The best app to learn Portuguese, picked in the first paragraph

I build a Portuguese app, so start with that. It shows up once, near the bottom, for one narrow job, and three of the four picks below send you somewhere other than my product. You can weigh the page accordingly.

I also have not used most of these apps for a year each. Nobody writing a roundup has. Everything here comes from the companies' own live pages, quoted with the date I read them, which is a lower bar than a real trial and a much higher one than the invented test scores further up this search results page.

The picks, up front

Brazilian Portuguese, starting from zero, mostly listening on a commute: Pimsleur. Audio-first, 30-minute lessons, and its Portuguese course calls itself Brazilian Portuguese in its own words. You hear the language before you see it spelled, which matters more in Portuguese than in Spanish.

European Portuguese, any level: Practice Portuguese. It is one of the few products built for that variety and nothing else. Its own site says it does not split its efforts "across any other languages, or even Brazilian Portuguese." That sentence is the entire reason it wins this slot.

You already take lessons with a tutor and keep forgetting what they taught: a flashcard tool, not another course. Free Anki if you like making cards. Mine if you don't. Details below, including why Anki is the first thing to try.

You have never said a Portuguese sentence to a human: buy an hour with a person before any subscription. On italki this morning there were 397 Portuguese teachers listed, from $7 to $85 an hour. No app on this page substitutes for that, including mine.

If one of those matches you, you can close the tab. The rest of the page is the working.

Settle the variety first

This is the decision that wastes money, and it comes before the app question rather than after it.

Portuguese splits harder than Spanish does. A learner trained on Brazilian audio often finds European Portuguese hard to parse at first, because the European variety reduces unstressed vowels heavily and the rhythm lands differently. Buy twelve months of the wrong one and you have bought an accent you will then work to undo.

Here is which apps commit, read off their own pages on 21 September 2026.

That Duolingo row is worth sitting with. Learners report the course is Brazilian, and a forum post is not a source I will publish as fact. What I can say is that Duolingo had many chances to label it and didn't.

So: moving to Portugal, your shopping list is short and Practice Portuguese tops it. Brazil, and nearly everything on the market already points at you.

What a year actually costs

Monthly prices hide the spend, which is why every competing page publishes them. Below is twelve months, with the date I checked and what I could not confirm.

Three gaps I will not paper over. Babbel's pricing page would not load for me, and Memrise and Clozemaster render their prices client-side, so I have no figure for any of the three. Every roundup above me prints numbers for all of them. I would rather leave a cell empty than publish a price that was true in 2024.

Pimsleur shows why monthly framing misleads. Its own subscriptions page publishes no dollar amount, and the App Store shows two different annual figures. Anyone quoting you a clean "$20 a month, so $240 a year" is doing arithmetic on a number Pimsleur never published in that form.

What each one is bad at

The failure comes first here, because it is the part you cannot get from a page that earns a commission on the click.

Pimsleur gives you almost no grammar instruction and no writing. You will speak early and well for your level, and you will not be able to explain why a sentence takes the subjunctive, because nobody told you. It is also the most expensive way to listen if you already have intermediate ears.

Practice Portuguese has no free trial, which is a real cost when you cannot sample before paying. It teaches one variety of one language, so if you drift toward Brazil it is the wrong subscription entirely. The 30-day refund is the thing that makes it safe to try.

Duolingo will not get you speaking. Its own courses now claim content through CEFR B2 for Portuguese, which is a statement about what the course contains rather than what learners come out able to do. The strongest published result on Duolingo, its own 2024 CALICO study on English courses, measured reading and listening only. Free is a fair price for that, and the free tier is real.

Anki ships no Portuguese whatsoever. Empty engine, and you supply every word. It also still runs the 1987 SM-2 algorithm out of the box: the modern scheduler, FSRS, is opt-in at the bottom of the deck options page, and plenty of articles wrongly claim it became the default. If you will not spend an evening in that options page, Anki will quietly underperform for you.

italki is not an app in the sense you are shopping for, and it stops working the moment you stop paying per hour. Its own blog admits the gap: "It's up to you to take the language you learned in your italki lesson and add it to a smart platform to ensure you don't forget your new vocabulary."

One number worth carrying into any of these. The State Department's Foreign Service Institute puts Portuguese at 24 weeks of class, inside a Category I band of 552 to 690 class hours, on a week of 23 class hours plus 17 hours of self-study. Portuguese sits at the bottom of that band, faster than Spanish and French, which the same page lists at 30 weeks. Those are full-time government students aiming at Professional Working Proficiency, so read it as the shape of the hill rather than a schedule for your commute.

Where I have a stake in this

Verbamor is mine, it costs $129.99 a year or $19.99 a month, it is iOS only, and it has no free tier. It does one job: you record or type what came up in your tutor lesson, and it turns that vocabulary into fill-in-the-blank cards with audio and an image, scheduled by FSRS.

So it is the wrong purchase for most people reading this. It teaches you nothing new, it will not take a beginner through their first thousand words, and if you have no lessons and no input, there is nothing for it to hold on to. Buy a course or an hour with a teacher first.

One honest limit on this page's own subject: Verbamor's Portuguese speaks with a Brazilian voice, so a European Portuguese learner is getting the wrong accent read back to them on the sentence audio. That is the same disclosure I have been asking of everybody else, and my product fails it for half this page's readers.

If you already pay a tutor and keep losing the words between lessons, try Anki free before you try mine. It is free on three platforms, it is genuinely excellent, and for anyone who enjoys making their own cards it is the correct answer to this entire page. Mine is worth paying for only when the card-making itself is what keeps stopping you.

Questions people actually ask

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Sources

Prices on this page were read off each company's own live pages on 21 September 2026 and are rechecked quarterly. No app here was trialled for this guide, and nothing on this page was scored out of 5. Every load-bearing claim Verbamor makes is traced to its paper on the research page.