The best AI apps to practice speaking European Portuguese

What you need to practice speaking European Portuguese

In our ranking of 67 languages, European Portuguese is the 60th hardest for English speakers, at 3,139 effort points. That’s a little more than Brazilian Portuguese (3,010), and still less than Italian (3,244).

On paper, it’s the same language as in Brazil. Out loud, it isn’t. And most of what’s out there for learners is Brazilian, so the Portuguese of Portugal is the one you have to go looking for.

• Vowels that disappearPeople in Portugal swallow the unstressed vowels, so words come out shorter than they look. Pequeno, small, sounds a bit like “p’kenu”. And an s at the end of a syllable sounds like “sh”: dois, two, is “doysh”. You only learn to follow it by hearing a lot of it.
• Tu, você or o senhorWith friends and family it’s tu: Tu queres um café? With people you don’t know, you often drop the pronoun and use the verb on its own, Quer um café?, or say o senhor and a senhora. Você can come across as cold.
• Grammar that isn’t Brazilian“I’m working” is estou a trabalhar, not estou trabalhando. And the little words go after the verb, with a hyphen: chamo-me Ana, diz-me. After não, they jump in front: não me lembro.
• Words from PortugalA train is a comboio, your phone is a telemóvel, and breakfast is o pequeno-almoço. Learn from a Brazilian course and you’ll say trem, celular and café da manhã. People in Lisbon will understand you. You just won’t sound like them.
• Lots of Portuguese you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: videos, podcasts and texts from Portugal where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeEven one of the easier languages takes hours of talking, and the fast, clipped speech of Portugal takes getting used to. 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 YouTube videos and podcasts from Portugal, 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 the way people do in Portugal: estou a fazer, levanto-me, tu with friends. 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 made for European Portuguese, like Practice Portuguese or Pimsleur’s European course, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in European Portuguese

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies, and if you said it the Brazilian way, or just got it wrong, 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 European Portuguese teachers

Six teachers, all from Portugal, all speaking with European Portuguese voices. Inês and Leonardo are from Lisbon, Mia and Sofia from Porto, Tiago from Coimbra, and Duarte from Faro, down in the Algarve.

You might know Leonardo already: he’s Leo from the YouTube channel Portuguese With Leo, where he teaches the Portuguese of Portugal.

• 
  Duarte Sousa

  Faro · Portuguese
• 
  Inês Almeida

  Lisbon · Portuguese
• 
  Leonardo Coelho

  Lisbon · Portuguese

  Portuguese With Leo
• 
  Mia Esmeriz

  Porto · Portuguese
• 
  Sofia Martins

  Porto · Portuguese
• 
  Tiago Ferreira

  Coimbra · Portuguese

Input: Portuguese from Portugal 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. For European Portuguese, that means finding videos from Portugal, not Brazil.

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 YouTube video from Portugal, say one from Portuguese in Real Life, or an Apple Podcasts episode. It has to be in Portuguese: the subtitles or the speech, not just the topic. 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.
• Stories written for youRead writes texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• 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 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. So here’s how the two compare for speaking European Portuguese, 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 Duolingo. All comparisons.

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