Duolingo Review: Portuguese Lessons

Almost anyone trying to learn a language these days is using (or at least has heard of) Duolingo. You know, the little green bird who oh-so-nicely (and sometimes not so nicely!) reminds you to get your daily practice in? Millions use Duolingo to study everything from Greek to Gaelic, making proud posts to their social media feeds when they hit a new milestone in their streak. But how does it measure up with respect to Portuguese lessons? Full disclosure: our review is coming from the perspective of more than 1,000 straight days using it to learn Portuguese, so stick with us and see for yourself.

Do you already speak a similar language?

It stands to reason that the vast majority of people learning Portuguese have some previous exposure to a Romance language. Perhaps you learned French in high school and now you want to spend some time in Brazil, or you grew up bilingual with Spanish and are ready to make the easy hop-skip-jump over to Portuguese. That will absolutely impact how you experience learning Portuguese via Duolingo: many words are cognates, pronunciation is often quite similar, and you'll be able to rely on your "other language" to give you plenty of clues as you work through various lessons here. That's not a bad thing, but it gives a different overall perspective on Duolingo than, say, trying to learn Korean for the first time and having to learn not only a whole new-to-you alphabet but also pronunciation.

Learning is impacted by what other language(s) you speak

In our experience, coming at Duolingo's Portuguese lessons from a fluent background in both Spanish and English, that familiarity can both help and hinder your progress. On the one hand, you'll feel like a rockstar as you fly through the lessons on Duolingo: you can lean on what you already know and level up almost as quickly as you want. You'll also make fewer mistakes: Duolingo starts you out with 5 hearts, and each mistake will cost you one. Use up all of your hearts, and you'll be waiting a full 24 hours before you can keep practicing Portuguese. So, with some fluency in another Romance language, you may get to keep studying for even longer.

Hints get in the way of genuine learning

Downside? Duolingo has a wordbank on most exercises you'll use for practice. That means that instead of having to type in a word from memory, you'll choose from a selected set of words to create a phrase or sentence. Plus, most of the time you can click on a word you don't know to get a hint (Duolingo will tell you exactly what it is and how to say it), so it's rare that you have to pull something up from the depths of your memory. Across all of the languages Duolingo offers, students often complain about that: too many hints and too many wordbank exercises equals not much genuine progress towards fluency.

Doesn't offer a lot of practical skills

If we're being really honest with you (and with ourselves), nearly 3 years of daily use of Duolingo has barely moved the needle on our ability to speak Portuguese. Given that we're fluent in Spanish and have been acing the Portuguese lessons for 1,000+ days, it shouldn't leave us staring blankly when someone we encounter asks us a basic question... but it does. We can absolutely tell you that o macaco gosta do abacaxi (the monkey likes the pineapple), but if you ask us for directions to the nearest bus station, you're going to have a very painful wait as we try to string the words together (and then we'll probably default to Spanish, hoping you'll understand us anyway).

Gamification will keep you around

So, why have we spent (or, you might even say if you were feeling salty, wasted) so much time on the Bird App? We'll say what most people do: the gamified features of this language platform are addictive, and it makes you like you're really learning a language (even if your functional fluency remains at almost nil). It's the sunk cost fallacy: why would you stop after you finally hit that 100-day (or 1,000-day) streak, even if you're not getting a ton out of the Portuguese lessons? Plus, Duolingo is constantly showing you how you measure up against other language learners: every week is an opportunity to rank on the leaderboard and move up (or down) to a new group (Ruby, Emerald, and so on, all the way up to the top tier of Diamond). You can friend people on the platform and complete challenges together, earning cute monthly badges and encouraging each other to keep up that streak. They don't even have to be studying the same language as you.

Subscribing has some benefits

And did we mention that Duolingo won't cost you anything? While you can use Duolingo for free as long as you like (unlike many Portuguese lessons that only give you a few lessons before you have to upgrade to a paid account), you do have the option to subscribe to Super Duolingo. (And, believe us when we say that you will have many, many invitations to do so, because almost every third ad you'll get on your free account will be for the paid plan here...) What benefits does that get you? First, it takes away the ads. Next, you'll get unlimited mistakes: on the free account, remember that you start out with 5 hearts, and every mistake takes one of those away until you run out, and then you're locked out of practicing until they "refill" over the rest of the day. And, speaking of mistakes, Super Duolingo gives you access to targeted practice of the errors you've made over time.

Options for monthly/annual billing, single user or group account

So, how much does it cost to subscribe? The easiest way to check the current pricing is through the Shop section of Duolingo (which we found most easily on the desktop version, not so much via the app). We want to point out that while you're always quoted a monthly cost, the lowest-priced subscriptions are based on annual billing. At the time of this review, single-user access to a Duolingo membership was $12.99 per month or $83.99/per year (but shown as a monthly price of $6.99). Duolingo has also rolled out a Family Plan, and they're quick to tell you that the 2-6 people on the account don't even have to be a part of your household or your family tree: it's literally anyone you'd like to include, and it's priced at $119.99/year.

You can use it for free

Duolingo doesn't have to cost you a thing. We haven't spent a penny (or a Brazilian real) since we started the journey down the Bird path, and yes, we have picked up on some vocabulary and even a bit of grammar over those 1,000+ days. There's speaking, reading, listening, and some limited writing practice, an array of male/female and old/young voices to challenge the ear a bit, and of course, all of the streak-chasing and friend-encouraging features we mentioned to keep us moving, even if it's just a few minutes a day.

Fun way to fill some time

As a zero-dollar option for studying Portuguese (or many other languages), it's not the worst thing out there. But, for the love of language learning, please don't try to convince yourself that just a few lessons a day on Duolingo will make you fluent. This app is best used as a fun way to fill some free time, or to supplement more in-depth studies using another service (like some of the higher-ranked Portuguese lessons on our list). Duolingo deserves our "just average" rating, given all of the pros and cons.

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On the Duolingo website