Pai, mãe, filho

The family words are the easy half of this session. The hard half is the words Brazilians use for everyone else, because those are the ones a dictionary gets politely wrong.

The family

pai is father and mãe is mother. filho is son, and the plural filhos covers children of either sex, the same way Spanish hijos does. irmão is brother, and irmãos is brothers or siblings. família is family, and it is a word Brazilians lean on: a great deal of conversation starts and ends with it.

homem is man and mulher is woman. Mulher is also the everyday word for wife, so minha mulher is my wife, not my woman. Context does the sorting.

Friends and titles

amigo is friend. garota is girl, and in Brazil it stretches comfortably to a young woman in her twenties. querido is dear, and it turns up both at the top of a letter and in the middle of an affectionate sentence.

senhor is sir, mister, or simply the polite form of you when speaking to an older man. O senhor quer café? is a courteous way to ask a man whether he wants coffee, and it is still very much alive.

The words for everyone else

pessoa is person. It is grammatically feminine whoever it describes, so a man is still uma pessoa.

gente is people, and it is the word that most changes how you sound. A gente means we, and in spoken Brazilian Portuguese it has largely pushed nós aside. It takes a third person singular verb: a gente vai is we are going. Learn this early, because you will hear it constantly.

pessoal is the folks or the gang, as in oi, pessoal, hi everyone. As an adjective it means personal.

cara is guy. It is informal, it is everywhere, and it doubles as a filler: cara, que dia is roughly man, what a day.

Somebody and nobody

alguém is somebody and ninguém is nobody. Portuguese is happy to double its negatives, so não vi ninguém is I did not see anybody, with no hint of contradiction.

Put together, these words let a learner say who was there, who was not, and who they were to each other, which is most of what a story needs.