Portuguese phrases for tourists: the taxi and the tasca

You have a flight to Lisbon and a date on it. Between now and then you want enough Portuguese to stop yourself from pointing at a menu and saying the English word louder, and that is a narrower job than the one most language apps are built around.

You are not after fluency. You want to be polite, you want to be understood at a counter, and you do not want to be that tourist. The situations are easy to name because you have already pictured them: a tasca at nine in the evening with no English menu, a taxi from the airport where you need to say where to stop, check-in at an apartment where the host speaks fast, a pharmacy where pointing is genuinely not enough.

If you abandoned a streak app somewhere around day 180, it was probably not laziness. It was the arithmetic. A tree of vocabulary that does not know you leave in six weeks will teach you the plural of owl long before it teaches you how to ask for the bill. What you need is the opposite order: the lines a short trip spends, in the order it spends them, practised out loud until your mouth stops hesitating.

Sort the set into three jobs and it stops feeling like a language and starts feeling like a packing list.

The courtesies you will say forty times a day

Bom dia, por favor, desculpe when you are in someone's way, obrigado if you are a man and obrigada if you are a woman. None of it is impressive. All of it is the difference between a transaction and a greeting, and it is the first thing a short trip actually spends.

The transactions

A table for two at the door of a tasca, which in Phrazl's Portuguese restaurant set reads Uma mesa para dois, por favor. Stopping the taxi where you meant to, which in the transport set reads Pare aqui, por favor. These are not conversation starters, they are instructions, and they work on the first day of the trip rather than the tenth.

The repairs

The phrase that earns its keep is the one you reach for when the first one fails: say that again more slowly, I did not understand, I am still learning. Most travellers rehearse the order and forget the reply, then freeze at the part they did not plan.

And the part a written list cannot teach you

Portuguese written down and Portuguese in the air are not the same thing. Unstressed vowels get swallowed, and the spelling gives you almost no warning about it, which is why reading a list of phrases quietly on a plane does so little. So every phrase in the trip pack carries audio you can hear at speed or slowed, with a written pronunciation guide beside it. The voice is synthesised, and the app says so on the screen rather than implying a recording booth was involved. If native-speaker recordings are the thing you are shopping for, that is not what you would be buying today.

The same three-step setup runs for every destination in the selector, and this pillar has a page for the ones people search hardest. Spanish phrases for tourists covers the twenty you spend first in Spain. Basic French before Paris works through what a four-day trip actually uses. Greek phrases for tourists goes at ferries, tavernas and the pharmacy, and German phrases for tourists at platforms, check-in and the bill. Japanese phrases for tourists deals with the sounds you want in your mouth before Narita. Italian phrases for restaurants takes one scenario end to end, from ordering to paying. Emergency phrases in Thai goes further into the scenario this page only mentions in passing, including why it is better rehearsed in advance than searched for at the time. If you want the plain list of what is covered, the languages and destinations page has it.