Portuguese after Spanish: what carries over

If you already have Spanish, Portuguese is the shortest hop we can measure. Our A1 packs carry the same 617 English headwords into both languages, and for 303 of them the Spanish word and the Portuguese word sit within a small spelling distance of each other. Of those, 179 are the identical string once the accents come off. No other pair in our corpus gets near it: Spanish and Italian manage 178 at A1, Spanish and French 79. The head start is real and it is entirely on the page. It lands in reading. It stops at listening, and a handful of the words you recognise mean something else in Portuguese.

The closest pair in our corpus

The lead holds at A2, where 309 of 625 shared headwords are close and 165 are spelled the same. Mean distance across the whole A1 list is 0.352, against 0.489 for Spanish and Italian, where 0.0 is an exact match and 1.0 means the two forms put no letter in the same place.

The measure is spelling and nothing else. Both words are lower-cased, stripped of accents and punctuation, then compared by Levenshtein edit distance divided by the length of the longer form; at or below 0.25 counts as close. Spanish, Italian and Portuguese word overlap carries the method, the four-language matrix and our reason for never printing the lexical similarity percentage that circulates for this pair.

One thing needs clearing out of the way. The 617 shared headwords are a fact about us. We built one graded headword list and carried it into all six languages we ship, so the Spanish A1 pack and the Portuguese A1 pack cover the same concepts by construction. The 303 is the part nobody decided in advance.

Split it by our twelve themes and the resemblance moves in a way we did not expect.

People & Family more than doubles between the levels, and the reason is visible in the words. A1 holds the immediate family, which is exactly where the two languages went their own way: padre against pai, madre against mãe, hijo against filho, hermano against irmão, abuela against avó. A2 brings the extended family and the emotional adjectives, and those come back together: sobrino and sobrinho, nieto and neto, preocupado and preocupado. The words for the people you name first are the ones your Spanish does least for.

Greetings & Essentials refuses to move at all, 15 of 51 and then 15 of 50. It is the only theme in our lists where a Spanish speaker gets the same thin discount at both levels.

What the 179 identical words buy you

At A1, 179 of 617 arrive already written, and at A2, 165 of 625: animal, azul, entre, porque, cama, bolsa, grande, comprar, responder, bicicleta. Verbs are a large share of it, because the Spanish infinitive endings survive into Portuguese far more often than they survive into Italian.

What that buys is reading. A menu, a street sign, a form, a clause in a rental contract: you will take the gist from Portuguese text on day one, and the gist will usually be right. No other starting point we can measure hands a learner that much on the first morning.

Here is the qualification we would want if we were reading this page instead of writing it. Our measure strips accents before it compares, so a pair it calls identical is not always identical on the page. 19 of the 179 A1 pairs differ once the marks go back, and 24 of the 165 at A2.

Those marks do different jobs in the two languages. A Spanish written accent marks stress. Portuguese uses the acute and the circumflex to separate open vowels from close ones as well, and it writes nasal vowels with a tilde that Spanish orthography has no letter for. The difference our measure deletes is the difference that tells you how the word sounds.

Where the closeness hurts

A shared spelling scores 0.0 whether the two languages agree about what it means. Pooling A1 and A2, our Spanish and Portuguese lists teach nine spellings for different English headwords.

Three of those nine are one idea wearing two English labels rather than a real trap: barco graded as ship and boat, todo as all and every, felicidades as congratulations and best wishes. We drew that line by hand and someone else could draw it one row up or down. The other six cost you something. Largo is long in Spanish and wide in Portuguese. Doce is twelve in Spanish and sweet in Portuguese. Add an accent to mas and you leave Portuguese but for Spanish more.

Outside our graded lists the traps get worse, because they turn on country as well as meaning. Constipado in Brazil means constipated and the word for a cold is resfriado; cross to Portugal and constipado is exactly a cold. Pasta is a folder on a desk or a screen, and the food is massa. Senha covers both a password and the paper ticket that holds your place at a counter. Sobrenome is your surname in Brazil, while a Portuguese form asks for your apelido, which in Brazil is a nickname. Portuguese mistakes English speakers make has the rest of them.

