The best way to learn Portuguese, priced honestly

European or Brazilian comes first

Every other choice on this page depends on one decision: which Portuguese.

Brazil and Portugal write nearly the same language and say it quite differently. European Portuguese swallows many unstressed vowels, so a learner raised on Brazilian audio can find Lisbon hard to follow at first. The grammar and spelling differences are smaller, and you can fix them later. The ear takes longer.

Products pick a side. Pimsleur’s Portuguese page opens with “Brazilian Portuguese is the most common variety”. Practice Portuguese says “Strictly European Portuguese, since 2012”. Several others never say, and you find out when you press play.

So decide by where you’ll use it. Moving to Portugal, partner from Porto: European. Brazilian family, work in São Paulo, or no particular place in mind: Brazilian, because far more people speak it, so there’s far more Brazilian audio to learn from. The best-app guide goes product by product on this.

What I sell

I make Verbamor, an iPhone and iPad app that turns words from your own lessons and conversations into flashcards. It’s $19.99 a month or $129.99 a year, US prices taken from the app’s own plan definitions on 21 September 2026, and your App Store may show a different amount. It sits in the table like every other row.

I haven’t used Practice Portuguese, Rocket, PortuguesePod101, Pimsleur or Babbel myself. Every price below is from the company’s own page or App Store listing, read on the date given in the sources.

What Portuguese costs, route by route

Not priced: Memrise, Busuu, Clozemaster and Duolingo Max. I couldn’t read a price for any of them on their own websites, and I won’t copy one from a roundup. Memrise and Busuu do print prices on their US App Store listings, with no language named: on 18 October 2026, Memrise's "Monthly Language Learning Plan" at $24.99 and "Annual Language Learning Plan" at $61.99, and Busuu's purchases from $6.99 to $139.99.

How many hours Portuguese takes, and what that costs

Portuguese takes about 552 class hours. The Foreign Service Institute’s current page lists it at 24 weeks, the bottom of Category I’s 552 to 690 hours, level with Italian and 6 weeks shorter than French or Spanish.

Read that number with its context. FSI’s students do 23 hours a week in class and 17 more on their own, so the 24 weeks also contain 408 hours of self-study. The goal is professional working proficiency, ILR level 3, which is a lot more than ordering lunch. The State Department doesn’t split the figure by variety.

552 class hours, at a pace you can keep

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months at an hour a day, every day

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months at 30 minutes a day

Over 2 years, the apps barely differ. Babbel’s annual plan twice is $214.80. Rocket is $149.95 once. Pimsleur Premium on the annual plan is $299.90. Anki is $24.99 once. Verbamor is $259.98. Practice Portuguese, monthly for 24 months, is €360, roughly $396 at its own converter’s rate.

Tutoring is where the money goes. At italki’s published $5 to $30 an hour, two lessons a week for 2 years is 208 hours: $1,040 at the bottom, $6,240 at the top.

What all the money buys is the same 4 things, in order. Audio you can mostly follow, in your variety. Recall, which in Karpicke and Roediger’s 2008 study left about 80% of words remembered a week later against 36% for restudying. Spacing across days. And speaking to someone who corrects you, which in Saito and Akiyama’s 2017 video-call study improved comprehensibility in the group that got feedback, and not in the comparison group.

Which route fits which learner

Brazilian, from zero, no money yet. Duolingo’s free tier to find out if you’ll stick with it, then free Anki for the words you keep losing. Give it 3 months before you pay for anything.

Brazilian, from zero, mostly in the car. Pimsleur, at $149.95 a year on the annual plan. It’s Brazilian by its own description, and answering out loud is the right habit for a language you’ll mostly speak.

European, any level. Practice Portuguese at €15 a month. It teaches only that variety, which is exactly why it’s the pick: it’s one of the few products where you know which accent you’re paying for.

Want a syllabus and hate subscriptions. Rocket Portuguese, $149.95 once, with 60 days to ask for a refund. Check the sample audio is the variety you want first, since the pricing page doesn’t say.

Want to speak. A tutor on italki, and say up front whether you want Brazilian or European. Two hours a month at $15 is $360 a year.

You like building things. Anki, free on a computer, with FSRS switched on in the deck options (the default is still the older SM-2). Make cards from what you hear in your variety. That beats my app on price by $129.99 a year, and if you’ll keep it up it’s the better answer.

What the courses leave behind

Every course here teaches you Portuguese somebody chose for you, in an order that suits most people. That’s fine for the first thousand words.

What it can’t keep is the Portuguese that happened to you. Your tutor uses saudade in a sentence, explains it, you nod, and a week later you’ve kept the feeling and lost the sentence.

That’s the gap Verbamor fills. Record a lesson or paste a transcript, and it picks out the words and phrases, then turns each into a card with the word blanked from the sentence you heard, plus native-accent audio and an image. FSRS decides when each one comes back.

The limit: Verbamor has no course and no grammar lessons. Past a starter deck of about 650 common words it holds what you’ve met, so from zero you’ll get more from Duolingo’s free tier, or Practice Portuguese if you’re European-track, for your first months. I’d rather say that than sell you the wrong thing.

Questions people actually ask

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Sources