Class #8 with Alexia, August 7, 2026

note: this is a recording of your private coaching session with Alexia. No one will see it except you, Alexia, and Foster 🙏

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Session summary

This was a full hour of real conversation with almost no scaffolding, and it went everywhere: the storm vocabulary Hannah taught you the night before, your MRI and the ceramics-and-teaching week that wiped you both out, Hannah's move from Guyana back to Boa Vista and the geography lesson that came with it, the three Guianas and their strange mix of languages, pastel de palmito tasting like artichoke dip, Trader Joe's versus Lidl, the apple and pear trees in your yard, cotton trees in Rio that make it look like it's snowing, storks and cicadas and flying cockroaches, and the story of how Hannah actually got from a church in Brazil to your guest room.

Two things worth naming. Alexia said outright that she had no notes for you compared to last class, and that's the honest read: you started topics, asked your own follow-up questions, and held long stretches of storytelling on your own. Where you still reached for English was mostly concrete nouns you didn't have yet (inseto, cigarra, barata, cozinhar for "to bake", tem sabor de for "tastes like"), and every one of those you got back into Portuguese within a few seconds. The single focus before next class is the one you already named yourself: deixar rolar. Stop planning the sentence before you say it. Hannah told you the same thing, Alexia told you in Class #1, and the bootcamp you're in right now is the best possible place to practice it.

⛈️ Chuva, trovão e tempestade

Relâmpago — lightning

Trovão — thunder

Tempestade — storm

Quando chove... — when it rains

You brought relâmpago into the class yourself, straight from Hannah, and you were right about it. The one you couldn't reach for was trovão, which is thunder, and then tempestade for when it's really coming down. Worth keeping the three together in your head because they almost always show up together in conversation: tá chovendo, tem relâmpago e trovão, é uma tempestade mesmo.

😴 Exausta de tanto falar

Ressonância magnética — MRI

Não vou dormir muito tarde — I'm not going to stay up too late

Estou exausta / Estou muito cansada — I'm exhausted / I'm very tired

You'd been up early for an MRI, so ressonância magnética went straight into the chat. Alexia had her own version of the same week: two ceramics classes, a class she taught at the coworking, and dinners on top of it, five and a half hours of nonstop talking on the Wednesday alone. Her line for the weekend was basically tô fechada, closed for business until Monday.

The thing you were reaching for and didn't quite land was "we're not staying up too late." In Portuguese that's não vou dormir muito tarde.

🗺️ Boa Vista, Roraima e as três Guianas

Boa Vista é a capital de Roraima — Boa Vista is the capital of Roraima

Embaixada — embassy

Antes de vir pra cá comigo — before coming here with me

Ela tem muito o que resolver com a vida nova dela — she has a lot to sort out with her new life

Mato Grosso do Sul / Cuiabá — (two useful ones to keep straight: Cuiabá is the capital of Mato Grosso, and Campo Grande is the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul)

This was the longest thread of the class and you drove most of it. Hannah had been living in Guyana, working at the embaixada and teaching Portuguese to English speakers there, and after her divorce she moved to Boa Vista. You were the one who pinned down that Boa Vista means Roraima, and you were right that there are a million Boa Vistas in Brazil, so the state is what actually identifies it.

Then you took Alexia through the part of South America nobody talks about: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Dutch as the official language of Suriname, Sranan Tongo as an English-based creole with Dutch, Portuguese and African influence layered in, French Guiana still being French territory, and Portuguese growing in Suriname because of the Brazilian border. Alexia had never heard of Guyana before meeting Hannah. Your closing line was the good one: Brazilians say they're the only country in South America that doesn't speak Spanish, and that's not true, because three of their neighbours don't either.

Small verb note from your storytelling: antes de vir pra cá comigo. Not antes de vir aqui. When there's movement toward a place, it's pra cá.

🍲 Pastel, palmito e molho de alcachofra

Pastel de feira — the big street-market pastel

Pastel de vento — a pastel with no filling, just the dough (literally "wind pastel")

Recheio — filling

Palmito — heart of palm

Tem sabor de... — it tastes like...

Alcachofra — artichoke

Espinafre — spinach

Molho — sauce, dip (Portuguese doesn't have a separate word for "dip." If there's sauce in it, it's a molho)

Iogurte grego — Greek yogurt

Queijo Minas — fresh Minas cheese

Matar as saudades — to satisfy a craving or a longing for something you miss

Hannah's been cooking for you, and pastel won: chicken filling, simple, muito saboroso. But your real find was the pastel de palmito, and the observation was entirely yours. Palmito tastes like artichoke dip. Alexia had never made that connection and said so.

The vocabulary that came out of it is the useful part. "How do you say tastes like?" is tem sabor de. Spinach is espinafre. And "dip" doesn't exist as a category in Portuguese, so spinach and artichoke dip is molho de espinafre e alcachofra.

Alexia's side of this: there's a pastel de feira place near her in Porto, and just saying the words puts her com água na boca. She also explained the difference. Pastel de feira is the big one from the street market, and pastel de vento is that same big pastel with nothing inside, just dough. Everything else is named by its recheio: frango, carne, camarão, queijo.

And the phrase you were building toward when you talked about ranch dressing and hot sauce in Italy is matar as saudades. Not matar os saudades. Saudade is feminine.

