As the World Wide Web grows wider and the devices used to navigate it become smaller, finding your way through the modern Tower of Babel is a matter of time rather than resources.
It’s undeniable that the internet has transformed the way we learn languages, particularly by making learning a much more accessible experience.
In this post, you’ll find the top 24 Portuguese learning resources to help you push your studies to the next level.
I was so very pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Ba Ba Dum, as it’s the perfect cocktail of fun and knowledge. It features 22 languages, including our beloved Portuguese, and yet somehow it manages to be completely free.
It’s got cute little games that you can alternate between or even mix and match to practice your vocabulary and spelling, after which you receive a score.
I also love that it doesn’t shy away from some cheeky words and expressions such as mamas (breasts) or fazer coco (to poop), accompanied by equally delightful illustrations. The visuals on Ba Ba Dum overall are a huge plus since I’m a staunch believer that knowledge is best served with a side of eye candy.
All in all, its playful approach to language learning makes Ba Ba Dum uma delicia (a treat) and secures its spot on the must-have list of online resources on the matter.
Polly Lingual and its cute parrot logo are on this list because it has the best of both worlds: it’s a technologically-advanced language learning tool with a human touch.
The tech part consists of predictive lesson algorithms that adapt the pace and lessons based on your progress. It also has material grouped by special interests, namely travel, medicine and business. Each lesson gives you written and audio content, so you can learn with both your eyes and your ears.
Most lessons can be downloaded as PDF files, which will come in very handy if you want to practice Spaced Repetition.
Also make sure to check out each time the games are available, including my personal favorite, Whack-a-Word. It’s a good whacking that perhaps won’t give you as much tension release as a Whack-a-Mole, but will surely do much more for your Portuguese vocabulary.
Now, the human component of Polly Lingual comes in the form of its Polly Ambassadors, AKA registered native speakers that offer private tutoring for fixed hourly rates.
Choose the one that’s right for you if you want to work on getting conversational, homo sapiens to homo sapiens. Because Polly knows that confidence to express yourself is just as important as awesome conjugation skills.
FluentU, fluent Me, fluent everyone! The ultimate in language learning tools is here to get you immersed to your heart’s content. And not only that, but it will immerse you in native video content, anything being fair game for learning.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
It’s pretty sweet to be able to watch a news broadcast in your desired language, follow the interactive captions and just hover over any word to pause the video and get a comprehensive definition.
This particular system makes for developing great sentence structure know-how and the authentic materials ensure that you get a genuine language experience, instead of endless flashcard browsing. There’s also an element of “gamification” involved, as every course is followed by a video-based quiz.
FluentU then tracks your progress and customizes your video suggestions. You can see how much of a video you already know before you even click it. I find the pacing of lessons to be quite flowy and I also dig their reviewing alerts that don’t let you slack off too much from your practice.
Well, looks like the Portuguese government caught up with the trend and decided to launch its very own Portuguese learning platform.
The format is comparable to Busuu for European Portuguese, with 24 themed modules divided between “Elementary” and “Independent” levels of practice. Each module comes with its own targets stated at the beginning, which helps you assess if you got the most out of it or if you need to revisit it.
It’s extremely detailed and well-structured so as to cover the four pillars of fluency (reading, writing, listening, speaking) both in terms of information and exercises.
What’s more, shortly after registering you’re assigned a tutor for you to exchange messages with and clear up any doubts. This tutor will also evaluate the exams which you’ll be taking after each of the six consecutive modules.
Bear in mind that the platform, while open to everyone, is targeted primarily at immigrants to Portugal, a fact which you’ll find reflected in the content of the modules. You get to learn, for example, about a Ukrainian tour guide or a receptionist from Morocco. Props to the Portuguese government for owning up to its immigrants and offering this nifty tool for everyone to feel at home in Portugal! Even those of us who are just dreaming about getting there.
This is the Department of State’s free course in Portuguese from 1946, and the audio and print books are available free for download. It was designed for self-instruction through repetition of sounds and then words and phrases, gradually working up in complexity.
The programmatic learning style has fallen out of favor, but this course does have something to offer learners, as it methodically deconstructs pronunciation of Portuguese in the early units in a way that you don’t normally see in newer communicative-method instruction.
This course, provided by Lucrative Skills on Alison, is tailored for beginners, offering practical examples to facilitate your learning.
Through systematic video lessons, you’ll explore common words, simple phrases, and essential expressions, so you can learn gradually and feel more confident while building your word bank.
This series of apps for computers, browsers and mobile devices is an electronic replacement for flashcards, and it’s a very good one. You can record audio (from, say, your Skype sessions with tutors) into the flashcards that you create.
If you get lazy, there are dozens of user-made Anki decks available for learning Portuguese, but for many of them, it’s not clear which version of the language they’re targeting. Also, making your own sets of cards tends to be more personal and useful for reinforcing your learning.
It’s a popular language learning app where you’ll get to pick from 100’s of vocabulary lessons, native speaker videos and AI conversation practice with topics including introductions and greetings, organizing a holiday activity, meeting the in-laws, talking about your favorite books, learning about the cultural dos and don’ts and many more.
This app provides audio recordings of the words and gives examples of how to use them in sentences. The app also has quizzes to help you review the words you have learned.
By the way, you can read a complete review of the Memrise app here.
Aside from having a name similar to mine, which is always a plus, Carla is a born and raised alfacinha who moved to the UK at age 18 and who, above all, really knows her stuff.
Click the “Teaching Basis” tab on her site and you’ll be greeted by an abundance of textbooks that she’s gone through, most dealing in phraseology, psychology and other “-ologies” that I don’t even dare spell.
As she astutely puts it, you just have to trust her and think of her “as your mechanic, you don’t need to know how the engine is built to be able to drive, but when you get stuck, I’ll be there to help”.
The price for kicking it with Carla is $38.18/session (converted from British £, hence the oddly specific number) and it goes down as the number of sessions acquired goes up. Have your pick anywhere from the Silver (3 sessions) to the Platinum bundle (10 sessions) or try out her free lessons (podcasts, video lessons, audio quizzes) to get a feel for her style.
We’re back to one-on-one tutoring with this one-of-a-kind online learning experience. “The Flow of Portuguese” is the brainchild of one Idahosa Ness, who is also, to my knowledge, the creator and main practitioner of the Mimic Method.
This method, similar to the shadowing technique, entails focusing on pronunciation and learning a language by ear rather than “by eye,” which according to Idahosa will make you a master of Portuguese in no time. Well, it worked for him all right, just check him out rapping in eight different languages!
In short, Idahosa claims his course will train your pronunciation so that you don’t sound like a gringo—or in my case, like Borat—when trying to speak Portuguese.
How exactly does he plan to achieve this? By giving you personalized feedback based on the recordings you submit for every lesson, by putting you through a “Boot Camp” in order to grasp those pesky nasal vowels and by having a ball with the learning experience, replacing flashcards and charts with songs and rapping.
His method may seem a bit controversial, but many swear by it and I love the originality element it brings forward. It’s the perfect tool if your main focus for learning Portuguese is developing conversation skills, be it for an upcoming trip or communicating with your significant other or any array of reasons.
To get into the Flow of Portuguese with Idahosa you’ll have to dish out $147.00, completely refundable after 60 days should you find it doesn’t quite work for you. Give the free e-course a go first and decide if you’re ready to get rid of the accent and rap like a Portuguese Eminem.
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the ones that work the best. For what could be simpler and easier than an open-source, community-driven dictionary for slang words and expressions? And yet, Speak Like A Brazilian is a treasure in its own right.
In saying this, I must admit I have a soft spot for Portuguese slang talk, as it’s quite colorful and it manages to capture the spirit of the people admirably. Not only that, but it was hella handy during my time in Portugal when I would compensate for my lack of grammar savvy with local calão (slang), which never failed to put a smile on those confused people’s faces.
But back to the matter at hand. As you may have guessed from the name, Speak Like A Brazilian may be of more use to you in the land of caipirinha (Brazil) than in the land of fado (Portugal) but sometimes the calão crosses over and surely any Lusophone can deduce the meaning of the expressions. If not, all the better—it just means you get to wow them with your extra knowledge when you explain what you meant!
Be advised, that this isn’t a resource for the easily blushing. At the moment I’m writing this, the site has 53 pages packed with slang and from the first page alone I already learned how to say “love handles” and what to call a quick slap to the head. The following pages are sure to get even less inhibited and more entertaining.
