Introducing yourself in Portuguese

Level A1

Introducing yourself in Portuguese

This lesson gets you through your first conversation with a Brazilian: your name, your age, where you're from and what you do. With friends and people your own age you say você, and with someone older or a customer you say o senhor (to a man) or a senhora (to a woman), with the same verb form as você. Brazilians often drop "I", so "Sou estudante" is just "I'm a student".

Four words for meeting people

Your name: Meu nome é…

MeunomeéAna

Your age: Tenho vinte anos, literally "I have twenty years"

Tenhovinteanos.

Where you're from: Sou do Brasil

Soudo Brasil

"From" is de, do or da

In Portuguese, most country names come with "the": o Brasil, a França, o Japão. So do some states, like o Texas. "From" is de, and it merges with that "the": de + o makes do, de + a makes da.

So you say "Sou do Brasil" but "Sou da França", and English gives you no clue which one to pick, so learn each country with its article. Most cities take no article, so you keep plain de: "Sou de Recife", "de Osaka".

Your nationality: Sou brasileiro

Soubrasileiro

Nationalities — no capital letter

Brasileiro or brasileira? Words that change for women

Nationalities and many job words have one form for a man and one for a woman. A man says "Sou brasileiro", a woman says "Sou brasileira"; the same goes for médico and médica, professor and professora, japonês and japonesa.

For more than one person, add -s: brasileiros. Words in -ês change a little more, so japonês becomes japoneses. Some words, like estudante, are the same for a man and a woman.

Also unlike English, these words take a small letter: "Ela é francesa", never "Francesa".

Your job: Sou professor

Souprofessor

No "a" before a job

English says "I'm a teacher", with "a". Portuguese leaves it out: "Sou professor", "Minha mãe é médica". Saying "Sou um professor" sounds odd to a Brazilian, so drop the article whenever you just say what someone does.

The question "O que você faz?", literally "What do you do?", is the plain way to ask about someone's job. Portuguese has no helper "do" for questions: in a yes-or-no question you keep the statement's word order and let your voice rise at the end, as in "Sua irmã ainda é estudante?"

Four jobs

Ana meets Kenji

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