Practice your greetings!🗣️

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Olá, Bom Dia! In an earlier lesson, we covered some of the most common greetings in Portuguese. In this lesson, you can practice saying them yourself and get immediate feedback! No worries if it comes up wrong, just try again. If you finish them and want to start over, refresh the page. Let me know how it went and if you have questions here.

IMPORTANT: The Speak the Words feature is only supported in browsers that implement the Web Speech API – Chrome browsers, except on iOS. You need a microphone to answer the question.

If it’s still not working on your Android phone, try these steps before trying again.

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*Cultural tip down below regarding how to say Good Evening in Portuguese

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*If you wanted to be informal, you would change consigo to contigo.

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“Yes, everything is well with me.”

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Introductions

Como se chama? (What’s your name – formal)

Como te chamas? (What’s your name – informal)

Chamo-me Filomena. (I’m called/my name is Filomena)

Muito Prazer means “lots of pleasure” and it’s appropriate to say whenever you want to say “Pleasure to meet you.” (for the 1st time).

An alternative to this is:

Prazer em conhecê-lo” (literally: Pleasure in to meet you)

Pronunciation Guide

  • Bom,
    Bem,
    Sim
    The om in bom the em in bem and the im in sim are great examples of Portuguese nasal vowels/sounds.
    In nasal sounds, the final m isn’t quite fully pronounced, in other words, we don’t close our lips as you would when pronouncing the letter m.
  • Estás, 
    estou, 
    adeus At the end of a word and before consonants s sounds like sh.

Grammar notes

  • Obrigado, obrigada
    In Portuguese, everything and everyone (people, things and places) has a grammatical gender: they are either masculine (m) or feminine (f).
    Many masculine words end in o and feminine words often end in a. Likewise, the word for thanks is obrigado when said by a man, or obrigada when said by a woman.

Related reading

Cultural tip

In Portuguese, people use the expressions Bom dia, Boa tarde and Boa noite both when saying hello and goodbye, as in Olá, bom dia (Hello, good morning) or Adeus, boa tarde (“Goodbye and good afternoon to you”)
For good evening, boa tarde is used before it gets dark and boa noite after the sun sets. Read more details about greetings in Portuguese in my lesson Hello in Portuguese.

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