Then there is the split our Portuguese collection declares up front. It is Brazilian first, with the European form in the note column, and that choice has a cost worth stating before you download anything. A bus is an ônibus or an autocarro. The toilet is a banheiro or a casa de banho, the menu a cardápio or an ementa, the phone a celular or a telemóvel. Our app packs use the Brazilian voice throughout. A reader learning for Lisbon gets the right sentence from us with the wrong noun inside it.

Listening is where the discount runs out

Our numbers say nothing at all about sound. There is no pronunciation data anywhere in this comparison, so any figure we put on the listening gap would be invented, and we are not going to invent one. What we can point at is the shape of the evidence.

Every measurement on this page was taken after the accents came off. Portuguese spelling uses those marks to carry information Spanish spelling does not carry, and stripping them turns mês into mes and irmão into irmao. A reader coming through Spanish does the same stripping in their head without being asked to, and arrives at a word nobody in São Paulo says. The measure and the learner share a blind spot, which is the most useful thing we can tell you about either.

The practical result is two skills that come apart. You can read a Brazilian news page in week one and lose a sentence spoken at normal speed in month six, and the reading keeps reporting that you are further along than you are. Plan around that from the first day: put the audio in front of yourself before the text talks you out of it. Our own audio is text to speech and the Portuguese voice is Brazilian, so it models one accent only.

What to do differently on day one

Four things, and none of them is the standard advice to open at A1 and work forward.

Skip the words you can already read. Greetings & Essentials is where our two lists agree least, 15 of 51 at A1 and 15 of 50 at A2, and People & Family at A1 sits at 10 of 35. Those are the first words out of your mouth in a shop, and they are the part Spanish withholds.

Read the false friends before the vocabulary. Nine spellings inside our own graded lists, and the collection notes on top of that. A Spanish speaker cannot catch these by reading carefully, because the whole trap is that the sentence reads correctly.

Pick a country before you learn a noun. Brazil or Portugal changes the bus, the toilet, the menu and the phone, and it changes which pronoun you reach for by default.

Turn the audio on for the words you think you know. The 179 identical A1 words are precisely the ones you will pronounce as Spanish for a year if nothing corrects you. In the app the phrase page plays an entry on tap where a clip exists, and once the charger automation is set up a word arrives on its own when the phone goes on charge, weighted towards whatever you have gone longest without hearing.

Where to start

The 500 Portuguese phrases you actually need is the fastest entry: 500 sentences grouped by the situations of a day, written by us, Brazilian first with the European variants in the note column. A Spanish speaker can read most of it on sight, which is the moment it becomes tempting to skip. Read the note column instead of the phrase column, at least on the first pass.

For the graded corpus, our Portuguese packs run A1 to C2 inside the 33,233-entry set, and the counts by level and theme sit on Portuguese corpus statistics.

If Portuguese is competing with something rather than following Spanish, Spanish or Italian: which to learn first runs this same measure over a pair where the answer comes out much less decided.

Common questions

Is Portuguese easy if you know Spanish?

Easier to read, on our numbers. 303 of the 617 A1 headwords our lists share have Spanish and Portuguese words within a small spelling distance, and 179 are the identical string once accents come off, which is the highest of any pair in our corpus. It says nothing about listening or speaking, neither of which our packs measure.

How long does Portuguese take after Spanish?

We have no data on that and we publish no figure for it. What we can say is which part of the work the Spanish covers, which is recognising written words, and which part it leaves untouched, which is everything you do with your ears and your mouth.

Should a Spanish speaker learn Brazilian or European Portuguese?

Decide by where you are going, because the split sits in the words you need in the first hour. A bus is an onibus in Brazil and an autocarro in Portugal, the toilet a banheiro or a casa de banho, the phone a celular or a telemovel. Our phrase collection is Brazilian first with the European form in the note, and our app audio is the Brazilian voice.

What are the worst false friends between Spanish and Portuguese?

Inside our A1 and A2 lists there are nine shared spellings with different English headwords, and six of them are real traps: largo is long in Spanish and wide in Portuguese, doce is twelve and sweet, aula is the classroom and the class, bolso is a purse and a pocket, escritorio is a desk and an office, and mas is but in Portuguese while mas with an accent is more in Spanish.