If you can’t resist a good novella, Semantica might be the perfect video resource for you.
Semantica is a website that provides novella-style dialogues in Brazilian Portuguese to help you build vocabulary, grammar skills and sentence construction skills in a natural way. There are also additional learning materials, like grammar training, to help you build on what you’ve learned.
Semantica offers videos for beginning through advanced students, so they’re appropriate for a wide array of students.
If you don’t want to sign up for Semantica just yet, check out the Semantica YouTube channel to see some of the videos it offers.
If you want the convenience of learning Portuguese with videos, but with the structure of a course, check out this Udemy course. Udemy hosts tons of courses so if you finish this course or it’s not quite for you, head over to the Udemy website and give your specific topic a search.
This particular course is designed to help beginning students learn Brazilian Portuguese. It offers over 20 hours of video content you can watch whenever it’s convenient for you. The course teaches a variety of common words and phrases that you might need if you travel to Brazil.
Portuguese Lab is a website that offers learning content for beginning through upper-intermediate students learning European Portuguese. The site offers podcasts, e-courses and more.
But don’t worry! Portuguese Lab also offers plenty of free videos you can enjoy on the Portuguese Lab YouTube channel. You can find dialogues, stories, vocabulary, grammar and more.
Most people who I’ve met who are learning Portuguese are doing so for reasons related to the music, perhaps fado, samba funk, or something else, and for the purposes of singing or dancing or even learning the cavaquinho (small four-stringed guitar).
And even if your reasons for learning are unrelated to the hundreds of styles of music in Portuguese, the planet’s very best lyrical songs are probably going to be useful in your venture. This is a great site for looking up the lyrics to songs in Portuguese, and you can also use it to explore musical genres as Brazilians define them.
LyricsTraining offers real music videos with a learning twist that turns songs into games. Just choose a song, select your difficulty level and start learning.
As the music video plays, you’ll notice that it’s captioned, but some words are missing. The more advanced the level you selected, the more words will be absent. Your task is to fill in the right words based on what you hear.
Don’t worry—if you miss any words, you can rewind and relisten until you figure them out.
If you’re studying European Portuguese, you might check out “Sou Pra Ti” (“I’m for You”). Brazilian Portuguese learners can learn with “O Sol” (“The Sun”).
Professional Portuguese teachers will usually provide learning materials, plan lessons and give you assignments, but you can also plan your own. I think it’s wisest to work with several tutors at once so that you’re exposed to different idiolects (individual language quirks) and vocabulary ranges.
You can also use the website to find language exchange partners without paying a dime. Simply sign up for an account and then go to “language partners,” which is tucked away under the “community” menu. You’ll find Portuguese speakers from around the world who are dying to practice your language in exchanges (especially if you’re a native English speaker). Send messages to a few of them, and arrange an encounter over Skype.
You can read a complete review of the italki app here.
Brazil’s largest-circulation newspaper and its newspaper of record can give you a lot of reading material for learning Portuguese.
If front-page Brazilian news itself has too many unfamiliar characters that make it difficult to follow, or if you tire of reading about that particular circus of corrupt scoundrels, you might check out the international section, where articles are written with more context about who is who (and there will even be stories about your own country).
Each time I have to write something in Portuguese it gets me wondering: do they really need all those diacritics? Does their letter “A” really need so many ornaments to adorn itself with? And will I ever manage to match avó (grandmother) and avô (grandfather) with their rightful meanings?
Then I remember what a wonderful musical concoction the Portuguese language is and I make peace with its orthography.
If your relationship with scribbling in Portuguese is as complicated as mine, then you’ll absolutely love Lang-8. It’s a social network built around the idea of language exchange, specifically written language exchange.
You write a “journal,” i.e. any text written in your target language, and native speakers will correct it for you. You’ll also get useful comments and feedback and can request help with transcribing videos in your language of choice.
Lang-8 is a bit reminiscent of RhinoSpike, the site where native speakers record audios of the texts you submit in their language. I say that not just based on the social twist it gives to language learning, which I find brilliant, but also because they both share the “tit for tat” element that encourages you to not only ask for help but also to provide help to those trying to learn your mother tongue.
To really enjoy Lang-8 to the fullest, I would suggest ending your post with a question, so that people can engage with you. For instance, if you’re writing about how tasty Pastéis de Belém are, you can ask people what other Portuguese desserts they would recommend. It’s a good way to not only absorb corrections but actually interact with others.
