E, mas, ou

Mesmo is the word that best explains why this session exists. A dictionary offers same, even, really, self, right. All five are correct, and which one applies depends entirely on where the word sits in the sentence and what it is leaning on.

These are the words a hundred-word course is made of, because they are the words Portuguese is made of.

The joiners

e is and. ou is or. mas is but. porque is because, and in Brazilian writing you will also meet it as por que in a question, which is the same word doing the interrogative job.

entao is so or then, and it does an enormous amount of conversational work: starting a sentence, resuming one, signalling a conclusion, filling a pause. It is one of the first words that makes a learner sound like a speaker rather than a reader.

Already, still, and the pair that does the heavy lifting

ja and ainda are worth learning together. Ja is already, and it also carries a sense of now or right away that English has to spell out. Ainda is still or yet.

Between them they handle a great deal of what English does with its perfect tenses, which is one reason Portuguese can be comfortable with simpler verb forms than a textbook suggests.

The ones that shade the sentence

tambem is also. so is only. assim is like this, or thus. talvez is perhaps, and it drags a subjunctive along behind it when it comes first in the sentence, which is a beginner's earliest encounter with that mood.

nunca is never and sempre is always. Nunca behaves the way Italian and Spanish negatives do: Portuguese is comfortable with more than one negative element in a sentence, and stacking them intensifies rather than cancels.

None of this is learned from a list. It is learned by meeting the words often enough that the wrong one starts to sound wrong.