How Long Does It Take to Learn Portuguese?

Want to learn Portuguese?

With over 220 million speakers spread across Brazil, Portugal, and several African countries, you're in good company! Home to several UNESCO sites like the Island of Madeira, the Samba genre of music and dance, the martial art Capoeira, and a rich literary tradition, Portuguese offers a window into vibrant cultures around the world. (Plus, Ronaldo is Portuguese.)

Well:

But how long does it take to learn Portuguese?

Let's find out:

How long does it take to learn Portuguese?

The only honest answer to this question is that it depends.

Reviewing 76 years worth of data, the US Government's School of Language Studies reports that it typically takes US diplmats 600–750 in-class hours (plus ~1,200–1,500 out-of-class hours) to learn Portuguese to the level of "General Professional Fluency".

"General Professional Fluency" corresponds to Level 3 on the International Language Roundtable (ILR) fluency scale, and diplomats focus specifically on the ability to speak Portuguese fluently and read the language confidently.

This means that, after ~2,000 hours of study, US diplomats are expected to be able to:

Essentially, this means that diplomats become conversationally proficient in Portuguese. You might call it a high-intermediate level of Portuguese. They can speak the language quite fluently and don't have an issue functioning in a Portuguese environment, but they're by no means fluent, and you would immediately notice that they aren't a native speaker.

But I'm not a diplomat, so what does this mean for me?

For the most part, this means good things.

In particular, you should know that:

The fact that it takes diplomats 2,000 hours to learn Portuguese doesn't mean that you have to bury your nose in a textbook for 2,000 hours before a switch flips and you get to begin doing interesting things in Portuguese.

On the contrary, you progress toward Portuguese fluency by doing interesting things in Portuguese. When we watch YouTube, listen to podcasts, read books, browse social media—consume Portuguese, generally speaking—and understand the messages within that content, we gradually build a mental model of Portuguese in our brain. As we continue interacting with Portuguese, that mental model becomes more robust and accessible.

In other words, Portuguese fluency comes a byproduct of simply spending time doing things you enjoy in Portuguese.

To get your foot in the door and begin stumbling through your first piece of Portuguese content, you're realistically looking at a couple hundred hours of work. Probably less.

You might be able to learn Portuguese a bit faster if...

You speak another Romance language

If you already speak Spanish or another Romance language, you'll enjoy a massive head start when you begin learning Portuguese. Spanish and Portuguese have a lexical similarity score of 89%, meaning that virtually all vocabulary is shared between the two languages.

To see what I mean, compare:

There are some notable differences—little high-frequency words like of and the are quite different, and Spanish words that end in ~ción instead end in ~cão in Portuguese—but the two texts are remarkably similar. The two languages' shared roots in Latin mean they have many similarities in vocabulary, verb conjugation, sentence structure, and even idioms.

You have a concrete, pressing reason to learn Portuguese

I earlier made a somewhat bold statement: you progress toward Portuguese fluency by doing interesting things in Portuguese.

Here, I'm going to double down: you won't learn Portuguese to any meaningful level unless you go out of your way to engage with Portuguese—whether that means having conversations, reading books, watching Netflix's 3% in the original, or, well, something.

On a practical level, your typical Portuguese textbook might give you ten sentences per chapter. A three minute Portuguese song will expose you to the same amount of sentences, and there might be a couple dozen sentences in a single page of Portuguese text. Using Portuguese to do something will expose you to significantly more Portuguese than following the traditional classroom approach, and this makes a difference for language learners.

Plus, it's fun.

You focus on one specific aspect of Portuguese

Languages are generally broken down into four skills:

And these skills can further be broken down into sub-skills. You're writing Portuguese whether you're texting a friend, writing a novel, or writing a financial statement about your company's market performance during the previous year, but these are really three different types of writing. Even if you became a renowned author of Portuguese romantic-comedy novels, that wouldn't mean that this style of writing would translate well to the more cold and objective world of business.

This presents challenges to the intermediate learner because it means that your Portuguese is, necessarily, going to become unbalanced. You'll feel super confident in some areas, but woefully unprepared in others. A big part of graduating from intermediate to advanced boils down to learning to confidently do a bunch of things in Portuguese that, frankly, you aren't actually interested in doing.

For the beginner, though, this is excellent news.

It means that you're much, much closer to being able to do anything in Portuguese than you are to doing everything in Portuguese.

What makes Portuguese hard to learn

Portuguese may be a "Category I" language according to the Foreign Service Institute, indicating that it's one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to learn, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

Here are some of the hurdles you'll have to overcome while learning Portuguese.

Portuguese pronunciation

Portuguese pronunciation is wild. I could write an entire blog article about it.

To be brief, though, here are the two main wrenches you'll need to dodge:

Nasal vowels

With normal vowels, air comes out of our throat. With nasal vowels, air comes out of our throat and nostrils. To see what I mean, place your fingers lightly on your nostrils (the outside, don't be picking your nose on me) and say the word "had". This is a "normal" vowel. Now say "hand". Feel that vibration? That's a nasal sound.

In English, nasal sounds always appear before a nasal content: N or M.

In Portuguese, nasal sounds appear before nasal consonants, but they can also appear anywhere. If you see a vowel with a little squiggly hat (as in ã or õ), it's nasal.

Compare these two words:

You can make these nasal sounds as a native English speaker, but you won't be used to pronouncing them without following up with an N or M sound. Producing them independently, on demand, will take practice.

The letter R

Officially, Portuguese R has two pronunciations:

But, like speakers of many languages that have this guttural R sound, Portuguese speakers sometimes pronounce the "proper" trilled R and sometimes substitute it with other things. Unfortunately, all of these possible variations are sounds that don't exist in English.

For example, here are there different native Portuguese speakers saying carro (car):

Portuguese grammar

Portuguese grammar is pretty standard so far as Romance languages go, but it still presents several hurdles for the aspiring learner. Here are three big ones:

Portuguese verb conjugations

In English, we have five verb forms—write, writes, wrote, writing, written.

Portuguese verbs have in the ballpark of seventy forms.

Portuguese gendered nouns

In English, nouns are just nouns. A duck is a duck.

In Portuguese, nouns have gender.

Specifically, it has two genders:

Every single noun has a gender, and there's no logic behind what noun is what gender. It's just something you'll have to memorize.

Brazilian Portuguese vs European Portuguese

Do me a favor and watch 10 or 15 seconds of this video:

No, it's not just you. Those two accents sound super different.

More than that:

Don't get me wrong, they're both Portuguese... but if you get used to Brazilian Portuguese, you might find that you need to do a bit of work to make sense of European Portuguese or Mozambican Portuguese.

The best way to learn Portuguese

There's a lot of apps and resources out there, but to learn Portuguese, you only really need to know one thing:

The more content you consume and understand in Portuguese, the faster you will learn.

So, however you go about learning Portuguese, make sure your plan includes these three steps:

Learn the basics of Portuguese

To build your Portuguese foundation, you've got a few tasks ahead of you:

There are several apps and resources out there aimed at total beginners, so I'll leave these tasks to you.

Just know that this is a foundation. You don't need to know these 1,000 words like the back of your hand. All you need to do to move on to the next stage is reach a point where you can generally break Portuguese sentences down and make sense of what's going on. So long as you're consuming content in Portuguese, you will naturally build and reinforce your knowledge of all the above points totally naturally.

Consume a lot of content in Portuguese

In this stage, you have only three tasks:

And while I say "only", that first step is going to be one of the most difficult things you do in Portuguese. Once you find that first piece of content, though, you're off to the races. You now know that you can understand things in Portuguese! So long as you follow your interests and continuously engage with the language, you will learn Portuguese.

If you're completely new to Portuguese, start with a YouTube channel like A1 Comprehensible Input in Portuguese (or something similar). In these "comprehensible input" videos, the speakers intentionally use simple language, rephrase difficult sentences, and repeat themselves—all things that make it easier for a new learner to comprehend what they're saying in Portuguese, without needing to translate to English.

