Who else wants to start speaking Brazilian Portuguese with confidence?
Put down those boring text books! Say goodbye to endless hours of toil with boring materials.
Follow along with these fun to watch videos and watch as your culture and language abilities improve!
Hi friend,
I remember just a few years ago I was in the same position you were in.
I had just arrived in Brazil and I was overwhelmed by how new and foreign everything was to me.
I was excited to be in Brazil and to be experiencing a country I had dreamed about visiting for a long time. At the same time, the reality of being a foreigner who couldn’t communicate even his basic needs started to weigh on me.
The first few days were especially rough, as I had absolutely no Portuguese vocabulary that I could communicate with. I had to rely on broken bits of Portuguese that I had gotten from listening to audio lessons to try to do simple things like ordering my first bowl of açaí from a corner juice shop.
I remember walking around, feeling like everyone had their eyes on me while simultaneously being terrified that someone would ask me a question or engage me in some way.
The people that I met seemed nice enough, but I just didn’t know what to say to them. I was afraid of embarrassing myself in front of other people.
It took a tremendous amount of energy for me to just get my basic needs met.
The first time I ordered a bottle of water, I was on a boat that had left in the Amazon jungle. I knew the word for water was “Agua,” so I said that to the woman at the shop.
Her response, “É dois,” (2 Reais) almost gave me a heart attack.
It seems silly to say that now, but back then I was so uncomfortable with speaking with Brazilians because they would always say things that I didn’t understand, and I felt like I was supposed to have all of the answers.
I wasn’t comfortable being a beginner, and I wasn’t comfortable making mistakes. On the inside I was a mess of emotions, but I tried to keep anyone from seeing that. I summoned up whatever Portuguese I had and sent the words to my mouth, hoping that I said the right thing that would get the response I needed.
It worked. One situation at a time I was able to build up my confidence and gain new conversational abilities. But there was a tremendous amount of time and energy I had to expend just to say simple things.
Every time I needed to have one of my basic needs met, I would meticulously plan what I was going to do and say as if it were a military operation.
For example, once I figured out that I could pick which fruits I wanted in my juice, it became my mission to get my juice made the way I wanted.
I studied the vocabulary I needed in order to get my juice, then I went out and ordered it. My reward was a delicious and freshly blended juice made with the fruits I wanted and without the extra sugar that would be bad news for my belly.
It took a bit of time, but the mission was a success. I got the juice I wanted and more importantly I started to feel more confident in speaking Portuguese with actual Brazilians.
Piece by piece I started to build up my language abilities. I started out with the situations I encountered every day, refining my approach every time I got to put to use something that I had already practiced.
It was a continual process of trial and error, success and failure, but through persistence and a willingness to put myself out into the unknown, I was able to gain enough Portuguese to be able to get around without having to have someone else there to hold my hand.
One of the best feelings in the world is being able to go to a restaurant and order exactly what you want without needing Google Translate or a Brazilian friend there to help you out. It’s a tremendous relief to be able to achieve that milestone after weeks of struggling with the language.
The waiters and shopkeepers I met were relieved too. Initially when they saw that I was a foreigner they would get uncomfortable, but that discomfort would turn to relief once they heard me speaking. It was as if the burden of talking to an adult child had been lifted off of their shoulders and they got to act normal around me.
Situations that used to make me feel scared and uncomfortable soon started to give me a feeling of empowerment and confidence. In a few short weeks I was able to go from needing other people to do all of the work for me to being able to take care of myself.
The more that I learned, the easier it became to learn new words and phrases. I was able to take on greater challenges until a few months later I was speaking fluently.
As time went on and I spent more and more time in Brazil, I kept meeting foreigners who had just arrived and were struggling with the same problems that I once had. After hearing enough of their frustrated stories, I decided to start showing them how to do things the right way.
At first I would show people around in person. When newcomers would arrive in town I would walk around town with them introducing them to the terrain and explaining how things worked at restaurants, bus stops, convenience stores, etc.
The great thing about living in Brazil is that once you master how to speak and act in a certain set of situations, you can travel to anywhere in the country and get along just fine. The same language and cultural rules apply to a snack bar, whether it’s in Rio de Janeiro or Salvador, Bahia.
It’s a huge milestone to accomplish that, but until you do, the challenges of daily life in Brazil can be frustrating.
