Practice Portuguese

I will start with the good. This is the best app I have found for learning European Portuguese. This was super important to me since my fiancé is Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese is so different from European Portuguese that it was useless to learn Brazil Brazilian Portuguese if I want to speak with my fiancé in his native language. I love the fact that they use real speakers from Portugal to say the words and phrases. The lessons have been very useful and I like the ability to pick my review words and phrases. Now for the bad. The app is super glitchy and seriously lacking on the development side. I frequently have to close the app and restart it and it can often times be slow to load lessons. It’s also very slow to check your pronunciation. I like the fact that they have the ability to track your daily streaks as well as earned stars however, most of the time those things won’t show up on the app so you can’t really track your streak or compare yourself with other users if you like competition. I reached out to them about this problem and they were responsive, but their solution did not work. The last time they did any updates on this app was two years ago so they are not keeping up on. It’s usability from the development side, which is a bad sign for long-term usability as phones update and change. I also don’t like the fact that there’s no way to practice conversational Portuguese through this app.

When I first started using the app, I ran into so many bugs and crashes that it felt unusable. But I contacted the developers and they gave me an alternative password. I guess log into some sort of beta version? And it’s working much better. It crashes much less frequently, but it still does crash every now and then. Or it will prompt me to re-login in error so I have to reboot the app And then it remembers that I’m still logged in. But the content is great. The featured speakers are great. I don’t think I’ve found a better option for learning Portuguese with a Portuguese accent instead of a Brazilian accent if your goal is to go to Portugal. This was super important for me because I find the Portuguese accent so hard to understand and hear. I feel like I’m learning French all over again. I can only hear a third of the syllables being said. But anyways, good app. Just needs a little more work on the development side.

I spent 6 months trying to learn as much European Portuguese as I could in preparation for a trip to Portugal. I struggled finding resources that were not Brazilian Portuguese, and then I found this app. I used several different apps- this one blew all others out of the water! Well worth the subscription. The phrases are useful and presented by native speakers. The grammar lessons are extremely helpful. I loved being able to bookmark phrases and add them to my smart review. My favorite part was the “shorties”, where you listen to dialogues and skits in European Portuguese at your level. When I went to Portugal, my husband was blown away at how well I was able to communicate after only 6 months of study. I was able to talk to our taxi driver who didn’t speak English, help my husband read menus that didn’t have English, order food for us, and even got us out of a tough spot when we couldn’t figure out which train to get on! You can jump around units and study different topics you think may be useful. I loved this app and recommend it to anyone trying to learn Portuguese.