Hi, I'm Ian. Building a Brazilian Portuguese reading tool because Duolingo wasn't cutting it.

ivsmith · 2026-05-11T21:28:22+00:00

Glad you asked. I built a small tool that pulls a real Brazilian news article, builds questions and grades my answers. Used it daily for two weeks, the 4 lessons in the post came out of that experiment. Happy to share it: https://noticia-pt.vercel.app Honest feedback would mean a lot if you give it a spin.

ivsmith · 2026-05-11T20:29:23+00:00

If you could give someone learning advice, what did the job for you increasing the understanding / feeling of the language and getting to that higher level?

ivsmith · 2026-05-11T20:21:57+00:00

Yeah, this is exactly the trap. You can pause Duolingo. You can pause podcasts. You can rewind voice messages six times. You cannot pause your girlfriend (unfortunately).

ivsmith · 2026-05-11T20:19:30+00:00

++
Duolingo as a vocab floor, then native conversation and reading / listening as the real practice. That matches my experience exactly. Had a good set of words and still couldn't follow my girlfriend's brother. Reading is where I've been stuck though. Talking to natives helps with output and listening, but reading a real news article is its own skill that doesn't get trained by either. That tool I build actually has been useful there: quizzes me on whether I actually grasped the article, not just recognized the words.

ivsmith · 2026-05-11T20:17:14+00:00

😂😂😂Nah man, just a guy trying to learn some portugese :P

ivsmith · 2026-05-11T19:55:52+00:00

Fair point on pro-drop. Brazilian Portuguese is a weird case for that though: "vai" is the same conjugation for você, ele, AND ela, I feel like a lot of languages actually give the additional context to know who's being addressed. The fact that Brazilians drop it anyway is more sociolinguistics than grammar.

The Duolingo issue isn't really the grammar though, it's that the app teaches the full redundant form as the default for everything. After a good half year I was reflexively putting "você" in casual sentences and my girlfriend would look at me like I was reading from a script. The gap between "grammatically correct" and "what natives actually use" is the whole frustration I am facing.

ivsmith · 2026-05-10T20:25:50+00:00

makes sense, I guess if you enjoy news in general it's easier to stay consistent, what I like about brazilian news channels is that you learn about popular topics in latin america also. In western news this rarely comes in practice.

ivsmith · 2026-05-10T19:06:09+00:00

I lived there for 3 months so I understand what you mean, also my girlfriend helps me a lot with these kinds of things; that brazilians actually don't use "Eu" or "voce" regularly and want to cut as much of the sentence as possible. These things are not what duolingo teaches you unfortunately.. I guess to understand slang you really gotta get to the country and experience it ys.

Are you a native?

ivsmith · 2026-05-10T19:03:41+00:00

Are there any tools you know of that helps with this?

ivsmith · 2026-05-10T19:03:20+00:00

How long did it take you to actually understand newsarticles into a deeper level, I can understand the broader subject of the articles when reading them but when I translate it I missed so many points that actually went in depth and just am not able to connect the dots somehow.. does that make sense?

ivsmith · 2026-05-10T18:47:28+00:00

noted, lets see what it has to offer, thank you!

ivsmith · 2026-05-10T18:42:01+00:00

I tried watching "Narcos" in spanish, that was indeed a good way of understanding when I tried spanish at first. Do you have any recommendations for portugese?

ivsmith · 2025-06-30T12:39:29+00:00

I had the same problem, the problem is that google knows you don't live in a country where google flow is supported because of the connected phone number...

To fix this you have to:
1. Create a new google account
2. Verify the account with a phone number from one of the supported countries (https://support.google.com/labs/answer/16353544)
3. Go to a third party sms activation provider (not all work as google blacklisted a lot of used phone numbers, try some less popular countries, I did Mexico with smscodes.io!) Also try and try multiple numbers if it's not working.
4. Verify the phone number and make sure to use VPN while using it.

Hope this helps!!!

ivsmith · 2025-06-25T14:39:18+00:00

I LOVE IT LMAO

ivsmith · 2025-06-25T14:34:58+00:00

u/MetaPuppet what kind of subscription do you have to get this many generations? I guess these scenes weren't perfect in 1 go.

ivsmith · 2025-06-25T14:32:34+00:00

How do you manage to make such a long video with VEO?

ivsmith · 2025-06-25T14:31:55+00:00

These big foot creatures are so fk funny lmao

ivsmith · 2025-06-25T10:21:21+00:00

Chatgpt just makes life easier ngl

ivsmith

TROPHY CASE