Portuguese from English now has section 4 Topic is solved

[John Little]

I got the message about moving me up because my Portuguese course had been updated but I couldn't see any changes. This morning i noticed they had added a section 4, making the Daily Review now section 5. I did a section 4 lesson and found a few new phrases.

[Explorer]

Duolingo usually messes things up whenever they update a course, assuming you already know words you've never seen before. I restarted the course to see it from scratch, and noticed there are quite a few new words. You don't need to restart, but you might want to check out the first lessons. Even though they show up as completed, some of them actually have new content.

[Explorer]

As you know, I restarted my Portuguese course to go over the new content they added in the latest update. Well, after 25 days of speedrunning I finally finished everything again all the way up to legendary. Here are my thoughts:

• The course has been completely changed. It has nothing to do with the old one.

• There is less repetition now. Depending on your taste this can be better or worse. In my opinion there was way too much repetition before. I remember getting pretty far in the old course and still running into phrases like "I eat apples".

• They added some new vocabulary, but lots of other words just disappeared.

• The course is obviously built around Brazilian Portuguese. That said, I rarely had problems when using expressions from European Portuguese.

• The grammar took a huge downgrade. Someone else mentioned this in another thread and now I can confirm it. Many verb tenses are gone. Almost everything is either present or present continuous. It is terrible.

• The stories are still the same, and that's a problem. Since so much grammar has been cut, sometimes you run into concepts in the stories that never show up in the course itself.

To sum up, I honestly think this update is a complete disaster. They totally ruined the Portuguese course. They wrecked it in a way I couldn't have imagined. As things stand right now, I doubt the level you can reach is any higher than A1.

[John Little]

The most challenging course Ive found recently is memrise. Im not sure if its jumped ahead too much but the phrases are getting quite complex. As for repetition, I wish some of the other apps had more. I seem to be "learning" a lot of new words without seeing them in different contexts or being repeated at all.

Airlearn, which started right at the begining (far too easy for me) seems to have rushed ahead a lot and has become a lot more challenging.

[SweNedGuy]

For a while I had a fourth and fifth section in the Portuguese course from English. But as I finished the third section (chapter 30), the fourth section has vanished and I am back in the endless daily practice repeat.

However: my Portuguese course from Spanish now has opened a fourth section. More 'new words' which have Spanish cognates and a few false friends. Gradually I also recover some stories, which had been dropped by a previous course 'improvement'.

[SweNedGuy]

Today the fourth chapter (60 units) for the Portuguese from English course eventually opened for website users. The subjects covered are identical to the ES - PT course for as far as I can compare right now.

1 Habla de planes para mañana - Discuss plans for tomorrow
2 Explica problemas técnicos - Explain tech issues politely
3 Comenta observaciones de la ciudad - Discuss city observations
4 Habla sobre preferencias de películas - Discuss movie preferences

[Thomas.Heiss]

The chosen title of this thread will get confusing soon.

Why don't we only speak about a section number when there's real A2/B1 CEFR content - with lessons - available?

I don't think that it's a really good idea to discuss about that a section #5 is available for a course when in fact it's only the "daily refresh".

In my uncompleted and partly locked PT and FR courses the last "Daily practice" hasn't got a specific section number!
Yes, I know, when the path is finished the last practice section unlocks and the displayed number on the https://www.duolingo.com/sections Url is about getting increased misleadingly, to clearly label the individual section in the UI.

@Explorer
Would you be so kind and remove "& section 5" from the thread title?

We'll surely talk about a real B1 section #5 whenever it gets released.

See my PT screenshot.
That's the EN->PT path with 131 units.

[Explorer]

Well, I've finally wrapped up my fourth speedrun through the Portuguese course, finishing every single unit at the legendary level. I won't go into too much detail, since I think I've already talked about the hits and misses in my previous reviews.

So let's get started.

The upsides:

• The number of lessons has increased by about 46%. There's a ton of new content and much more vocabulary to pick up. To give you an idea, I managed to complete the old course with around 35,000 experience points. This time I hit 65,000 XP.

• They also added several important verbal tenses. Some of them (like the future simple, present perfect, past perfect, and the subjunctive ones) are covered only briefly, but at least they are there.

The downsides:

• I still miss the tips and notes at the start of each unit. There are just some things you can't understand through intuition alone.

• The content is super scattered and messy. The titles often don't give you any clue about the grammar points covered in each lesson, which makes it a nightmare if you want to go back and review something specific.

• All of section 4, and especially the last 10-15 units, is full of bugs and mistakes. This can be very frustrating because you end up losing energy points for no reason half the time. A real headache. I've lost track of how many reports I've sent in. Hopefully they will fix them eventually.

[John Little]

I have suddenly realised that all I'm learning is new vocabulary that I may not need. And, if I do need to use a word I dont know, I can look it up. What Its not doing, is helping me revise those damn tenses that I keep forgetting.

And as Someone said (probably Explorer) its not easy to find the relevant grammar exercises.

Edit: It was explorer above:

The downsides:

I still miss the tips and notes at the start of each unit. There are just some things you can't understand through intuition alone.
The content is super scattered and messy. The titles often don't give you any clue about the grammar points covered in each lesson, which makes it a nightmare if you want to go back and review something specific.

[John Little]

For a while I had a fourth and fifth section in the Portuguese course from English. But as I finished the third section (chapter 30), the fourth section has vanished and I am back in the endless daily practice repeat.

That is actually pretty odd. What have you got now? Mine is now totally the new course and Im suddenly a long way from that old, familiar, wheel of eternity.

[SweNedGuy]

For a while I had a fourth and fifth section in the Portuguese course from English. But as I finished the third section (chapter 30), the fourth section has vanished and I am back in the endless daily practice repeat.

That is actually pretty odd. What have you got now? Mine is now totally the new course and Im suddenly a long way from that old, familiar, wheel of eternity.

The fourth section is back since late October. Since I am learning Portuguese mainly from Spanish, I realize the content of the respective chapters is completely aligned. The same stories are also introduced.