Migaku also makes conquering that first step a bit easier by enhancing the subtitles in these videos, as shown below:

You're looking at a few things here:

Migaku offers the same functionality for pretty much anything on the internet with copyable text: everything from the subtitles on Netflix and YouTube to posts on X (formerly Twitter) to all of the articles on Portuguese Wikipedia.

Now, you don't need to use Migaku. You can just watch YouTube and manually paste new words into a free online dictionary instead—it's takes more work, but you can do it.

Whichever option you choose, you'll be doing the same thing: consuming a lot of Portuguese content and gradually acquiring the language over time. If you're not sure where to start, set a goal of simply establishing the habit: become the type of person who listens to Portuguese or reads in Portuguese each day.

Take intentional steps to remember the useful vocabulary words you encounter

I'm about to show you something that's integral to being human:

Yeah.

We forget stuff.

Quickly, if left to our own devices.

Unfortunately, learning Portuguese means will involves remembering thousands of vocabulary words.

The good news is that this isn't as bad as it seems. So long as we review information periodically, it will stick. In particular, if we review information at gradually increasing intervals, those things will eventually work their way into our long-term memory.

To streamline this process, we built Migaku to automate the process of making flashcards, figuring out when to review them, and curating daily learning plans. It works like this:

We'll automatically schedule the flashcard for you to learn in the future. Then, depending on your performance (whether you do or don't remember the card), we'll determine when you should review it next. This creates a powerful filtering process in which you spend of your review time on the stuff you struggle with and waste less of it on the stuff you know well.

If you aren't looking to pay for a language learning tool right now, you can achieve similar functionality with an open-source tool like Anki SRS. Whereas Migaku is plug-and-play, Anki is a sandbox program, meaning that you will have to do everything manually—but if you don't mind playing around a bit, you can create some pretty cool things.

Repeat steps 2 and 3

That's it: that's the basic learning loop. To learn Portuguese, all you have to do is:

So long as you do that, over time you'll learn the specific vocabulary and grammar you need to do the things that are important to you.

It's a long journey, but it's a fun one, too.

How to measure your level of Portuguese

Here are three options for you, ranked from most to least formal:

Take a Portuguese proficiency test

Which test to take is a question for you to decide yourself:

Both of these tests are aligned with the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR):

If this is the first time you're hearing about the CEFR, you may wish to:

Track the amount of words you know

At Migaku, we track the amount of Portuguese words that a learner knows. While official certifications are great, Portuguese content isn't made to align with the CEFR standards. This means that you may technically have a solid upper-intermediate level of proficiency on paper, but find yourself struggling to understand the stuff you want to watch on YouTube or Netflix.

Using "known" words as a metric isn't perfect either—it's actually really hard to define what a word is—but it does let us do useful things, like estimate how well you'll understand a piece of content you tune into.

For example, I have never studied Portuguese before, so Migaku gives me a whopping 0% comprehension score for this discussion of the hit Portuguese TV series, 3%:

But if we switch over to Mandarin, a language I do speak, I get a much better comprehension score of 81% for this random YouTube video I'm watching:

Following suit, at Migaku we break down proficiency levels according to vocabulary size:

Skip the certifications and focus on what you can do

At the end of the day, unless you're planning to move to a Portuguese-speaking country, become a Portuguese teacher, or take up a very specific line of work, it probably isn't a huge deal whether you ever get certified or not.

I've been studying Spanish for nearly 20 years now—I was not expecting that number to be so big—and I've never taken a Spanish proficiency test.

But I can say:

And at the end of the day, those are the things that matter to me.

Language is a whole new world, and the experiences you have in it ultimately matter much more than your level of proficiency on paper.

In other words:

Depending on your goals, learning Portuguese will take around:

However quickly or slowly you learn, just know that so long as you're regularly engaging with Portuguese, you're making progress.