Learn Portuguese

Learn Portuguese and join the conversation with over 220 million native speakers across the globe. From Portugal to Brazil to Mozambique, learning Portuguese will expand your world more broadly in business and in culture. As the ninth most powerful language in the world, Portuguese speakers, also called “Lusophones,” are nicely situated among the likes of other economic heavyweights like German and Japanese (ranking seventh and eighth, respectively). Speaking Portuguese gives you access to the millions of Lusophones who are fluent in the second most-spoken Romance language in the world.

English speakers will find that learning Portuguese is not as difficult to learn as it sounds. Portuguese grammar and sentence structures are simplified compared to English, and many Portuguese language learners find that the Portuguese accent is easier to produce than a Spanish accent. English and Portuguese also share deep Latin roots. Because of these shared origins, you’ll quickly discover that many words sound similar to English and have the same meaning—also called cognates. These cognates can give you a huge advantage when it comes to speaking Portuguese quickly and confidently.

Take this sentence for example: “Animais não são permitidos no restaurante.” The sentence is made up almost entirely of Portuguese-English cognates. Let’s break it down.

Animais / Animals

não são / are not

permitidos / allowed (permitted)

no / at the

restaurante / restaurant

If we put it all together, we have, “Animals are not allowed in the restaurant.”

Not only is Portuguese relatively quick to pick up and begin speaking, understanding it gives you a huge advantage in understanding other Romance languages like French, Italian, and Spanish.

At Rosetta Stone, we understand that the goal of learning Portuguese is to feel confident enough to speak the language and to understand it in real-world situations. That’s why our Portuguese program focuses on learning both spoken and written Brazilian Portuguese in context, using audio and visual cues to help build a language learning program that gets you speaking Portuguese from the very first lesson.