In Brazil they speak Portuguese.  In fact they are the only country in the Americas that has Portuguese as their only official language.  This is a language that I'm still learning every day.

Gestures

Take the gesture test!  Can you figure out what these gestures mean?

Big list of Brazilian Swear Words

In this list we have 358 ways to say Penis and 230 ways to say copulate!  There's more than 2,000 words in total!

Portugal versus Brazil

The Portuguese spoken and written in Portugal is quite different from the Portuguese spoken and written in Brazil.  The basic difference, I feel, is that the Portuguese have tried to preserve their language and the Brazilians have freely changed and simplified the language.

For example, Tu (2nd person singular) and Vos (2nd person plural) are no longer used in Brazil.  This is great for me since there's less verb conjugations for me to memorize!  Even Nós (1st person plural) is disappearing from spoken Portuguese and being replaced with A gente and uses the conjugation of the 3rd person singular.  So instead of six ways of conjugating a verb (Eu, Tu, Ele/Elas, Nós, Vós, Eles/Elas) you can get by with just three (Eu, Ele/Elas/Você/A gente, Eles/Elas/Vocês).

Originally, I though that você had it's origins from vós but that's not true.  It actually has its origins from the phrase "Estou à nossa mercê", loosly translated to "at your service".  Here's what happened to the expression

Pois What?

The word Pois is used in an interesting way here in Brazil. My dictionary says it's the adverb of Portanto which means "so", or "therefore".   But here are some, more common usages: