Learn Brazilian Portuguese to conversational in six months
Six months at 30 minutes a day plus weekly tutor calls gets a determined adult to real, halting conversations in Brazilian Portuguese. Roughly 180 hours total. Knowing Spanish or Italian first will cut that in half. Knowing neither, you'll still get there.
6 months · ~180 hours · hold a 15-minute conversation with a patient native speaker
1.Pimsleur Brazilian Portuguese — Levels 1 & 2
Sixty 30-minute audio lessons that drill pronunciation, rhythm and core sentence patterns into your mouth before you ever look at the page. Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation — nasal vowels, the unwritten "ee" sounds at word ends — is the part that trips Spanish speakers up; Pimsleur fixes that early. Do one lesson a day, in the car or on a walk. Don't repeat lessons obsessively. Move on when you've understood ~80%.
$21/month subscription, or 7-day free trial
Pimsleur Brazilian Portuguese →2.Semantica Portuguese
Video novelas filmed in Brazil with native actors, structured as a graded course from absolute beginner upward. Each chapter shows you the grammar Brazilians actually use — not the textbook version — with explanations and quizzes inside the same video. The closest thing Brazilian Portuguese has to Dreaming Spanish, with a tighter narrative spine. Watch one chapter a day; replay scenes, don't translate them.
$15/month, or one-time lifetime pass
Semantica Portuguese →3.italki — community tutor
Once you can follow a Semantica chapter without pausing, book a community tutor — they're native speakers without formal teaching credentials, which is exactly what you want for cheap conversation reps. Brazilian tutors are abundant on italki and rates are among the lowest of any language. Tell them you're a beginner, you'll bring the topic, and they should correct you mid-sentence. Same tutor twice a week.
~$7–12/hour, pay per lesson
italki Portuguese tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you want European Portuguese rather than Brazilian — for travel, residency or family — swap Semantica for Portuguese With Leo on YouTube. He's the most prolific European Portuguese teacher online and his videos come with bilingual subtitles. Pimsleur also has a separate European Portuguese track. The two dialects are mutually intelligible but the rhythm and vowel reductions differ enough that learners are better off picking one and committing.
Why this path
Language Transfer doesn't have a Portuguese course, so the usual European-language opener doesn't apply. Pimsleur fills that gap better here than for any other language because Brazilian pronunciation is unusually unforgiving — getting the mouth right early saves months of being misunderstood. Semantica gives you the input hours your brain needs to internalize grammar, and italki makes the leap from understanding to speaking. Most beginners stall by skipping the tutor. Don't.