain — a native English child meets these words later than the Germanic ones and finds them harder. Your students have the usual difficulty curve reversed, and that is a resource worth exploiting when you choose reading texts. When students report understanding a research paper more easily than a comedy, that is not a fluke; name it for them so they stop second-guessing it.

5. Portuguese words English already borrowed

Traffic has run the other way too, mostly through Portuguese seafaring and Brazilian culture. These arrive in class free of charge:

banana · mango · cobra · flamingo · piranha · jaguar · samba · bossa nova · caipirinha · açaí · favela · marmalade · molasses · albino · veranda

A small confidence win, and a genuinely interesting five minutes: marmalade comes from marmelada (quince jam), and veranda reached English from Portuguese by way of India.

6. English words in Portuguese — and the false ones

Brazilian Portuguese has absorbed a wave of English, especially in business and technology:

o site · o mouse · o delivery · o shopping · o marketing · o feedback · deletar · printar · startar

These are mostly free vocabulary — but Portuguese has also put English words to uses no English speaker would recognise, and students assume they are safe. These deserve a slide of their own:

• um notebook is a laptop, not a paper notebook.
• o shopping is a shopping mall, not the activity.
• um outdoor is a billboard.
• um pen drive is a USB stick or flash drive.
• o chip is a SIM card.
• um smoking is a dinner jacket or tuxedo.
• home office means working from home, not the room.

The pronunciation students learned in Portuguese is also usually not the English one — the stress shifts and the final consonants change. In English they need to reset rather than carrying the Brazilian version across.

7. Thousands of words they already know

This is the point to return to whenever a class feels discouraged. Because English took so much of its vocabulary from Latin, an educated Portuguese speaker already recognises a very large slice of it. Students do not need to learn these words — they need to unlock them, using tools already in this guide:

• Transformation rules (§1) convert Portuguese endings into English ones.
• Prefixes carry across almost unchanged: pré-, re-, in-/im-, trans-, sub-, inter-, anti-.
• Suffixes convert predictably: -dade → -ity, -oso → -ous, -ário → -ary.
• Roots are shared: port (carry), dict (say), spect (look), scrib (write).

A strategy worth teaching: before reaching for a dictionary, break the word into prefix + root + suffix and ask what the Portuguese cousin would be. Inevitable = in- (not) + evit (avoid, evitar) + -able — decoded on sight. For a Portuguese speaker, English is not an entirely foreign language; it is one that raided the same Latin cupboard.

8. False friends (falsos cognatos)

A false friend looks like a Portuguese word but means something else — usually because the shared Latin ancestor drifted on one side and not the other. These cause more errors, and more embarrassment, than any genuinely hard vocabulary, precisely because they feel safe. Portuguese has an unusually rich crop of them, and they deserve explicit teaching time.

• push ≠ puxar. The two mean exact opposites, and Brazilian doors are labelled puxe for pull. Students read English doors backwards for years.
• pretend ≠ pretender. “I pretend to study medicine” is a very common sentence in a university class, and it says something quite different from what the student means.
• actually ≠ atualmente. Actually means in fact; the word for atualmente is currently. This pair alone accounts for a startling share of confused meetings.
• exquisite ≠ esquisito. Complimenting a host's esquisito cooking is not the compliment the student intends.

Don't drown students in the full list at once. Teach the top handful, and cultivate a mild suspicion whenever a Latin-looking English word solves a problem too conveniently.

9. Common direct-translation mistakes

Some errors come not from a single word but from translating a whole Portuguese structure. The most common cluster around one difference: Portuguese uses ter (to have) and estar com (to be with) where English uses to be.

EP. European Portuguese generally prefers ter here — tenho fome, tenho frio, tenho medo — where Brazilian says estou com fome. The English error is identical either way; only the source structure differs.

• ✕ “I am agree” → “I agree” (estou de acordo is a phrase; agree is a verb).
• ✕ “It depends of” → “It depends on.”
• ✕ “Explain me the rule” → “Explain the rule to me.”
• ✕ “I have 20 years old” — the halfway hybrid, and the surest sign the ter habit is still live.

The fix students need is a habit, not a rule: when a sentence describes a state a person feels (age, hunger, cold, fear, being right), English reaches for to be.

10. Translation traps

Some very common Portuguese expressions cannot cross into English word for word at all — they need a different structure entirely. Good candidates for a dedicated drill.

Watch ter for existence especially. Brazilian Portuguese uses tem where English needs there is / there are, and it produces headless sentences: “Has a lot of people here,” “Have a problem.” It is one of the most persistent Brazilian errors and one of the easiest to drill, because the fix is a single fixed phrase. Saudade is the other one to plan for — there is no English noun for it, so students need the verb: I miss you.

