Memorize 300 Everyday European Portuguese Words: A Flashcard Study Plan

The Flip It deck Portuguese Vocabulary A2 — Everyday (deck code OY7211) is 300 cards long, and reading it end to end reveals two things the title never says. First, it is European Portuguese, not Brazilian. Second, it is not one list but two, glued together — and knowing where the seam is turns a shapeless 300-card grind into a two-week plan.

Two decks in one

Cards 1–239 are a spoken-corpus frequency list: real conversational Portuguese, but stored as inflected forms rather than dictionary entries (aconteceu, fizeste, será, tive, podia). Cards 240–300 switch abruptly to the top ~60 English function words rendered as clean lemmas (the → o, be → ser, make → fazer). That second block is where every duplicate back comes from: um appears three times (a / an / one), em three times (on / at / into), seu three times (his / their / its), plus de, para, como, não, então and sobre twice each.

You will cover: contigo, embora, mundo, carro, lugar, razão, família, cabeça, sangue, coração, mão/mãos, olhos, porta, quarto, escola, semana, manhã, tarde, marido, filha, rapaz, mulheres, crianças, pais, amigos, sorte, medo, cuidado, guerra, polícia, arma, morte, acordo, segurança, plus the connectors enquanto, desde, contra, durante, apenas, quase, entre, atrás, dentro, perto and the numbers três, quatro, cinco.

The verb problem

Forty of the 300 cards are scattered forms of just seven verbs: fazer (fez, fiz, faço, fazes, fizeste, feito, faria), ser/ir (fui, foram, fosse, for, ia, vai, será, seria, sido), poder (pode, podem, podia, poderia), saber (sabia, sabemos, sabem), ter (tive, tenha), ver (vi, vejo, vê) and ouvir (ouvi, ouve). Learned as 40 unrelated cards they never cohere.

Tip 1 — collapse them into tables. Before your first session, write one card per verb whose back is the full present + preterite row, and suspend the singletons. Seven cards replace forty, and you gain the ability to produce forms the deck only asks you to recognise.

Tip 2 — fix four cards on sight. yes (reflexive) → si is wrong: yes is sim; si is the pronoun used after a preposition (para si). would → faria is really would do. it → isto is this (thing) — European Portuguese usually drops the subject pronoun entirely. And óptimo / pára are pre-1990 spellings; the current orthography is ótimo and para.

Tip 3 — flag the regionalisms if you are heading to Brazil. rapariga is the ordinary EP word for girl but is coarse in Brazil (use menina); equipa is time there. Same for the tu forms (achas, fizeste, precisas), which Brazilian speech largely replaces with você.

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