With the gringos that I met and took on tours around Brazilian cities I was able to give them what they needed in terms of language and cultural understanding in order to be able to do what they wanted to do on their own the next time they came back to one of those places.
Actually being able to speak in those situations with something approaching what a Brazilian would say is something that takes a bit longer, and there’s no shortcut to actually going out and practicing the language with real life people.
The biggest advantage that I was able to give them ahead of other gringos who would attempt to move to Brazil without this type of guidance is that they had the confidence to know that what they were saying was the right thing to say, and they had real life validation via my performance that it was indeed possible for a foreigner to go into that situation and speak fluent Portuguese.
Usually what would happen after our first encounter is that I’d get a message a few days later saying that they went back and did it by themselves, but they had a question about how to say something specific.
They would want to know which words to use, how to order their requests in a sentence, and if it was possible to say something that they had found on Google Translate.
Now don’t get me wrong, Google Translate can be incredibly useful for translating the odd word here and there, but there’s a lot of cultural wisdom that Google hasn’t been able to input into their software. If you rely on it too much you’ll sound strange.
There’s a unique flow to handling yourself in Brazilian conversations that has to be discovered for yourself. You won’t really know what that means until you start interacting in Portuguese for yourself.
Suffice to say, when people would email me with more questions, what I really wanted to do was go out there into the city and walk them through it again so that they could really get it.
As much as I wanted to help out my friends though, I started getting busier and simply didn’t have the time to be able to offer them that kind of 1-1 attention.
Eventually what I decided to do was to make an online course that would contain everything that I had learned about speaking Portuguese to navigate the daily challenges of living in Brazil so that I could share that knowledge with my friends without me having to explain it to each of them individually.
That course is called the Survival 15, and will help you achieve proficiency in the 15 most common situations that I’ve seen foreigners go through when they come to Brazil.
This is a 100% online interactive video course and is designed to teach you the most essential Portuguese phrases you’ll need to know when you come to Brazil.
For each of these 15 situations you receive a number of different videos that give you everything you need to become self sufficient in those situations.
Here’s what each module looks like:
Cultural Breakdown – You get started by being introduced to that situation and what to expect when you’re in it. Major differences about Brazilian culture are pointed out here. Everything you’d need to know in order to avoid embarrassing yourself or being caught off guard by something unexpected is pointed out here.
Video Walk Through – Once you understand what’s happening in that situation, I go through the motions and teach you how to behave by way of example.
Exact scripts of what I say, what the Brazilians say, and other common phrases and expressions that you might say in that situation are included in this section.
You’ll be able to take what you learn here and go out into the streets and use it the same day if you wish.
PDF’s are included of each section so that you can print them out and study them just before you go to use them.
Pronunciation Breakdown – My friend Viviane breaks down each word that is used in the videos syllable by syllable so that you can train how to speak them properly.
Brazilian Portuguese is often challenging to foreigners because there are a number of sounds that are used in Portuguese that we don’t use in English. For example the nasal sound is extremely difficult for foreigners to pull off on the first try, and it usually takes a lot of practice before they’re able to get their mouths to make that sound.
Learning how to properly pronounce words in Portuguese takes time. With these pronunciation break down videos you’ll be able to practice in the comfort of your home before you go out and use those words in conversation.
Pronunciation Feedback – As an added feature to allow you to increase your confidence in speaking Portuguese, we’ve added a mechanism for you to upload your own audios to get feedback from a Brazilian Portuguese teacher on how to improve your pronunciation until you get it right.
Over time I’ve observed that as much as one studies on their own, until they actually get validation from a Brazilian Portuguese teacher that they’re pronouncing things properly they will wonder if they’re actually saying things properly or if people are just being nice to them. No more of that. Upload your audios, get feedback from a teacher and know exactly where you stand.
Confidence In Your Speaking Skills For
If you wanted to hire a teacher to get you up to speed on this material, you’d be looking at paying between $20 and $50 an hour for classes, and it would take you weeks of lessons to get through everything that we go through in this course. Having a teacher guide you through this material could end up costing you hundreds of dollars.
But with The Survival 15, your cost for relevant Brazilian Portuguese instruction, cultural breakdowns, improved situational awareness and pronunciation feedback is about the price you’d pay in a month for your morning cup of coffee.
I’m not against hiring a teacher for 1-1 classes, but it can get expensive quickly and you might want to spend your money on flights to Brazil instead. In fact, because I believe in the power of Portuguese learners receiving feedback from teacher so much, I even brought on a teacher to provide pronunciation corrections for you.
