Learn Hardcore Portuguese (Portugal): O hotel oferece um pequeno-almoço clássico com pão quente e café. - The hotel offers a classic breakfast with warm bread and coffee.

In European Portuguese pequeno-almoço is a single compound noun (“breakfast”). The hyphen joins pequeno (“small”) and almoço (“lunch”) to form “little lunch,” the traditional term for the first meal of the day. This hyphenation is fixed by the orthographic rules and reflected in dictionaries.

What does oferece mean and why is it in the singular form here?

Oferece is the third person singular present tense of oferecer (“to offer” or “to provide”). It’s singular because the subject o hotel (the hotel) is singular. If you had a plural subject—say os hotéis—you would use oferecem instead.

Why is there an um before pequeno-almoço, but no article before pão quente and café?

The um before pequeno-almoço is the indefinite article “a,” giving us “a classic breakfast.” After com (“with”), Portuguese typically omits articles when listing generic food items (pão quente e café). It sounds more natural to leave them bare. You could say com um pão quente e um café, but it’s less idiomatic for describing included items.

Why are the adjectives clássico and quente placed after the nouns they modify?

In Portuguese the neutral word order is noun + adjective. So you say pequeno-almoço clássico and pão quente. Placing the adjective before is possible for emphasis or style but isn’t the default structure.

How does gender and number agreement work for clássico?

Adjectives must agree with their noun in gender (masculine/feminine) and number (singular/plural). Pequeno-almoço is masculine singular, so the adjective is clássico (not clássica or clássicos).

Why is there an o before hotel?

Portuguese normally uses a definite article with common nouns, even in subject position. O hotel (“the hotel”) sounds natural; dropping the article (hotel oferece...) feels incomplete or overly telegraphic in European Portuguese.

Could we replace oferece with serve or inclui, and what difference would that make?

Yes.

serve (“serves”) puts the focus on what the staff brings to the table.
inclui (“includes”) emphasizes that the breakfast is part of a package.
oferece (“offers/provides”) is the most neutral term for saying “the hotel makes this service available.”

What's the difference between pequeno-almoço and the Brazilian Portuguese café da manhã?

Pequeno-almoço is the standard term for “breakfast” in Portugal (literally “little lunch”). In Brazil people say café da manhã (“coffee of the morning”). If you’re learning European Portuguese, stick with pequeno-almoço.

What role does com play in this sentence, and could you use e instead?

Com is a preposition meaning “with,” linking the breakfast to its components. Using e (“and”) would simply list items without showing they belong together as one breakfast; com tells us “the breakfast comes with hot bread and coffee.”

Why does café have an accent on the final é?

Portuguese words that are oxytone (stressed on the last syllable) and end in a vowel (like café) require an acute accent on that vowel. The accent mark shows that the stress falls on -fé rather than on the penultimate syllable.