🛒 Trader Joe's, Lidl e Aldi

Pingo Doce, Continente, Mercadona, Lidl, Aldi — the supermarkets in Porto (Mercadona is Spanish)

Lanches — snacks

Uns docinhos, umas batatas — some sweets, some crisps

Maçã — apple

Manga seca / banana seca / maçã seca — dried mango / dried banana / dried apple

Hannah has already bought the Trader Joe's tote bag, which is the correct order of operations. You two are heading to the big international supermarket next, the one with a section per country and the strange fruit.

For "snacks," Portuguese gives you lanches, though in practice people just list them: uns docinhos, umas batatas. Note that batatas covers crisps here, not only potatoes.

Alexia's contribution was the Lidl and Aldi story. Same family, two brothers, a falling out, one company each. And her claim is that walking into a Lidl in Portugal feels roughly like walking into a Trader Joe's, which is the closest thing available on this side of the Atlantic.

🌳 Árvores, algodão e cegonhas

Árvore — tree

Duas árvores de maçã e duas árvores de pera — two apple trees and two pear trees

Árvore de algodão — cotton tree

Plantação de algodão — cotton field

Cegonha — stork

Ninho — nest

Hannah's fascinated by the trees in your yard, which she'd never seen before. Watch the agreement here: árvore is feminine, so it's duas árvores de maçã e duas árvores de pera, not dois.

Then Alexia gave you the Rio version. There are trees in Rio that release a kind of cotton, and when the wind picks up it looks like it's snowing. Not the low cotton plants you'd see on a farm, actual trees, and the cotton isn't usable the way a plantação de algodão is. She saw her first real cotton field in South Carolina.

Her other first was the cegonha. She'd never seen a stork until Portugal, where they're everywhere, and she spotted one from the train: an enormous ninho on top of a lamppost, and then the bird itself taking off.

🐛 Inseto, cigarra e barata voadora

Inseto — insect

Cigarra — cicada

Barata — cockroach

Barata voadora — flying cockroach

You described the cicadas without having the word, which is exactly the right instinct. Cigarra, and Alexia confirmed they're everywhere in Rio when it gets hot, screaming all day. You had the periodical-cicada invasion to match it, the ones that come out on a multi-year cycle and make everyone shut their windows.

And then the barata voadora, which exists in Rio and in South Carolina and thankfully not in Portugal. Your line: eu já saí de um país tropical, eu não quero mais isso na minha vida.

⛪ Como a Hannah chegou até você

A primeira conexão foi durante uma conferência há anos atrás — the first connection was at a conference years ago

E uma pessoa da minha igreja fez conexão com as pessoas do Brasil — and someone from my church connected with the people in Brazil

E depois alguém daqui foi visitar lá — and then someone from here went to visit there

Alguém que visitou aqui, conheceu ela e sugeriu que ela viesse para cá — someone who visited here met her and suggested she come here

Eu estudei fora — I studied abroad

This is where the grammar got interesting. You said sugeriu que ela vim para cá, and the form you need there is viesse. When a verb like sugerir, pedir or querer is followed by que plus a second subject, in the past it takes the imperfect subjunctive: sugeriu que ela viesse, pediu que ela ficasse, queria que ela voltasse. Worth putting on a card, because you'll use it constantly telling stories about other people.

The other fix: "I studied abroad" is eu estudei fora, not estudei estrangeiro. Estrangeiro is the foreigner or the adjective, and fora is the place you went.

The story itself was lovely. A conference years ago, someone from your church meeting someone from a church in Brazil, visits in both directions, and eventually a phone call asking whether you could host. Which you said yes to because you know what it's like to be in a strange country where you don't know anyone, and you wanted her to feel at home.

🇪🇸 Espanhol proibido

Para mim também não — me neither (you said "pra mim tampouco")

Uma coisa interessante é que ela... — one interesting thing is that she... (you said "algo interessante")

Vamos para lá — let's go there (not "vamos ir para lá")

Gostei muito disso / gostei muito do de palmito — I really liked that (gostar always takes de)

Four Spanish leaks and one redundancy, all worth catching. Tampouco and algo are both real Spanish and both flagged in the chat with a healthy number of exclamation marks. In Portuguese you want para mim também não and uma coisa interessante.

The redundancy is vamos ir. Vamos already carries the going, so it's vamos para lá, vamos para a praia, vamos jantar. Adding ir doubles it up.

And gostar always brings de with it. Gostei muito disso, gostei muito do de palmito, never gostei isso.

📚 Homework

1. Fazer uma lista das palavras que a Hannah te ensinou.

You said this one yourself in class. You take notes after every session with us, so do the same for Hannah. She's teaching you a different vocabulary than we are, kitchen words especially, and right now it's all going by too fast to keep.

2. Ir ao supermercado internacional com a Hannah.

Go, and name things out loud in Portuguese as you walk around. The fruit section is the good one. If you don't know a word, describe it instead of switching to English, which is the whole exercise.

3. Agradecer à Hannah pelas aulas de português.

Alexia's request, word for word. She's given you a bootcamp for free.

4. Deixar rolar.

Your last week with Hannah is the last week of full immersion for a while, so use it on the one thing that's actually holding you back. Don't build the sentence before you say it. Start talking and repair as you go. You already know this is the issue, Hannah told you the same thing, and it's the only thing we're working on next class.

Want more homework or have any questions? Message us on WhatsApp anytime.