Learn Portuguese by reading.

The best way to learn Portuguese is to read authentic Portuguese daily with instant tap-to-translate, learning the most frequent words first and reinforcing them with spaced repetition. Portuguese spelling is largely regular, so reading real texts quickly builds vocabulary — and Lector defaults to Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR), the largest variety.
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Lector reading a Portuguese passage with colour-coded word states and click-to-translate
Native speakers
~260 million
Difficulty (FSI)
Category I
To proficiency
~600–750 hours
Why Portuguese

Reasons to start.

01

Around 260 million native speakers — the most-spoken language in South America and the Southern Hemisphere, and official on four continents (Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and more).

02

Brazil is one of the world's largest economies, so Portuguese opens up travel, business, music, and culture for a huge and growing community.

03

Largely regular spelling and Latin-derived cognates with English make reading approachable early — and Lector ships Brazilian Portuguese by default.

Bonus: Very closely related to Spanish — Portuguese speakers can often read and follow Spanish — and to Italian; it shares a large stock of Latin-derived cognates with English, so knowing one Romance language makes the others far easier.

Is it hard? How long?

The honest version.

FSI Category I (~600–750 hours), among the easiest languages for English speakers. Spelling is largely regular and there are many cognates; the nasal vowels (ão, õe), verb conjugations, and the distinctive personal infinitive are the main learning curve.
Whatever the category, the method is the same: read a lot of Portuguese, learn the most common words first, and let a spaced-repetition system resurface them right before you forget. See the method .
A line of Portuguese

No fim da tarde, a família se reúne na varanda para tomar café, conversar sobre o dia e ver as crianças brincarem no quintal.

In the late afternoon, the family gathers on the porch to drink coffee, talk about the day, and watch the children play in the backyard.

How Lector helps

Read it. Practice it. Remember it.

The reader (above) turns any Portuguese text into a lesson — tap any word to translate it, hear it in a native voice, and track what you know. Then frequency-ordered cloze practice locks the core vocabulary in, and mined words push straight to Anki.
Practice

Drill the words that matter first.

Frequency-ordered cloze sentences build the core of Portuguese vocabulary, scheduled by spaced repetition so each one returns right when you're about to forget it — in multiple-choice or typing mode. Practise listening to native pronunciation on every word and sentence, powered by Google text-to-speech.
Portuguese cloze practice in Lector with multiple-choice options
Free resources

Free resources to get you started.

The Portuguese reference data and Anki decks below are free to download and use on their own. To turn them into a full reading course, self-host Lector for free or start on the cloud from $5/mo.

Portuguese reference data

Frequency lists and Anki decks built from open corpora — free to download and use.

Browse the data

New to Anki?

A from-scratch guide to spaced-repetition flashcards and loading your first Portuguese deck.

Getting started with Anki
Questions

Learning Portuguese, answered.

More on the method, or jump into the docs.
Get involved

Learning Portuguese? You're in good company.

Come chat with other learners on our Discord — swap resources, compare progress, ask questions, and stay motivated while you read your way in.
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Start reading Portuguese today.

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