That in itself is of great value because it allows you to communicate with your teacher about the exact specific sound in Brazilian Portuguese that is giving you difficulty.
Why sit through hours of classes hoping to get feedback on a crucial area of the language when you can get the precise feedback you need in order to see a huge improvement almost immediately.
The Survival 15 Course will save you dozens of hours of wasted time by dialing you in to the exact words and phrases that you need to master in order to become a self-sufficient Portuguese speaker in Brazil. It’ll save you endless hours of frustration from not knowing what to do or say when you get to Brazil. You’ll be more confident when you go to use the words and phrases that are taught inside the course.
If you’re serious about overcoming the initial hurdles of learning Portuguese to speak in Brazil then you should sign up for this course right now.
Right now you can get access to the course for $47. That’s a one time enrollment fee and gives you lifetime access to this course. Once you make the payment you’ll get an email with your login instructions and you can start studying right away.
If you’re ready to jump in and start learning the Portuguese that will make you a functional Gringo in Brazil, then go ahead and sign up using the button below.
Yes Josh, I’m ready to start speaking Portuguese with confidence
I’m ready to sign up for the Survival 15 Course that will help me speak the Portuguese I’ll use every day in Brazil.
Just a one time fee of $47
Here’s how it works:
1. Situational based learning – We’ve broken down the most common situations that you’ll find yourself in as a foreigner and built lessons around those situations. As a foreigner in Brazil you’ll predictably find yourself doing the same things over and over again. We’ve filmed videos acting out these common situations so that you know what to expect when you get to Brazil.
2. Understand the Cultural Context – It’s not enough to just learn the words that are spoken in these situations. You need to learn the culture as well. Each situation comes with an explanation of what you should and shouldn’t do in those places. Avoid making embarrassing faux paus. Impress your Brazilian friends with your knowledge of their culture.
3. Speak like a Brazilian – In any language there are multiple ways to say the same thing. In some places it might be more common for people to greet each other by saying, “What’s up?” instead of “Hello.” It’s the same thing with Brazilian Portuguese. For some reason most courses ignore this and only teach you one way to say these common phrases. Brazilian Portuguese Language Essentials teaches you how Portuguese is actually spoken by Brazilians.
4. Proper Pronunciation – Pronunciation is far more important than you may realize. In Brazilian Portuguese the difference between ‘bread’ and ‘dick’ is a slight nasalization. Every section comes with a breakdown video that shows you how to pronounce each word syllable by syllable so that you can construct each word just like a Brazilian would.
5. Go at your own pace – The course is all up there for you to learn at your own speed. If you are a dedicated learner you can go through all of the material in about a week. Most people spend about a month to get through all of the material.
Lessons:
Getting Around:
1. Asking for directions
2. Taking a Taxi
3. Taking the Metro
4. Taking the Bus
5. Asking the bus to stop
6. Asking which bus to take
7. Confirming which bus to take
Eating and Drinking
8. Ordering at a Restaurant
9. Ordering at a Lanchonete
10. Ordering at a Juice Bar
11. Ordering at a Boteco
Being Social
12. Greetings
13. Goodbyes
14. The conversation that every foreigner has
15. Survival Phrases
No-Risk Language Learning Guarantee
If you’re serious about getting started with the Survival 15 then you can proceed with confidence in our no-risk money back guarantee.
I’m absolutely committed to your language learning success and want you to be able to feel good about investing in yourself.
If you’re not completely satisfied with this course for any reason then just send me an email within 30 days and I’ll refund your money.
Just give me a piece of honest feedback about why the course didn’t match your expectations and I’ll have my assistant process your refund.
Every effort has been made to make the process as simple as possible for you. Ultimately though you’re the one who has to learn the language, so you have to meet me halfway and put in an honest effort.
If you’ve done that and you’re still not seeing progress then just send me an email and I’ll refund your money.
That being said, we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about this program and are confident in the material.
Testimonials
“This was a lot better than the phrase book that I was using to study. It was really helpful in letting me know exactly what to say to sound more Brazilian. Thanks.” – Sasha P
Yes Josh, I’m ready to start speaking Portuguese with confidence
I’m ready to sign up for the Survival 15 Course that will help me speak the Portuguese I’ll use every day in Brazil.
Just a one time fee of $47