The best app to learn Portuguese starts with which Portuguese
Portuguese hides a fork in the road that the app stores never mention: Brazilian and European Portuguese differ in sound, rhythm and everyday grammar far more than American and British English do. Nearly every app teaches Brazilian by default. If Lisbon is the plan, an app that never says so is quietly teaching you the wrong music.
We make Vocabloot, one of the five below. We have been direct about what it does not do, and for a complete beginner we recommend starting elsewhere.
Five Portuguese apps, and who each suits
Duolingo
- Best for
- Building the habit, if Brazil is the goal
- Price
- Free with ads, around $7 a month without
- What it does well
- A solid Brazilian Portuguese course with enough repetition to plant the first thousand words, and the open vowels of Brazilian pronunciation are easier to pick up by ear.
- Where it falls short
- Brazilian only, and it never tells you. Grammar goes unexplained, and European Portuguese's swallowed vowels will be unintelligible if this is all you trained on.
Babbel
- Best for
- Grammar and situation-based dialogue
- Price
- Around $15 a month, less on longer plans
- What it does well
- Explains verb conjugation and the contractions (no, na, pelo) that make written Portuguese look harder than it is. Dialogue-first lessons suit a language people mostly want to speak.
- Where it falls short
- Also Brazilian-focused, paid only, and it finishes. Studio audio flatters your comprehension either way.
Anki
- Best for
- Vocabulary retention at scale
- Price
- Free, except $25 once on iPhone
- What it does well
- Best in class for retention, and the one tool where you can choose your variant: European Portuguese decks with native audio exist and are good.
- Where it falls short
- No teaching, and you must check each deck's variant yourself. A mixed deck will happily teach you both accents without telling you which is which.
Drops
- Best for
- Five-minute vocabulary top-ups, in either variant
- Price
- Free for five minutes a day, around $10 a month for more
- What it does well
- One of the few apps offering European and Brazilian Portuguese as separate courses, with clear native audio in each.
- Where it falls short
- Vocabulary only, no grammar, fixed lists. Portuguese verb endings do the sentence's work, and Drops never mentions them.
Vocabloot ours
- Best for
- Someone with basic grammar who wants everyday vocabulary
- Price
- Free during early access
- What it does well
- Point the camera at anything and it gives you the Portuguese word with its article, pronunciation and an example sentence. Gender attaches best to real objects, o garfo and a faca, and the words of your own day are the ones you will actually reuse.
- Where it falls short
- No grammar teaching, so it will not explain conjugation or the personal infinitive. Use it for vocabulary alongside something else, and expect early-access rough edges.
Brazilian or European: decide before the app does
Brazilian Portuguese is spoken with open vowels and a slower melody; European Portuguese compresses unstressed vowels until whole syllables disappear. Learners trained on one routinely fail to understand the other at first contact.
The grammar diverges too: Brazil uses você where Portugal often uses tu, and continuous forms are built differently. None of this is exotic, but an app that mixes them silently leaves you sounding like nowhere.
If Brazil is the goal, every app on this list works. If Portugal is, filter hard: Drops' European course, European-specific Anki decks, and European podcasts from day one, and treat Duolingo as Brazilian, whatever the label says.
The honest recommendation
Starting from zero for Brazil: Babbel if you can pay, Duolingo if you cannot.
Starting from zero for Portugal: Drops' European course for sound plus a grammar source, and accept that the big apps are not built for you.
Comfortable reading but short of words: Anki or Vocabloot. Pick Vocabloot if you would rather learn the words for what is around you than work through a frequency deck.
Everyone: pick one variant's audio and stay loyal for the first year. Mixing accents early costs comprehension in both.
Try the camera approach
Snap anything and learn the word for it, with pronunciation and an example sentence.
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Free during early access. We only use your email to send your invite.