Adding European Portuguese

[Mari80]

Does anyone know if Duolingo intends to add European Portuguese any time soon?

[ararat-tempest]

since there's no "incubator", who knows what will happen...
but I'd also like to check out the European Portuguese course!

[John Little]

Our reason for learning Portuguese is our Brasílian Daughter-in-law. I know there are differences, some words but largely pronunciation, but I'm not sure how different it is

Although our Brasileira daughter-in-law tells us she does have difficulty understanding European Portuguese.

I'm also unsure what versions are spoken around the World. But I know American English is more widely spoken than English English.

[Explorer]

It would be great if there were a section where you could learn different varieties of Portuguese. But I’m afraid the green owl won’t spend a dime on teaching a variety spoken by only 10 million people. Brazilian Portuguese has become the go-to international standard, and that’s what most sites teach you.

PS: Assimil used to offer courses in both Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese.

[Corinnebelle]

@Explorer We can still explore those differences here on Duome.

Digital dialects features both Brazilian and European Portuguese.

[John Little]

I know a lot of "X" words are Brazilian from the indigenous language. I thought maybe Abacaxi (pineapple) might be different but its not. Xicara (cup in Brasil) is "taca" in Portugal. I would be interested in any others.

[IceVajal]

This page is comparing European Portuguese with Brazilian. As I'm not learning one of them, I have no clue how much help it is.

https://www.practiceportuguese.com/lear ... ortuguese/

[ararat-tempest]

Our reason for learning Portuguese is our Brasílian Daughter-in-law. I know there are differences, some words but largely pronunciation, but I'm not sure how different it is

Although our Brasileira daughter-in-law tells us she does have difficulty understanding European Portuguese.

I'm also unsure what versions are spoken around the World. But I know American English is more widely spoken than English English.

didn't know about this, thx for the info.
btw, I've never seen a dude who uses "English English" rather than "British English" xDDD this is weird it's like a dude who uses "Chinese Chinese" rather than "Mandarin Chinese" comparing with "Hakka Chinese" or "Wu Chinese", etc.

[Thomas.Heiss]

Duolingo won't do anything.
Once they decided that they don't want to support multiple variants/dialects of a language.

It's the same with Spanish (Spanish vs South America, for every country), Canadian French, UK vs US vs AUS English,..

Maybe in the next 10+ years they will change their mind and do it right?! Who knows...

There was a moderator / contributor on the volunteer team who is from Portugal.

AFAIK he added several answer alternatives (like Tu es) and synonyms to the old volunteer PT course as best as he can.

Interestingly, I found that the PT contractor team has added a few sentences lately spread over the course which demanded verb conjugation in the 2nd Tu personal pronoun (Tu or es forms) and a few in more complex verb tenses.
Clearly created with AI as many alternatives (incl. Você form) or dropping the Tu [or adding it] were refused; there was only one right answer.
It's easy to recognize these new sentences as the Brazilian course mainly focuses on the Você form and proper verb conjugation for the 3rd person
(many times it accepts 2nd person conjugations if already added to the DB but I can't do them in other future or past tenses and surely NOT in the 4-5 Subjunctive forms ).

Maybe one of them is from Portugal??

Backstory:
Staff had declined that a volunteer created a dedicated European Portuguese course or to form his own team to create a second PT course, even when it would have been free for them.
Now it would cost them a bunch of money.

Sorry to say, but their focus relies in useless animations, riding the mess of a path overlay UI, adding more and more cartoons, constantly shuffling the content so all progress is lost (happened to me completely in DE->FR and partly in EN->PT), pushing more users into Max and Super subscriptions with new challenges and health/hearts infected "features", requesting more and more Gems payments for basic functionality which you need to refill with $$$,..

I guess their focus - now even more - is to write "black numbers" on their quarterly Pdf reports for investors and shareholders?!??

I even have to wonder how they could expand their English courses that quickly for multiple base languages; I'm positively surprised.

..(...)..

