Learn Portuguese

Português (Brasil) · a free course from absolute beginner to C2 · one lesson a day

This course teaches Brazilian Portuguese, which is the Portuguese almost every learner will actually hear: Brazil is about four fifths of the language's 260 million speakers. Grammatically it is gentler than its reputation — the everyday spoken language has quietly simplified the verb paradigm, so você and a gente do much of the work that a textbook gives to six different endings.

What is hard about Portuguese, and what this course does about it

The sound system is where the hours go. Portuguese has nasal vowels English has no equivalent for, unstressed vowels that reduce almost to nothing, and a written form that looks enough like Spanish to mislead a reader who has met that first. The course keeps the two apart deliberately: the false friends are taught as their own lesson, and every word carries audio so the shape of the sound is learned with the spelling rather than after it.

What the course covers

The syllabus is 364 numbered steps, and the first 401 of them have a lesson written by hand behind them — the explanation, the examples and the questions, not a template filled in. 30 of those steps are the grammar core: everything you need before the course turns to recombining it, which is the work that carries you from intermediate to C2.

The first 14 grammar points, in order

Straight from the course's own syllabus. Each gets its own lesson, and comes back in the reading and listening of later ones.

1. Singular subject pronouns (eu, você, ele/ela) and ser for one person
2. Plural subject pronouns (nós, vocês, eles/elas), the plural of ser, and a gente
3. Ser vs estar: the two Portuguese verbs for "to be", and estar for feelings and places
4. Regular present tense of -AR verbs (falar, morar, trabalhar)
5. Noun gender and the articles o, a, um and uma
6. Plurals: os, as, and the -s, -ns and -ões endings
7. The contractions everyone uses: do/da, no/na, ao/à (de/em/a + article)
8. Regular present tense of -ER and -IR verbs (comer, beber, abrir, assistir)
9. Common irregular present-tense verbs: ter, ir, fazer and querer
10. The near future with ir + infinitive (vou falar), and the progressive estar + -ndo (estou falando)
11. Possessives (meu/minha, seu/sua) and the clear way to say his/her: dele, dela
12. Demonstratives (este/esse/aquele) and isso/isto/aquilo
13. Ficar: the everyday verb for becoming, staying and being located
14. Question words (o que, quem, onde, quando, por que, quanto) and question formation

How one lesson works

Around 20–30 minutes at the fullest setting. Three lengths to choose from, and a shorter one spreads each grammar point over more lessons rather than taking the support away.

1. Review first. Every card that is due today comes back before anything new starts — all of them, with no cap, because a cap on reviews is a cap on what you remember.
2. New words. A handful of new words, dealt straight down the frequency list from wherever you got to, each with its recording.
3. The grammar. One point, explained in writing with worked examples and tables, before the questions that test it.
4. Reading. A passage in Portuguese in three parts, written from words you have already been taught, with comprehension questions.
5. Listening. The same again for the ear, in three parts.
6. Writing. From lesson 7, one task where you produce Portuguese of your own and get it back marked.

The words, and the order they come in

The course's vocabulary is a frequency list 4,573 words long, and the deck deals it in rank order from word one — so the words you meet first are the ones standing between you and an ordinary sentence. You can read the top of that list without signing up: the most common Portuguese words.

The course's words and phrases are recorded in a Portuguese voice — 4,744 clips, counted on the server — and the listening section plays them as connected speech rather than as a word list.

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