11. Articles: Portuguese vs English

Portuguese requires an article almost everywhere — before general and abstract nouns, before possessives, before people's names, before most country names. English strips it away in exactly those cases. The rule of thumb to teach: when the meaning is a category, an idea in general, or an unmeasured amount, English uses no article at all.

   General idea →  NO article in English
   As pessoas      People
   A vida          Life
   Os cachorros    Dogs
   O meu carro     My car

   Specific thing → article stays
   As pessoas daqui     The people here
   A vida que eu levo   The life I lead

The article returns the moment the noun is specified: “The people here are friendly.” Keep the two cases separate and most article errors disappear.

12. When English omits words Portuguese requires

Because this is the single most frequent article error for Portuguese speakers, it earns its own examples. When the topic is something in general, the article is dropped:

“I like the coffee” tells an English speaker the student is pointing at one particular cup on the table. “I like coffee” says they enjoy it as a thing — a useful contrast to make explicit in class.

13. When English requires words Portuguese omits

This is the big one, and it is worth more class time than anything else in this Part. Portuguese drops subject pronouns because the verb ending already carries the person — falo can only mean I speak. English has almost no verb endings left, so the subject is compulsory. Students produce headless sentences that sound not merely wrong but incomplete.

The same gap produces the missing dummy subject: English insists on an it for weather and time, and a there for existence, even though neither refers to anything. Do-support is the second half of the problem — English builds questions and negatives with a helper verb that Portuguese has no equivalent for, since Portuguese just raises the intonation or adds não.

In English neither is optional — a missing subject sounds broken, and a question asked by intonation alone reads as surprise rather than enquiry. Build the habit early: every English sentence needs a subject, even a meaningless one.

14. Tense and aspect: where Brazilian students are lucky

The continuous is a gift. Brazilian Portuguese builds it exactly as English does — estar plus a gerund, estou falando → I am speaking. Where French and Spanish speakers must be taught the progressive from scratch, Brazilians already have the structure and the instinct for when to use it. Spend the saved time elsewhere.

EP. European Portuguese uses estar a + infinitive (estou a falar) rather than the gerund. The meaning is the same, but the mapping to English is less direct, so EP students need the progressive taught more explicitly than Brazilian ones.

The perfect is the real work. Portuguese has a compound past that looks like the English present perfect and does not mean the same thing: tenho trabalhado means I have been working repeatedly and recently, not I have worked. Meanwhile the jobs English gives the present perfect are handled in Portuguese by the simple present plus há or desde.

The single most useful drill: an action that started in the past and is still going gets have/has + been in English, never the simple present.

15. Verbs that work differently

fazer is the troublemaker: it covers both do and make, and English splits them along a line that has no equivalent in Portuguese. The rough principle — make for creating or producing something, do for performing an activity — gets students most of the way, but the rest is memorisation.

Two more worth naming. ter does the work of both have and there is, which produces the headless sentences of §10. And ficar has no English equivalent at all — depending on context it becomes stay, get, become, or be located. Students who translate it as a single word will be wrong most of the time; teach the four English verbs separately and let ficar go.

16. Prepositions Portuguese speakers commonly confuse

Prepositions rarely map one-to-one between any two languages, and these are the pairs that cause the most trouble for Portuguese speakers specifically.

The pattern behind half of these: Portuguese attaches a preposition to the verb (gostar de, precisar de) where English attaches none, and attaches none (ouvir, esperar, procurar) where English insists on one. Teaching the verb and its preposition as a single unit — listen to, wait for, look for — works better than teaching the prepositions on their own.

17. Portuguese interference

A few habits transfer wholesale and need naming before students can hear them:

• Adjective after the noun. Carro vermelho → ✕ car red. English puts it in front, always.
• Double negatives. Não vi ninguém → ✕ I didn't see nobody → I didn't see anybody.
• Questions without inversion. Portuguese asks by intonation, so “You are coming?” arrives instead of “Are you coming?”
• Plural agreement everywhere. Duas casas grandes → ✕ two bigs houses. English adjectives never take a plural.
• People is plural. A gente is grammatically singular in Portuguese and means we, which produces ✕ the people is and ✕ a people.

18. Pronunciation problems for Portuguese speakers

Portuguese has a rich vowel system and a comfortable consonant inventory, but the overlap with English is smaller than the shared spelling suggests. These are the features that make a Brazilian accent identifiable — and the ones that actually impede understanding are near the top.

The one to drill first. Portuguese syllables almost always end in a vowel, so English words ending in a consonant get one added — hot dog becomes “hot-chee dog-ee.” It affects nearly every sentence, and because it adds whole syllables it damages intelligibility more than any individual vowel. Pair it with the -ed endings: worked is one syllable, not two.

