de vez em quando

Once in a while.

Portuguese does a lot with the word vez .

It's important to get up-to-speed on the way vez is used. Almost none of it is intuitive - you need to memorize these.

Think about how English uses time and once to say different things:

The time of my life.
Once upon a time.

Look at some of the ways that Brazilian Portuguese uses vez:

Literally, of time and when.

In English we would just say, again. You could say for example, O que devíamos falar mais vezes = What we ought to say more often.

*this one looks tricky because of the "nos" added. This nos is just there because falar is being used in a reflexive way. It's the "ourselves" as in We should have spoken (to one another) more often.

Literally, there was time, is said all the time when talking about the times long passed. (or, fairy-tales) See here for more about this.