Blog Posts

We’re working on a big improvement for the platform – we’re calling it “Smart Review”. Smart Review is a personalized way to practice everything you’ve been learning across all the Units. It incorporates spaced repetition 🤓, a highly-effective method for learning and retaining information. Scoring Changes Have your Unit scores looked a bit different this past week? To prepare for this upcoming feature, […]

2020 is almost here! Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet? Since we’re as committed to helping you reach your Portuguese language-learning goals as you are, we’ve put together some ideas to help you use our platform as effectively as possible. At the end of the article we’ve also included a worksheet to guide […]

Member feedback on our new “Shorties” episodes has been so positive, that we’ve decided to launch them into their own separate podcast feed! Subscribing in your favourite podcast application will allow you to automatically receive episodes as they’re launched, so you can improve your European Portuguese skills in just a couple minutes each day. Short […]

You asked for it: By popular request, we’ve launched a Practice Portuguese Community Forum! For years, we’ve been having fantastic conversations with members, directly via email. So now, it’s about time that the whole community can benefit from some of these nuggets that would otherwise be lost deep in the email archives. In the forum, […]

We’ve launched a new feature to record and analyze your pronunciation of phrases inside Lessons!

After you complete all of the Lessons of a Unit, you’ll unlock a special dialogue. They’re basically bite-sized podcast episodes (1-3 minutes long), designed to put some of the vocabulary you’ve learned into context. We’ve launched over 50 new dialogues, with more on the way as we continue to roll out new Learning Studio Units. […]

September 20th: This post has been updated to reflect additional scoring tweaks we launched today, inspired by some of the feedback in emails and this post’s comments. We’d love to know what you think in the comments… Obrigado! 🙂

We have exciting news! Over the past year, we’ve been rebuilding the Learning Studio from the ground up to prepare for lots of new, powerful features coming your way.

Although things will look mostly the same at first, some new intelligence has already been added to improve the functionality of the lessons, and their scoring…

Before: Classic Scoring

Previously, your lesson score was calculated as a percentage of how many questions you answered correctly.

For example, if you got 90% of the questions correct during a Lesson, that Lesson Bubble would fill in accordingly:

Your progress on individual phrases of a Lesson was not tracked, so the Learning Studio did not know which phrases you had already mastered, or which you still needed to practice.

Mastery Level

Now, when you complete a lesson, your Mastery Level for each phrase stored for later in the Learning Studio’s brain:

• You’ll see this list at the end of a lesson, so you’ll know exactly which phrases you still need to work on.

• All of the Phrase Mastery Levels combined determine your Lesson Mastery Level (which is visually represented by those filled-in bubbles on the main Units screen).

• Whether you take a Lesson for the 1st or the 15th time, the questions will intelligently adapt themselves based on your Phrase Mastery Levels.

We often get messages from complete beginners who plan to visit the country and want to learn a few of the basic phrases. In Portugal, the level of English is quite good, especially the younger generations in the main cities of Lisbon and Porto. But regardless of how well the locals speak your language, picking […]