EP. European Portuguese has the opposite habit — it reduces and swallows unstressed vowels heavily, and it pronounces coda s as /ʃ/ (estes → “eshtsh”). EP speakers therefore find the English schwa comparatively easy and rarely add the extra final vowel, but they carry the /ʃ/ across and can sound clipped where Brazilians sound syllable-heavy. The palatalisation of t and d in the table above is Brazilian only.

19. Familiar words with different pronunciation

The shared Latin vocabulary of §2 arrives with Portuguese stress attached. Portuguese places the stress late; English usually places it early — so the words students are most confident about are the ones they most reliably mispronounce.

This table is really a stress lesson wearing a vocabulary costume. Drill the pairs side by side — the Portuguese word then the English one — so students hear that recognising a word on the page is not the same as being able to say it.

20. Words Portuguese speakers commonly mispronounce

Beyond the cognates, a short list of words that reliably cause trouble and are worth drilling directly.

The last two rows matter more than they look. Because Portuguese has a single close front vowel, the /ɪ/–/iː/ distinction collapses, and several very ordinary words — beach, sheet, piece — turn into words a student did not intend in front of a class. Teaching the long vowel early saves everyone an awkward lesson later, and framing it as a length contrast rather than a different vowel is what makes it click.

21. Common spelling problems

Portuguese spelling is close to phonetic and uses accents to carry stress. English does neither, and the cognates shift in small, consistent ways that are worth teaching as a set.

The two rules that catch most errors: English never writes an accent on these words, and English doubles consonants where Portuguese does not — comercial → commercial, diferente → different. Portuguese doubles only rr and ss, so every other doubled letter in English has to be learned rather than guessed.

22. Silent letters

Portuguese pronounces nearly everything it writes, so silent letters feel arbitrary and get pronounced. The list is short enough to memorise outright.

The reverse also needs saying: Portuguese h is always silent, so students drop the English one in house and hello — and then, having been corrected, start adding it to words that begin with a vowel. Both directions need attention in the same lesson.

23. English collocations that feel strange

A collocation is a pairing of words that native speakers use together for no reason a learner can derive. Portuguese has its own pairings, and translating them produces English that is grammatical and audibly foreign. Most of the trouble traces back to three Portuguese verbs — fazer, tomar, and dar — which spread across many English verbs.

Teach these as fixed units rather than word by word. A student who has learned ask a question as a single item will never produce “make a question,” whereas one who has learned fazer = make will produce it forever.

24. Expressions that cannot be translated literally

Some Portuguese expressions have no English equivalent at all, and students need to be told so explicitly — otherwise they keep hunting for the word that does not exist.

• saudade — the famous one. English has no noun for it; students need the verb miss, or a phrase like I really miss home.
• jeitinho — the improvised workaround. A way around it gets close; the cultural meaning does not travel.
• cadê? — Where is…? There is no one-word English equivalent.
• chato — covers boring, annoying, and awkward. Students must pick one.
• pois é — an agreement noise. Yeah, exactly or I know depending on tone.
• fica à vontade — make yourself at home, help yourself, or feel free, depending on context.

Naming these as untranslatable is itself the lesson. It moves students from looking for a word to expressing an idea, which is the habit that eventually makes them fluent.

25. Phrasal verbs — and why Portuguese speakers avoid them

Phrasal verbs are the clearest place where the Latin head start becomes a liability. Faced with a choice, a Portuguese speaker reaches for the Latinate verb they already recognise — and produces English that is correct, comprehensible, and noticeably formal. Native speakers use the phrasal verb in almost every everyday context.

The other difficulty is that one verb plus different particles gives completely unrelated meanings, which feels arbitrary because Portuguese has nothing like it. Get is the standard demonstration:

Teach them in small themed batches rather than as a list, and push students to use them in speech even when the Latinate verb is available. The goal is not correctness — they already have that — it is sounding like someone having a conversation.

26. English idioms compared with Portuguese idioms

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be worked out from its individual words. Both languages have thousands, and comparing them is genuinely enjoyable for a class — students often find Portuguese has an idiom for the same idea, sometimes with an almost identical image, sometimes with one gloriously unrelated.

Same idea, similar image:

Same idea, different image:

The lesson to drive home: never translate an idiom word for word. Students should learn the idea each idiom expresses and match it to the equivalent expression in the other language — the images are there to be enjoyed, not converted.

27. British vs American vocabulary

English is not one target. British and American English differ in spelling, pronunciation, and — most visibly — everyday vocabulary. Neither is “more correct”; what matters is being consistent and knowing that the same object has two common names.

There is a geographical split worth knowing about here. Brazilian schools, media, and business lean heavily American — American spelling, American vocabulary, and American pronunciation models are the default, and most Brazilian students arrive already tuned to them. Portugal leans British, for reasons of proximity and European schooling. If you teach mixed Lusophone classes, that difference will show up in the first spelling test. Pick the variety that fits where the class is headed, keep it consistent, and make sure students can recognise the other.