A note before you dive in: this course is under active development. Lessons are still being written, so pages, audio, and Anki decks may change without notice — in particular, decks you download today may not merge cleanly with later versions. Study freely; just treat everything as provisional until a first stable release.

A traveler’s survival kit — tiny, polite, spoken on purpose

MiniCore Portuguese is a deliberately restricted slice of real European Portuguese — the Portuguese of Portugal — for travelers: roughly 300 drilled items arranged around 20 fixed sentence frames, spoken-only, and locked to the register a polite adult uses with a stranger. It is not a path to fluency, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is a minimal set of real Portuguese that people in Portugal understand instantly, selected to carry you through the most common travel scenarios.

It’s built for someone with no prior exposure to Portuguese — or to Portugal: alongside the language, each lesson teaches the one or two behaviors every guidebook assumes you already know, from greeting on entry to the tax-number question at every till. If you know some Spanish, this course is also where you learn not to use it: Portuguese people understand Spanish, and they would much rather hear your three words of Portuguese.

The kit also assumes a smartphone in your pocket, and uses it: translation apps are built in as the official bailout — the final rung of a repair ladder you start drilling in Lesson 1. So why not just rely on the app? Because most travel Portuguese is a handful of three-second exchanges — a counter, a doorway, a platform — that are over before an app is unlocked; and because an app speaks for you far more gracefully than it hears for you. European Portuguese is famously hard to hear — vowels shrink, syllable-final s turns to “sh”, natives are fast — and the replies keep arriving at speed, in noisy rooms. Half of this course is ears.

The method

• Frames, not conjugation. The entire grammar is 20 sentence patterns with swappable slots — Onde é ___? (“where is ___?”), Queria ___, por favor (“I’d like ___, please”), Pode ___? (“could you ___?”). Vocabulary rotates through the slots; the frames themselves never change. Five of the frames take a verb in its dictionary form, so most verbs need no conjugating at all.
• One open door: nouns. Verbs and adjectives are a small closed set, but any noun in the world drops into any slot — always with its o or a attached. The course teaches you to harvest nouns in the field — point and ask Como se diz isto em português? (“how do you say this in Portuguese?”) — so the system grows on its own.
• Shortcuts instead of hard grammar. The future, the past, “if” sentences, “the bus that goes to…” — each hard idea collapses to a cheap move built from things you already own. “If it rains tomorrow I won’t go to the beach” becomes two tiny sentences, not a grammar chapter.
• Polite by construction. The one way this course says “you” is the way a Portuguese adult addresses a stranger; the one way it says “I want” is the polite Queria; every request is a Pode…? question. You cannot be rude in this language because the rude forms aren’t in it.
• Recognition without production. The fixed things Portugal says to you — the till script, the waiter’s questions, the metro announcements, the tu forms friends will use on you — are drilled for listening only. You learn to catch the decision point and answer from your own small kit.
• Behavior notes where words aren’t the answer. Each lesson carries one or two cultural moves that no vocabulary can substitute for: greet on entry, say não to contribuinte, don’t touch the bread you didn’t order.

Audio first — this course is for your ears

Every Portuguese sentence on this site is playable — and hidden until you play it. The study loop is always the same: tap it and listen, repeat it aloud, then check yourself against the text and meaning that appear — and tap again to listen once more. MiniCore is spoken-only by design — the text is the map, the audio is the territory. If you read a sentence before you’ve heard it, you’re studying a different (and less useful) course.

Own it with Anki

Reading the lessons rents the course; spaced repetition buys it. Every lesson ends with a downloadable Anki deck of that lesson’s sentences, vocabulary, and dialog lines — all with audio, and deduplicated across the course, so importing all eleven decks never drills the same text twice. Every deck also carries speaking cards: its checkpoint’s self-test as cards, an English scene on the front, your Portuguese out loud before the flip. The intended rhythm: finish a lesson, import its deck, and let the daily review carry the material while you move on (the arithmetic is on How to Drill).

Two habits make the decks work harder. Drill sentences, not words: the bare word cards ship suspended, so the sentences carry the vocabulary. And keep your own form of the words that depend on who’s speaking — men say obrigado, women say obrigada — by suspending the other tag once, on import; How to Drill shows how.

Where to start

Lesson 0 tunes your ear — the six spelling-to-sound rules that make Portuguese sound faster than it is — with nothing to memorize. Then Lessons 1–9 build the system in order, each anchored to real scenes: the till, the restaurant, the train, the hotel desk, the pharmacy, and finally an invitation to dinner. Lesson 10 closes the eleven-lesson course with the emergency safety net — no new grammar, just the words for the worst day, drilled cold and hopefully never used.

Keep the Map open as you go: the whole course on one page — the twenty frames, the shortcuts, the repair kit, and every word grouped by theme.

After the course

Boosters will hold optional themed packs that drop new nouns into the frames you already own — no new grammar, ever. Skills will hold optional extensions to the system itself. And Beyond MiniCore names the tools worth packing alongside the course. None are published yet.