Summary: A few well-pronounced words and phrases make a surprising impact
Note: To anyone who knows Portuguese, I apologize for any mistakes I make in this post. I welcome your comments and corrections!
I started with good intentions.
In the past when preparing to travel, I’d make a concerted effort to learn some basic words and phrases as well as basic pronunciation. Often, I’d pick up a phrase book and practice learning the basics.
For this trip, I went so far as to purchase a stack of Pimsleur European Portuguese conversational language CDs as well as a deck of Lingo Portuguese language playing cards.
My wife did some online language lessons only to realize too late that she was learning Brazilian Portuguese.
Alas, work, life, sloth, whatever — I found myself flying across the Atlantic with vocabulary limited pretty much to “hello” and “thank you.” (“olá” and “obrigado,” respectively).
Fortunately for us, the vast majority of people we met in Portugal knew at least some English. There were only a couple rideshare drivers and a shopkeeper here or there that could not speak English. A quick usage of a translating app on my phone got us through those infrequent situations.
I felt bad about arriving so linguistically ill-prepared, but I decided the least I could do was to improve my pronunciation as best as I could for what little I did know and later would learn.
I had heard from someone that any word ending with “o” should be pronounced “oo.” So the city of Porto should be pronounced (“Por-Too”) and thank you (“obrigado” if you are a male) should be pronounced “oh-bri-ga-doo.”
An additional challenge with European Portuguese is that many of the written letters are not voiced. In contrast, I heard that Brazilian Portuguese has simplified its spelling to be phonetic like Spanish and German.
Learning One Phrase
I decided to look up one phrase using the Deepl app on my phone (I prefer Deepl to Google Translate). I wanted to know how to say, “we our on our honeymoon.” Deepl reported the translation as “estamos em lua de mel.”
Listening to the audio pronunciation, the dropped/skipped letters made it sound like:
“SHTAH-moes eh-LOO-a d’MELL.”
I first drilled it into my head using this mnemonic device:
“(John) Stamos (K)ahlua (Cecil B.) DeMille”
I shared this memory device with my wife, who later tried to recall it, but hilariously came up with “Tony Danza….???”
The Power Of One Phrase
Mastering this one phrase served us well.
People we met were already friendly and welcoming, but whenever my wife or I would utter this phrase, their eyes would light up and the enthusiasm bubble over. Several restaurants gave us complimentary flutes of sparkling wine with our dinner, and twice we found chilled bottles of sparkling wine awaiting us in our hotel rooms.
Simply saying “olá,” (hello), “bom dia” (good morning), or “boa noite” (“boy noit” – good evening) was enough to stop locals from immediately pegging us as English speakers.
If we said “estamos em lua de mel,” however, they assumed we were fluent and often barreled forward in Portuguese. I’d have to sheepishly admit that this phrase constituted about 50% of my Portuguese vocabulary, but it made me feel proud every time they told us our pronunciation was really good.
On one of the last days of our trip, we were in a baking supply store buying little cups needed to make pastéis de nata, the famous Portuguese egg cream tarts.
I spoke the phrase to the lady at the counter, and she launched into Portuguese. I had to stop her and admit the severe limits of my language proficiency. She responded that my wife and I were speaking better Portuguese than immigrants from the UK, Ukraine, or Russia who had been in Portugal for three years. That was sobering and disappointing to hear.
The Portuguese are warm and welcoming, and they have a great history of exploration (and yes, colonization). I want to return to Portugal, and when I do, I will prepare much more to show my appreciation and respect through their language.
Blatant Calm 