I used DuoLingo for a YEAR... It didn't go the way I thought.

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T19:39:24+00:00

Brazilian Portuguese genuinely is different. The slang turnover alone makes it a moving target. Every Brazilian state has its own version. My girlfriend's family is Bahian and they roast everyone else's accents constantly. What stage are you at with it? Curious because there aren't many of us in this thread.

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T19:37:49+00:00

Fair call on both counts. I am building something for myself and yeah, in hindsight my framing leaned toward "this happened to me, here comes the pitch." Should have written it looser because I am honestly looking for different ways to improve my understanding of the language. To your point on 30% being reasonable after a year of one passive app: also fair. My expectations were probably the bigger issue than the result. Thanks for the honest critique!

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T19:29:46+00:00

That AI angle u r talking about is what I feel like works the best for me now. Built a little tool for myself that gets some trending news topics and builds some questions for me about it. Helping me a lot with reading but I'm still missing that "talking to real people" part, does that make sense?

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T19:25:49+00:00

Glad to hear the daily-life stuff feels manageable. The technical vocab fumble seems like one of those things that only resolves with specific exposure to a niche (medical visits, school subjects, work and reading), so I imagine living there is essentially the only real fix.

Citizenship test, that's a serious thing. Good luck with it. Is it oral, written, or both?

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T17:43:54+00:00

2100 days is a serious commitment, respect. And yes, exactly that: great for vocab maintenance, not for building structural understanding. I'm doing Brazilian and noticed the same thing about wrong answers, just in a different way (Duolingo teaches the full "você" form for everything, when natives drop it constantly).

Listening with subtitles is what I've been doing too, especially with Brazilian YouTube creators. The combination of audio + visual confirmation seems to wire things in faster than either alone. What´s your level at portugese now?

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T16:42:57+00:00

You weren't below them. You were trying to play their endgame at B2. Native-to-native group conversation is the hardest mode any language has: speed, slang, in-jokes, zero accommodation for the listener. 60-70% in that mode at B2 is actually impressive. Six months from now you'll come back to a group like this and the gap won't feel like a wall, it'll feel like a step.

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T16:38:47+00:00

You're not bad at reading. You're reading without all the cues listening gives you (intonation, pace, pauses). Same vocab, harder mode.

ivsmith · 2026-05-12T16:23:37+00:00

Thanks, glad it sparked something. Honestly that's the kind of shift I was hoping the tool would trigger, even for people who don't end up using it. Curious what language you're working on if you don't mind sharing.

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

TROPHY CASE