Is Portuguese hard to learn? No. Portuguese is one of the easiest languages to learn (if you already speak English —which we’ll assume given that you are reading this).
Let’s start by looking at the Portuguese version of that question:
| Language | Sentence |
|---|---|
| English | Is Portuguese a hard language to learn? |
| Brazilian Portuguese |
Português é uma língua difícil de aprender? |
| European Portuguese |
O português é uma língua difícil de aprender? |
The first thing you notice is that Brazilian Portuguese differs from European Portuguese (more on that in a minute).
The second thing you notice is that some Portuguese words, although different from their English translations, are still recognizable because of their similarity to related English words. For instance:
| Portuguese Word | English Translation | Related English Words |
|---|---|---|
| aprender | to learn | apprentice |
| língua | language | linguistics |
The distance between Portugal and Brazil is about 4,500 miles, so it’s not surprising that the Portuguese spoken in Brazil differs from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal.
When you start learning Portuguese, you have to choose between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese.
Brazilian Portuguese has about twenty times more native speakers than European Portuguese (approximately 200 million versus 10 million).
That’s why many people, particularly those who live in the United States, choose to learn Brazilian Portuguese rather than European Portuguese.
When you look at the thousand most common Portuguese words, you notice that quite a few of them are similar to their English translations. Here are some examples:
| Portuguese | English |
|---|---|
| sociedade | society |
| participação | participation |
| energia | energy |
| população | population |
| situação | situation |
| serviço | service |
| competência | competence |
| origem | origin |
Words like these, which are similar in Portuguese and English, naturally make it easier to learn Portuguese when you already know English.
The reason there are so many similar words in Portuguese and English is because both languages have lots of words that come from Latin.
Portuguese evolved from Latin. That’s why it’s one of the Romance languages (alongside Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, and other ones that are less widely spoken). It also explains why so much of Portuguese vocabulary comes from Latin.
English also has plenty of vocabulary words that come from Latin. But English did not evolve from Latin. What happened is that English got most of its Latin-based vocabulary words from French.
A lot of these words entered the English language after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 when the Normans (who spoke a dialect of French) invaded England. For quite some time afterward, French became the language of the elites in England.
During that period, many French words entered the English language.
Portuguese is a much easier language to learn than Latin (even though Portuguese evolved from Latin).
Portuguese has two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine), whereas Latin has three (the third is called “neuter”).
If you were to guess the gender of a Portuguese word, you would have a one in two chance of getting it right (versus a one out of three chance in Latin). This means you would be 50% more likely to guess correctly in Portuguese compared to Latin.
Another thing that makes Portuguese easier to learn is that the grammatical case declensions that exist in Latin have disappeared from Portuguese (except for personal pronouns, but English works the same way).
The following table shows the effect of grammatical cases on the Latin word “fīlius” (which means “son”) and the corresponding Portuguese word. Notice how the Portuguese word keeps the same ending.
| Case | Latin | Portuguese |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | fīlius | filho |
| Accusative | fīlium | filho |
| Genitive | fīliī | filho |
| Dative | fīliō | filho |
| Ablative | fīliō | filho |
| Vocative | fīli | filho |
Spanish and Portuguese are very close in terms of the vocabulary. So, if you already know some Spanish, then learning Portuguese becomes even easier.
In linguistics, there is a value called lexical similarity, which measures how close two languages are in terms of their vocabulary.
This value ranges from 0 to 1. A value of 0 indicates that the two languages have no words in common, and a value of 1 indicates a complete overlap between the vocabulary of the two languages.
The lexical similarity between Portuguese and Spanish is 0.89, which is a very high value.
For comparison, the lexical similarity between Portuguese and French is 0.75, and between German and English (which are both Germanic languages), the value is 0.60.
Lexical similarity values greater than 0.85 often indicate that the two languages are dialects rather than separate languages. Although Portuguese and Spanish are separate languages and not dialects, their vocabulary is very closely related.
An affinity for Brazilian or Portuguese culture can make it easier to learn Portuguese.
Perhaps you enjoy Brazilian music (like Samba, Bossa Nova, or Forró) or Portuguese music genres (like Fado and Pimba).
As your Portuguese skills progress, you can start reading novels in Portuguese, like The Alchemist by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho.
The Alchemist has become an international bestseller, and many people read the English translation without knowing that the original text was in Portuguese.
Those who prefer watching videos can increase their exposure to the Portuguese language while watching some Brazilian telenovelas or Portuguese-language movies.
There are plenty of Portuguese-language movies, such as those by the Brazilian film director Kleber Mendonça Filho or those by the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes.
The large number of people who speak Portuguese means a lot of Portuguese language media and cultural content —which learners can use to immerse themselves in the Portuguese language.