Portuguese Learning Resources

This is a rundown of online learning resources you can use to learn portuguese, whether in the form of an app, a youtube channel or a podcast. I have split it off from the portuguese language-hacking page which was getting quite long. If you’re in the market for books to help you learn portuguese you might also want to take a look at a separate page I’ve made about those.

Specific Language Apps

The main gripe of students learning european portuguese always has to do with Duolingo’s Brazilian bias. Basically, don’t bother with it. It’s a good tool for most languages, but for European Portuguese it’s a total non-starter.

So what to use instead? Well, the most obvious candidate is the Practice Portuguese App. This has been a long time in the making: the boys have been doing a podcast and video series for ages and established themselves as the frontrunners for most new learners but there’s an app now to bring it all together. It’ll cost you a subscription fee of course, because they are doing it full time and now have an extra mouth to feed, but if you can afford it I think this looks like a pretty good way to go.

Memrise is the other big favourite. It’s a funny old app. It used to be a vocabulary app that allowed you to add pictures (known as “mems” to the words to jog your memory, but they spent some time developing it in more of an interactive direction and now the old vocabulary architecture is pretty much buried under a flashy new set of courses. It’s a good option and worth a look.

There are lots of other vocabulary apps but some are a bit ropey. If you want to take a look, you could try this blog post by Marlon Sabala. I tried ankipro, which I always assumed was a pro, paid version of a popular app called Anki, but it isn’t it’s a copycat, rip-off version. It actually worked out better for me because it allows you to import flashcard decks in the old memrise format, which was a real lifesaver. Normal ANki doesn’t seem to have that capability. Anyway, ankipro must have been sued for copyright infringement or something because it’s called Noji now! Anyway, for what it’s worth, the thing I like about it is that after you answer you can say how easy it was and if it was very easy it’ll delay showing you the word again for a longer time, whereas if you’re struggling you click on the hard button and it’ll jog your memory a minute or two later. It’s a simple but powerful way of focusing your attention on things you need to practice while noot completely losing sight of the more familiar things.

iTalki, Preply, Lingq and Hellotalk are useful apps that can help you find formal or informal tuition, language exchanges and so on. Another alternative, if you don’t want to speak to a human, is to just open ChatGPT and type “vamos falar português europeu” , then take it from there. Personally I think Chat GPT has its uses but you’re better off talking to a real human. Preply seems the most professional version of a teaching site. Italki is a bit rougher and a bit dated. The other two feel more like social media apps built around languages.

Lingoclip

Lyricstraining is a website, and it has a linked app called Lingoclip. Both let you play multiple choice games based on music videos by european portuguese artists (among many others). It’s pretty good, steering the line between study and things you can actually do for fun.

Most of the newspapers and broadcasters have their own apps too, and you can set them up to bombard you with portuguese destaques (headlines) throughout the day, and some of the language translation sites like Google Translate, Deepl, Reverso-Contexto and Linguee have apps too.

Finally, there’s a game you can play on a windows/mac/linux platform called influent that lets you learn basic vocabulary by exploring a house and interacting with your environment. They do a lot of languages, but Portuguese and Brazilian variations of portuguese are both options. I haven’t tried it myself but it looks like a decent way to get started if you are at a beginner level and just want to expand your vocabulary.

Youtube Channels by Portuguese Teachers

These have really mushroomed since I wrote the original version of this page. I think the pandemic has made all the difference. Lots of teachers have moved online to gain new students that can have lessons over Skype. Here are a few I know about. I’ll just link one random video of each instead of describing them so you can see which ones appeal to you. [Update: 5 December 2023 – I have purged a few of the videos on this page, mainly where they hadn’t actually recorded anything for a while]

Obviously since Liz is british you might wonder if you’ll miss out on some of the familiarity that a native speaker has, but unless you’re already jedi level, I doubt you’ll spot any slips: she’s extremely good, and you might find that – having been in your shoes – she knows where you’re coming from when you say you need the difference between ser and estar explained or whatever it might be.
Leo is able to convey difficult concepts very clearly and that’s why he’s very popular at the moment. Everyone seems to have him on their watchlist.
Mia Esmeriz has another popular channel that comes up a lot in lists of recommendations
I don’t watch many videos by learn European Portuguese Online but weirdly my wife sent me one of her videos today so she must have impressed at least one native speaker and that deserves some credit!
Catarina of the Portuguese Unschool takes an unconventional approach to learning and so she doesn’t do a lot of the usual videos most teachers make, she comes up in your timeline saying unexpected stuff and wearing intersting hats, so if you like your portuguese a bit punktuguese, have a look.
Portuguese Dips makes some really good “shorts” that explain odd little expressions that most teachers wouldn’t think to mention, so he’s definitely worth a subscription!

Social Media Places

Facebook has a few groups where expats and other learners gather to compare notes, like this, and there are usually teachers around offering help and cultivating potential customers. There’s an active Portuguese subreddit too and the level of portuguese tends to be a bit higher than on Facebook. I’m sure most social media sites that allow more than 280 characters probably have something similar so they’re worth looking at too.

