Learn Swedish from Brazilian Portuguese at PBC Languages
Learn Swedish from Brazilian Portuguese at PBC Languages: small group classes with native teachers and free 1:1 exchanges, half Swedish, half Portuguese.
Create your free accountNo card needed. Exchanges between members are always free.
The first wall for a Brazilian Portuguese speaker learning Swedish is the sounds. The 'sj' sound in words like sjö (lake) or the 'tj' in tjej (girl) and kött (meat) don't exist in Portuguese, and most people default to a 'ch' or 'x' sound that Swedes clearly hear as foreign. On top of that, Swedish vowel length changes meaning (a short or long vowel can turn one word into another), and the pitch accent that makes anden mean 'the duck' or 'the spirit' depending on the tone is something Portuguese simply doesn't train your ear for.
Then come the false friends. Sex in Swedish means six, not sexo. Novell is a short story, not a novela. Kaka is a cookie, and yes, it sounds exactly like the informal Portuguese word for poop, which every Brazilian in our groups laughs about at least once. On the flip side, words like restaurang, universitet, fabrik or polis are close enough to restaurante, universidade, fábrica and polícia that you can guess them on sight, which speeds up reading a lot faster than with, say, Finnish or Russian.
Where Brazilians tend to mess up structure is word order. Swedish is V2: the verb has to sit in second position, and inside subordinate clauses inte (not) jumps before the verb instead of after. Portuguese speakers keep the SVO habit from home and end up with sentences like jag inte vet instead of jag vet inte. The upside: Swedish verbs don't conjugate by person, so once you learn jag är, du är, han är, that pattern holds for every verb you'll ever use, and that alone removes a whole layer of memorization Portuguese speakers are used to fighting.
Words you will actually hear
| Here | Elsewhere | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| sex | sexo | Sex means six in Swedish, not sex. Say sex år (six years) with a straight face, nobody blinks. |
| novell | novela | A novell is a short story. What Brazilians call novela (the soap opera) is TV-serie in Swedish. |
| kaka | caca | Kaka is a cookie or cake. It sounds identical to the informal Portuguese word for poop, so context matters. |
| aula | aula | Aula exists in both, but in Swedish it's the physical lecture hall; in Portuguese it's the class itself. |
| fabrik | fábrica | Same Latin root, same meaning: factory. One of the easiest words to guess on sight. |
| polis | polícia | Both mean police. The spelling is close enough that you'll recognize it in a headline right away. |
| familj | família | Family in both languages, near-identical spelling and pronunciation. |
| restaurang | restaurante | Restaurant in both. The Swedish spelling with -ng at the end is the only real difference. |
| universitet | universidade | University in both, another shared Latin root that makes reading Swedish easier from day one. |
| glass | gelo | Glass means ice cream in Swedish, not ice, but the sound overlap with gelo helps you remember it's cold and related to ice. |
How it works here
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Sign up and say your level
Two minutes. If you do not know your level, we place you in the first class.
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Pick a class or an exchange
Classes are led by a native teacher. An exchange is with another member: half the time in their language, half in yours.
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Join by video, nothing to install
From your phone or your computer. If you cannot make it, cancel and get your place back.
Questions about this
How long does it take a Brazilian Portuguese speaker to hold a basic conversation in Swedish?
It depends entirely on how often you practice speaking, not just study grammar. What we see in our groups is that people who combine a weekly class with regular one-on-one exchanges start forming full sentences noticeably faster than those who only study alone. There's no fixed number of weeks we can promise, it's about hours of real spoken practice.
Is the one-on-one exchange actually free?
Yes. You spend half an hour speaking Swedish with a native Swedish speaker who wants to practice Portuguese, then you switch and spend half an hour helping them with their Portuguese. Nobody pays, you're trading time and language, not money.
What level of Swedish do I need before joining?
For the small group classes with native teachers, complete beginners are welcome, that's the whole point of starting there. For the one-on-one exchange, it helps to have at least a handful of basic phrases so the half hour in Swedish isn't just silence, but plenty of members start their exchanges very early on.
How exactly is the time split during the exchange?
Thirty minutes in Swedish, thirty minutes in Portuguese, split down the middle every session. You're not there to translate for each other the whole hour, each half is dedicated to one language so both people get real practice.
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