Learn Portuguese
Portuguese is most often started by people who already have some Spanish, and the place they come unstuck is the sound rather than the grammar. iLexiBox puts the nose first: Portuguese sends a great many of its vowels through it, the spelling signals that in three different ways, and not one of them is obvious from Spanish or from English.
Start at the alphabet
The Portuguese on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 200 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Portuguese voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random.
- 26letters
- 10digits
- 24pronunciation rules
- 100core words
- 20everyday phrases
- 20sentences
Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the course teaches them:
- m — an m at the END of a word is not an m at all — you never close your lips. It just sends the vowel out through your nose: bom, sim, comontem — yesterday
- n — the same thing happens to an n inside a word before another consonant — in canto, ponte and mundo the vowel goes nasal and the n itself vanishesmundo — world
- ão — the ending you will meet more than any other: “ow” as in “now”, through the nose, finished with a hum. Never say the o and the n as two thingsirmão — brother
Then material that does not run out
Once you are reading, the level is the point. The Text Generator writes Portuguese at the CEFR level, length, topic and format you ask for, so the step up is a setting rather than a new book. Speaking scores you word by word as you read aloud. The Conversation Partner talks back. The Translator explains a sentence instead of replacing it, and the Corrector marks what you wrote and says why.
Above the on-ramp sits the Path — a station map from A1 to C2 with grammar, vocabulary and checkpoint stations — and Words & Notes, where everything you save comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule in seven quiz styles.
2,373 photographs, 2,337 of them captioned in Portuguese
The album is a photograph for every word, shelved by category, each caption written in Portuguese and spoken in a real recorded voice rather than synthesised on the fly. It doubles as a game: see the picture, spell the word. Free to replay.
What Portuguese actually costs a beginner
An m at the end of a word is not an m at all — the lips never close, and the vowel goes out through the nose instead. The same happens to an n inside a word before another consonant, in canto and mundo, where the n itself disappears. And ão, the ending you will meet more than any other, is an ow through the nose finished with a hum, never an o and an n said one after the other. Nasality is not something a page can teach, so each of these is a card with a recorded Brazilian voice — the same voice the album is spoken in.
54 languages in the app, CEFR A1–C2.