Websites

Thanks to Rox for suggesting some new additions to this section

  • Instituto Camões and Online Platform for Portuguese (the government’s own sites aimed at foreign learners)
  • Brulingua.brussels is a site designed for people living in and around Brussels, presumably as a way of ensuring communication among EU employees. You’ll need to give it a random Brussels postcode from this website to set up an account. It covers A1-B2, broken into sections, has a live lesson option and built-in tests.
  • DailyNata is an email subscription service which will send you little digestible nuggets of basic portuguese twice a week. It seems like a good one for newbies
  • Linguno has fairly basic online exercises in vocabulary and conjugation. Ideally suited to people who like learning from penguins
  • Conjuga-me (excellent website that summarises all the verb tenses for a given verb. Definitely one to bookmark!)
  • Priberam (online dictionary)
  • Linguee (it took me ages to see the usefulness of this, but if you search for a word, either in english or portuguese, it’ll give you actual human-created translations in real books or official publications so that you can get a feel for the way it’s translated in context)
  • Readlang (directory of native speakers reading texts)
  • Ciberdúvidas (Q&A about the portuguese language, written in portuguese, so quite advanced!)
  • Youglish is a site that makes it easy to find subtitled videos in a specific language with specific words in the transcript, and – here’s the best part – it even let’s you specify European or Brazilian portuguese! Unlike YouTube it doesn’t give you a post to choose from. If you pick a word like “Guerra” for example, it takes you to a video play list with 198(!) videos in it and the first one is queued up right before the person says the word. So you can hear that and, if you want, scroll back and forth. Then you click forward to the next video and maybe it’s a song that contains the word, or whatever, and you can skip ahead, hearing the word in different contexts. It’s pretty clever.
  • NFLC has a small but interesting selection of “Continental” (ie European) Portuguese lessons. You have to create a login of course, but that’s easy to do and doesn’t cost anything. There are a couple of drawbacks: the interface takes a bit of getting used to, and the interviews all seem to be about ten years old so they are relating to the political scene was it was in the wake of the banking crisis, not really now. There’s also an app called Lectia attached to the site but I found it a bit Brazil-heavy and didn’t persevere with it.
  • The US Defence Language Institute has a bunch of exercises with quizzes, covering a whole range of languages, including Portuguese. This one is easier to navigate than NFLC but it’s a similar idea: a few comprehension tests for intermediate learners.
  • Sticking with the american theme, the Portuguese American Leadership Council of the United States has a collection of links to sites they like and you’ll probably find a few on there that I’ve missed here.
  • Dialang from Lancaster University used to have a series of tests that will give you an idea of how good you are at the language. It wouldn’t really teach you anything but it might be good if, say, you wanted to decide what exam you could reasonably aim for with the knowledge you have now, or what level book to buy. At the time of writing it has gone offline but I dug around a bit and found where a guy was talking about trying to resurrect it so if that sounds interesting you could try this page and see if there are any updates.

Podcasts

Podcasts, like Youtube Channels, have seen a real growth since the start of the pandemic when a lot of teachers were trying to get started in online teacching. Most have their own websites but you can find them on most podcast apps too. When I first made this page there were only 4. Here’s a selection of favourites. I’ve put them in order of difficulty with the easiest first.

  • Portuguese with Carla is really focused. Carla and her husband Marlon take a short piece of dialogue and break it down in minute detail, encouraging listeners to follow and repeat the words. It is definitely a good place to start if you have no Portuguese at all or if you want to work on your pronunciation. They have a few weird theories about how smelling herbs helps you learn but no worries; I’ve tried it without performance-enhancing oregano and it has been very helpful.
  • Portuguese Lab Podcast. This one has really come on in leaps and bounds lately and is doing a lot of interesting stuff. Definitely worth a look
  • Learning Portuguese Is Fun is a new one. It has pretty interesting topics and it presents them clearly to be accessible to relative newcomers. More recently (late Summer 2023) it has shifted the emphasis to ore intermediate/advanced learners.
  • Practice Portuguese is everyone’s go-to podcast for European Portuguese, and if you speak to other portuguese learners they’ll usually mention it within the first ten minutes. It’s produced by a native Portuguese guy called Rui, who does most of the talking and Joel, who is Canadian and adds a learner’s perspective to some of the dialogues. Since I wrote the first version of this post, they have also launched a second podcst called Portuguese Shorties. Pro-tip: if you try the original podcast, don’t listen to it in order because the earliest ones are some of the more challenging. You’re better off looking on the website, where they have a filter system that lets you choose your difficulty level, or just start with the most recent ones and work your way backwards.
  • Say it in Portuguese is the most advanced of all, I think. Each episode deals with an idiomatic expression and explains its use and meaning. It’s great if you are working at the B1/B2 level, but it takes no prisoners, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it if you’re starting out. Some of the later episodes have a co-host from another country. And I know, because I’m on a couple of them myself (see here and here).

Taking a left-turn at the traffic lights, there are some good, inspirational podcasts for language-learners in general. Have a look at “Actual Fluency” or “Creative Language Learning” in your podcast app, for example. Personally, I can only take this kind of thing in small doses, but a little of it now and again is good. It reminds you that you’re not alone and it gives you some ideas from the hardcore language-ninjas.

Exam Preparation

When you’re ready to take the exam, you might want to find study resources that are specifically geared toward preparation for the exam itself. If you already have a teacher, they might be able to help but if you don’t, you could try Say It In Portuguese’s course, tailored specifically to exam prep. There are a few online examplars you can look at if you would prefer to go it alone. I blogged about what I could find a couple of years ago but things might have moved on since then. This guy has written up his experience of taking the CIPLE exam, and don’t forget to read my own accounts of taking the exam for the first time. I’ve done a few posts about later exams, all the way up to DUPLE, but that first one is my favourite just because I was coming to it fresh.