Learn Portuguese online

Not yet. We are preparing or assessing a future Portuguese school. Register your interest and we will contact you when the first trial lessons or courses become available.

We do not yet have a confirmed launch date. Once our first teaching dates are fixed, people on the interest list will hear from us first.

We expect to offer both formats, although the first trial phase may begin with a more limited selection.

Not especially hard on paper, but much harder to hear than to read. The US Foreign Service Institute places Portuguese in Category I, its easiest group for English speakers, at roughly 600-750 classroom hours to professional working proficiency. Vocabulary comes quickly thanks to thousands of shared cognates, and the grammar holds few surprises. The real obstacle is listening, especially in European Portuguese, where unstressed vowels are reduced or dropped entirely.

Pick the variety spoken where you will actually use it. Brazilian Portuguese has far more speakers, with about 211 million in Brazil alone, and far more learning material. European Portuguese is what is spoken in Portugal and what the CIPLE citizenship exam tests. They remain the same language and stay mutually intelligible, so neither choice is wasted. Our vocabulary trainer uses European Portuguese.

Around 70-80 hours to reach A1, and roughly 300-500 hours to reach B1, where conversation starts feeling comfortable. The often-quoted 600-750 hour figure from the Foreign Service Institute targets professional working proficiency at B2 or C1, and it assumes intensive classroom study, so self-study normally needs more hours. At five hours a week, expect several months to A2 and one to two years to a solid B1.

Because European Portuguese reduces or deletes unstressed vowels, so words sound far shorter than they look. Portuguese is stress-timed, which squeezes unstressed syllables until they centralise or vanish: ‘de manhã’ collapses toward ‘dmanhã’, and a four-syllable word can arrive as two. Natives are not mumbling or speaking unusually fast, you simply have not learned to parse the reductions yet. Listening with native audio from day one is the cure.

Very similar in writing, considerably less so in speech. The two share roughly 90% lexical similarity, so a Spanish speaker can often read Portuguese and follow most of it. Spoken intelligibility is far lower, around 50-60%, and it runs asymmetrically: Portuguese speakers understand Spanish better than Spanish speakers understand Portuguese. Nasal vowels and vowel reduction are the barrier. Spanish gives you a real head start, and a supply of false friends.

No, the D7 and digital nomad visas have no language requirement, and permanent residency does not test language either. Portuguese citizenship does: you need A2, usually proven with the CIPLE exam from CAPLE, which costs about 79 euros and needs 55% overall plus at least 25% in every section. The certificate never expires. Since citizenship generally follows five years of residency, there is little reason to leave it late.

Start with audio rather than text. European Portuguese is not pronounced the way it is written, so learning words silently teaches you a pronunciation you will later have to unlearn. Pair every new word with a native recording, build a core of high-frequency vocabulary, and start listening early even when you catch very little. Our free vocabulary trainer is aimed squarely at that first vocabulary step.

Because Brazil has roughly twenty times as many speakers as Portugal, so most courses, apps and podcasts are built for that market and default to Brazilian without saying so. If you are learning for Portugal, check the variety before you commit: material that says only “Portuguese” is usually Brazilian. The giveaways are vocabulary such as autocarro against ônibus, telemóvel against celular, and comboio against trem.

Portuguese is an official language in nine countries and has roughly 258 million speakers, putting it among the most spoken languages in the world. The Community of Portuguese Language Countries spans four continents: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor and Equatorial Guinea. Brazil accounts for most speakers at about 211 million. One language opens Portugal, Brazil and much of Lusophone Africa.