I’m all for living in a Global village. The Global-er, the better. It is thus of no surprise that I would be a fan of HiNative, a Q&A community connecting language learners and native speakers.
Hailing from the same creators as Lang-8, it works basically on the same principle except with Twitter-style posts instead of paragraphs. The interface is quite friendly and provides you with four question formats: [How do you say this], [Does this sound natural], [What’s the difference] and [Free Question].
While the first three have to do specifically with aspects of language learning, the “Free Question” grants you more freedom with the topic, allowing you to pose questions about local culture, cuisine, bureaucracy—basically anything that the other formats don’t cover.
What’s more, recently an “Audio Upload” option has become available on the site, very useful for when you can’t type and for boosting your pronunciation as well!
If you’re thinking the name looks familiar, you probably read about it in my article on improving listening and are now having “déjà vu all over again,” in the great words of Yogi Berra.
Since I’ve already blabbed about this website, I’ll keep it short and sweet this time. Practice Portuguese offers free podcasts in authentic continental Portuguese, infused with slang, references to local culture and the occasional adorable appearance by the founder’s grandma (avó – there, I got it right).
You can also upgrade to some premium features ($6-ish/month) which include subtitles, a written transcript, a list of key words and expressions and a quiz for every podcast.
Although maybe not abundant in content, I find Practice Portuguese a good bridge between having mastered the basics of the language and holding conversations with natives. They even group podcasts by level of difficulty from “Easy” to “Advanced,” with a special distinction between Artigo (article) and Diálogo (dialogue) type episodes.
PortuguesePod101 offers hundreds of free videos that will meet your every need, whether you are just starting to learn or you are an advanced learner.
You can find playlists for listening practice, beginner Portuguese, intermediate reading practice, pronunciation and more—most focusing on Brazilian Portuguese.
With PortuguesePod101, you have hundreds of hours of language practice with native teachers who actually know how and what to teach.
BRAZILPOD is an awesome learning resource brought to you by Professor Kelm at the University of Texas at Austin.
You’ll find a variety of brief video clips featuring native speakers in Brazil and Portugal. The clips are neatly grouped by difficulty level, ranging from beginning to superior. You can choose anything from thematic content like “Beginning 7: People’s Physical Characteristics,” which offers four different videos with native speakers.
Make sure to check out Conversa Brasileira (Brazilian Conversation) for dialogues with native speakers.
If I had to pick just one Portuguese-English dictionary, this would be it. WordReference covers a huge amount of vocabulary and a range of uses for each word, often with contextual examples. There is a Spanish-Portuguese dictionary, which may be useful for those of you who are coming at this after having learned Spanish.
And most importantly in my book, it has a great Portuguese-English forum, whose results open automatically at the bottom of search results, and give you insight into trickier uses. You can also pose your own questions in the forum, as well as help others.
The Benefits of Portuguese Learning Resources
Maybe you live in a remote enough area that language tutors aren’t readily available, but if you have internet coverage and a computer or smartphone, you’re good to go.
Another advantage attached to this one is breaking down the economic barrier. Once a skill reserved for the elite, learning foreign languages has widely become a common practice thanks to all the free websites and apps.
Since a lot of these resources are funded through advertising and crowdsourcing, they eliminate the need for charging the user. Even when there are costs associated, the ratio of price to quantity of material tends to be better than in the case of traditional learning methods (classes, tutoring, textbooks).
Cutting down the costs of learning has led to a democratization of education, allowing people from less privileged backgrounds to acquire a language with fewer restrictions and obstacles.
Lastly, learning a language online comes with a great deal of flexibility, which reveals itself in many aspects. For one, you get to set the pace for your learning experience, doing it as often and as regularly as you wish.
Space constraints also become a lesser issue, as most internet-access devices can be carried anywhere from the park to the commute train.
Lastly, you’re granted the complete personalization of your language acquisition, which you can tailor to your specific needs and interests. There isn’t any type of learner out there that the Internet doesn’t cater to.
So there you have it, the essential Portuguese learning resources for conquering the language.
Now that you know that fluency is just a hop, skip and a click away, nothing can stand between you and complete “Portuguesation.”
Well, nothing except your Internet service provider, maybe.