Before you'll find an adopted EUPT course as a variant:

They very likely will destroy the old PT tree
(well, they already did with the path UI and NOT directly adopting the clever grammar sub skill 1-3 introduction for prepositions, contractions,.. how the volunteer did with the tree update in summer 2018)

and

finally realign the Pt-Br course for CEFR and push it to ₃₀₀ units like it happened with Spanish and French and English.

Even the Japanese course is much longer and goes to B1 according to @MatOzone's table. Italian and German are catching up.

www.duolingodata.com

..(...)..

What they really could (should) do is:

To throw away the beginner PT content from the first 3-4 months.

It contained way too much animal and food vocabulary!!
Way too many robotic sentences.
I don't really care what the bee does, where the turtle goes and if the boy or girl drinks milk or not.

Well, I get it: The focus of a volunteer course mainly was to teach grammar usage.
Not to teach you "practical phrases" for the real world and how you need to speak and to answer what you do in life or as a profession and what your hobbies and interests are.
But a didactical teacher should be able to mix both concepts so after several months you don't completely feel lost if you shall open your mouth, shouldn't he/she?

With the help of the community I'm glad I have not given up too early (without Memrise in parallel to see and learn real phrases I surely would have); later I added Mondly to get out of any monotonous DL lessons which won't necessarily help you to learn "speaking Portuguese".

But without any IGNORE feature I wonder what the user drop rate in the Pt-Br volunteer course actually was and still is.

The PT ranking list on www.duome.eu/en/pt wasn't too bad for finishers with golden owls compared to other courses.

How many users pass the 3-4 months mark of learning? Especially those who come from other CEFR Spanish and French courses?

As Portuguese was my first Romance language I sticked to it and tried to push through.

I'm thankful for all the grammar- and typing drills the old Duolingo Web portal has given me:

Now it's worse than ever with forced tapping of word banks, missing PT audio in cloze-deletions, too many multiple-choice exercises (since 2019), taken away feature of free EN typing (you need the TypeLingo extension for this basic functionality).

I'm also thankful for the provided Web Tips&Notes from volunteer contributors and mobile tips from staff on the app (only on the old tree before they decided to destroy and blacklist old app versions) as an add-on.

Almost everything is gone now... including sentence discussions.

Honestly, without T&N and SDs I wouldn't have managed to push through.

That was in 2016/17 before their old volunteer EN->ES course hardly contained any useful tips (on the Web) until staff took over, focused on the CEFR realignment and decided to only provide the new mobile tips (which usually don't always go that much into detail but try to make it easy for a learner so they tend to stay on the surface).

If you ever crossed volunteer Web T&N (PT or FR tree3) and detailed grammar threads on the old discussion forum, university grammar lecture resources or Kwiziq detailed reviews then you know what I mean.
What gets thrown at us on Duolingo now is not that much complete or we need to find out by trial & error.

For the Portuguese path it can only be a joke that all old good stuff was removed and guidebooks almost only contain "sentence examples" but no proper instructions.

IMHO there will be a long route to go for this Pt-Br course and path design!
It took the French linguistic team six years!!!

Honestly, I don't think there's much room for a second European variant at the moment, not at this stage.

Maybe in 5-10 years you can donate or pay for a selected course (best would be a one-time payment, not a stupid yearly subscription).

Super and Max are purely optional.
They won't earn anything in short-term in adding an EUPT course.

Theoretically spoken the AI stuff should be intelligent enough to support a rewrite of all sentences for a new EUPT course once the Pt-Br is completely realigned with the CEFR.

But I guess not many PT contractors are left with the cuttings from last year.
And maybe one of them (now 1-2 persons max as a leftover per course??) is from Portugal already?

[SweNedGuy]

If you want exposure to European portuguese before moving to Portugal, there are a couple of decent YT channels which will help you advance more than any app might. They also offer courses or extra's if you subscribe as a Patreon.

Portuguese with Leo (He is from Lisbon)

Portuguese with Silvia (She is from the Algarve region)

Silvia adapts her speech and rithm most: she speaks slower and more clearly than the locals in the Algarve when they speak among themselves.

If your Spanish is decent and you have an A2 level in Portuguese, understanding Gallego should not be difficult. Here is the channel of
Olaxon Mario in Gallego