The best AI apps to practice speaking Brazilian Portuguese

What you need to practice speaking Brazilian Portuguese

Good news first. In our ranking of 67 languages, Brazilian Portuguese is the 63rd hardest for English speakers, at 3,010 effort points. Only a few languages are easier, Spanish and French among them.

Lots of words look like English: hospital, importante, informação. But a few things catch everyone out.

• Sounds you have to hearNasal vowels: pão, bread, mãe, mother, não, no. And in most of Brazil, t and d turn into “ch” and “j” before an i sound: leite sounds like “lay-chee”. The quickest fix: say your sentence, then hear a native speaker say the same one.
• False friendsExcitado isn’t how you say you’re excited about a trip. In Brazil it usually means something much more personal. Say animado. Pretender means to intend, and puxar means to pull, not push.
• Everything agreesNouns are masculine or feminine, and the little words around them follow: meus amigos, minhas amigas. Place names can take an article too: o Rio, a Bahia, but just São Paulo.
• Two past tensesEu fui is I went, once. Eu ia is I used to go, or I was going. English uses one past tense for both, so this takes lots of practice to feel.
• How Brazilians really talkTextbooks say nós vamos. Brazilians say a gente vai. You’ll hear tá for está and pra for para all day long. You want a teacher who talks like that, and explains it.
• Brazil or PortugalIt’s one language, but you hear the difference right away: the accent, and everyday words. A bus is an ônibus in Brazil and an autocarro in Portugal. Pick the one you need.
• Lots of Portuguese you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeEven an easier language takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Portuguese. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Brazilian YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itKnowing a word isn’t the same as using it, with the right ending and the right past tense. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Portuguese? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the basics with a course like Duolingo (free), Babbel or Pimsleur, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Brazilian Portuguese

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, what kind of word it is, its forms, and an example with a translation. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Brazilian Portuguese teachers

Seven teachers. Brazilians first: Laura from Recife, Lucas from São Paulo, and Maria, who has a realistic face, so you see her speak as you chat.

And language people you might know: Benny Lewis from Fluent in 3 Months, Virginia from Speaking Brazilian, and our co-founders Olly Richards and Xiaoma (Lucas is a co-founder too). They learned many languages themselves, so they know where you’ll get stuck.

Learning the Portuguese of Portugal? That’s its own language on Teacher AI, with six teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Faro and Coimbra.

• 
  Benny Lewis

  Travels the world · Irish

  Fluent in 3 Months
• 
  Laura Pereira

  Recife · Brazilian
• 
  Lucas Bighetti

  São Paulo · Brazilian
• 
  Maria Silva

  Brazil · Brazilian
• 
  Olly Richards

  Devon · British

  StoryLearning
• 
  Virginia Langhammer

  New York · American

  Speaking Brazilian
• 
  Xiaoma

  New York City · American

  Xiaomanyc

Input: Portuguese to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Portuguese you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Brazilian YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Suggested for youWatch suggests videos by topic, from channels made for learners, like Easy Portuguese, Plain Portuguese and Speaking Brazilian, to comedy, food and the news. Each one shows the share of words you’d understand.
• Stories written for youRead writes Portuguese texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher. There’s today’s news, too.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Portuguese word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list, names and numbers aside, and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Portuguese on Duolingo. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Praktika · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Jumpspeak · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending