— for learners of português europeu
An AI tutor for people serious about European Portuguese. Not gamified. Not Brazilian. Not pretending to be human.
— Algarve, the south coast
— the problem
Built for streaks and casual exposure. Almost all of them default to Brazilian Portuguese, which is actively unhelpful if you're moving to Portugal.
Real humans, real teaching, at $30–50 an hour. Useful once or twice a week, but it cannot scale to daily practice, and no tutor holds detailed memory across thirty students.
A handful exist, and most are libraries of recorded lessons. No conversation, no memory, no opinions.
azulejos in Porto
— a note from the founder
My partner is from Lisbon. I've been learning European Portuguese for a year, and like every learner of European Portuguese I've talked to, I've been let down by every app on the market. They teach Brazilian. They forget me between sessions. They feel like video games when what I want is a teacher.
So I'm building the one I wanted. My teacher in Mafra checks every line, so it sounds like Portugal and not like a textbook. The first learners are using it now.
If you join the list, I'll write to you myself.
— Yasya— what it is
It remembers your dog's name, the hike you took last weekend, the cousin in Porto whose wedding is in October — and uses that memory the way a real teacher of two years would.
You can browse and edit what's remembered. Nothing hidden.
Built on CEFR scaffolding and the public-domain Foreign Service Institute Portuguese course, modernized by a native European Portuguese teacher. Every grammar rule is authored and reviewed, never invented by an LLM mid-conversation.
Your notebook fills automatically as you learn: grammar rules, vocabulary with your own example sentences, and what's coming next.
Your tutor has a name, a voice, and views — about saudade, about Sintra, about whether you're being too hard on yourself with the pronunciation.
It is honest about being AI when asked. It doesn't pretend to live in Lisbon.
where you'll want to be
Conversation happens by speaking, not typing. The voice slows down when you're a beginner and speeds up as you progress, the way a real teacher modulates for the student in front of them.
Pronunciation feedback is phoneme-level: not just "good" or "try again," but which specific sound needs work, and what it sounded like instead.
If you have a teacher, this is what you do between sessions to make them more productive. If you don't, it's your structured daily practice until you reach upper-intermediate, at which point we'll recommend you find a human.
We are not trying to replace the people who do this best. We're trying to be everything before them, and everything between them.
closed alpha · by invitation ✦