Core vocabulary

This is the fixed word list. Almost every example sentence in this handbook is built only from these words. Anything outside the list is marked [+] where it appears.

The point is not that these are the 150 most frequent words in Portuguese. The point is that if the grammar changes and the vocabulary does not, you meet conta, pegar, chave and perto several hundred times across twenty chapters instead of once each. You learn the grammar and the words, without spending attention on either separately.

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30 core verbs

First: the three verb families

Every Portuguese verb ends in -ar, -er, or -ir. Those last two letters are the whole classification system, and they determine which endings the verb takes in every tense.

Two things make this much easier than it looks:

1. -er and -ir verbs take identical endings in every form you will produce. They differ only in the nós form, which you are not producing (ch. 03). So there are effectively two patterns, not three.
2. The eu form of the present always ends in -o. falo, como, abro. No exceptions in the regular verbs, and almost none in the irregulars.

Chapter 07 gives the present-tense endings. Chapter 28 is a full conjugation reference for all thirty verbs below.

The list

The F column is the family. The R column marks whether the verb is regular (R), irregular (I), or spelling-changed only (s — a letter shifts to preserve the sound, but nothing real is irregular).

Count: 16 -ar, 11 -er, 3 -ir. Twelve irregular, and they are the twelve most useful verbs in the language — which is why irregularity survives at all: only high-frequency verbs get to be irregular.

The ten in bold do most of the work. If you conjugate only those ten, you can build most of what you need using the modal pattern in chapter 10.

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Core nouns

Gender is listed because it controls the article and every adjective attached to it. Learn the article with the noun, never the noun alone. This handbook always writes a conta, never conta.

Food and drink

Money

Home and objects

Places

Travel

Devices

Time

People

Health

Abstract

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24 core adjectives

Listed in the masculine. Feminine and plural forms follow the rules in chapter 20.

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Function words

These are not "vocabulary" — they are the skeleton. They appear in every chapter.

Pronouns

Articles

Prepositions

Connectors

Question words

Quantity and degree

Place and time adverbs

Note on aí: it literally means there, near you — the middle distance between aqui (here, by me) and lá (over there). Portuguese has three distances where English has two. This literal meaning is why Espera aí means hang on (literally "wait there") and why aí works as a narrative connector meaning and then. See chapters 17 and 18.

Yes, no, and the essentials

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How to drill this list

Do not memorise the list top to bottom. It is organised for lookup, not for learning.

Instead: read chapter 03 onward and let the examples do it. Each grammar chapter is roughly forty sentences built from these words. By chapter 12 you will have seen a conta in a statement, a question, a negation, a past tense, a request, and a comparison. That is what fixes a word — the same word in six different shapes, not the same word on six different flashcards.

Come back to this chapter only when an example uses a word you have lost. For verb forms, go to chapter 28.