About aprende.pt

An independent course in European Portuguese (the Portuguese of Portugal) for expats, visitors and learners. Last reviewed 6 November 2026.

Sources and honesty

Spellings follow the 1990 Orthographic Agreement as used in Portugal. Phrases and grammar were written in European Portuguese for this site. Pronunciations (IPA) were checked against Wiktionary's European Portuguese entries and follow the usual Lisbon patterns found in dictionaries such as Infopédia (Porto Editora) and Priberam. Ciberdúvidas is the place to settle questions of usage.

It has not yet been reviewed line by line by a native-speaker teacher, and the Brazil-versus-Portugal notes and the dialogues in particular would benefit from one. Regional usage differs: this is Lisbon-based, and you will hear different words and accents in Porto, the Algarve, Madeira and the Azores.

Audio

Every recording is generated in advance with Piper, an open-source speech model, using the European Portuguese "tugão" voice (MIT licence, trained on a CC0 dataset, OHF voice datasets). It is synthetic: some words sound less natural than a person would, and it reduces unstressed vowels less than Lisbon speakers do (the lab says where this matters). If a recording cannot play, the site uses your device's voice only if it is a pt-PT voice. It never uses a Brazilian voice.

Where this fits

aprende.pt teaches the language. For the practical side of being in Portugal, see tourists.pt (tickets, taxes, money, emergencies, a phrasebook) and agendar.pt (public-service appointments and documents), and dictionary.pt for looking words up.

Privacy

No accounts. Your flashcard progress, lesson scores and ear-training score are stored in your browser's local storage on this device, and never sent to us. The microphone tool processes your voice in the browser. Nothing is recorded to a server.

The site uses Google Analytics through Tag Manager in consent mode. Unless you press "Allow analytics" on the banner, no analytics cookies are stored. Fonts load from Google Fonts.