pt-drill vs Memrise for European Portuguese Learners
An honest, sourced head-to-head: native-speaker videos and a polished mobile app versus a free, EU-PT-only drill that covers all 10 tenses including vós.
Pick Memrise if…
You want a polished mobile app with real native-speaker video clips filmed in Portugal, gamification that keeps you opening the app, and a wide vocabulary catalog across many languages.
Pick pt-drill if…
You need free, no-frills European Portuguese verb drilling across all 10 tenses (vós included), zero gamification, and you don't mind a web-only trainer with a small 3,871-word vocabulary deck.
At a glance
| Feature | pt-drill | Memrise |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever, no ads, no paywall | ~$14.99/mo, $79.99–$99.99/yr, $199.99 lifetime (pricing varies by region) |
| European Portuguese | EU-PT only — pt-PT pronouns, vocabulary, conjugation | Yes, selectable as Portuguese (Portugal); also offers Brazilian |
| Verb conjugation drilling | All 10 EU-PT tenses with full paradigms (eu, tu, ele, nós, vós, eles) | None as structured drills — vocab and phrases only |
| vós forms | Drilled in every tense | Not taught as a structured topic |
| Vocabulary catalog | 3,871 A1–B2 lemmas (frequency-ranked) | Thousands of words and phrases (no published count) |
| Audio / listening | None | Native-speaker video clips ('Learn with Locals' / Immerse) filmed in Portugal |
| Spaced repetition | Leitner, 6 boxes, intervals 1/2/4/8/16/32 days | Proprietary SRS, algorithm not disclosed |
| Gamification | None — no streaks, points, or leagues | Streaks per language, points, leaderboards |
| Mobile app | Web only (works on phone browsers) | iOS and Android, with offline mode on Pro |
| Account required | Magic-link email, optional (used for cross-device sync) | Account required; free tier is heavily gated |
| Community courses | Not applicable — single curated deck | Removed from main app on March 31, 2024 |
What Memrise does well
It's easy to forget, when you're comparing apps on paper, that Memrise has a real and defensible strength: short video clips of native speakers, filmed on the street in the country where the language is actually spoken. For European Portuguese, those clips are filmed in Portugal — not Brazil, not a studio in California. The feature is variously branded as "Learn with Locals" or "Immerse" depending on which redesign you caught, but the underlying content is the same: real people saying real phrases, at speaking speed, in the accent you actually need.
Nothing in pt-drill comes close to that. pt-drill has no audio at all. If you want to train your ear to the elided vowels and softened consonants of European Portuguese — the things that make pt-PT sound like a different language from pt-BR — Memrise is genuinely useful and most of its direct competitors don't match it.
Beyond the video clips, Memrise is a polished mass-market product. The iOS and Android apps are mature, fast, and designed by people who clearly care about onboarding and retention. Offline mode (for Pro subscribers) means you can drill on a flight. The course catalog spans many languages, which matters if you're also learning a second one. The MemBot conversation feature, while not a substitute for a real tutor, gives you a low-stakes place to attempt sentences before you say them to a person.
The 2024 redesign also added Stories, an explicitly low-pressure mode that the company markets as "no streaks, no pressure" — a tacit acknowledgement that the rest of the app leans hard on gamification, but a welcome option for learners who don't want to be nagged.
Compared to learning verb conjugation from a spreadsheet (which is approximately what pt-drill is), Memrise is far easier to actually open every day. That counts for a lot in language learning, and it's why beginner-focused reviews like Portugalist still recommend it as "more user-friendly" for people starting out.
Where Memrise falls short for European Portuguese
The honest problems start when you look at what Memrise actually teaches versus what a European Portuguese learner needs to pass CIPLE, DEPLE, or DIPLE — or simply to hold a real conversation in Lisbon.
It teaches essentially no grammar. Memrise's pedagogical model is vocabulary and phrases, drilled with a proprietary SRS and reinforced by video clips. That works for the first few hundred words. It does not work when you need to say "se eu tivesse sabido, teria ido" — a sentence that demands the conjuntivo mais-que-perfeito and the condicional, neither of which Memrise drills as paradigms. There is no verb-conjugation drill, no tense selector, no way to practise the eu/tu/ele/nós/vós/eles forms for a single irregular verb until they stick. MemBot can chat with you, but it cannot substitute for the mechanical work of conjugation drilling.
vós is not a structured topic. The form is archaic in everyday European usage and many resources skip it, but it shows up in literature, formal writing, and B2-level reading comprehension. If you need it, Memrise will not give it to you.
The community-course retirement matters more for EU-PT than for most languages. On March 31, 2024, Memrise permanently removed all user-generated courses from its main app and website. Eight years of crowd-sourced content — including most of the deeper European Portuguese decks that learners used to recommend — were moved to a separate, read-only sunset domain at community-courses.memrise.com. That domain was originally scheduled to close at the end of 2024 and has been extended to end of 2025.
"User-generated courses are no longer available on the main Memrise app or website as of March 31, 2024."Memrise Help Center, 2024
For widely-taught languages (French, Spanish, German) the official courses cover the lost ground reasonably well. For European Portuguese — a smaller market — the community decks were often where the depth lived. If you read a recommendation from 2022 or 2023 saying "the best EU-PT Memrise course is X", check the URL: it may now point to community-courses.memrise.com, and it's running on borrowed time.
The pricing is non-trivial and non-transparent. Third-party reviews report monthly plans ranging from $14.99 to $39.99 USD depending on region and cohort, annual plans at $79.99–$99.99, and lifetime tiers from $199.99 up to $329.99. Memrise's own pricing page renders empty to bots, so cross-checking is harder than it should be. The StudyFrenchSpanish 2026 review is bluntly titled "Don't Waste Your Time", which is harsh but reflects a wider sentiment among advanced learners about the post-redesign product.
Where pt-drill is honestly weaker
This isn't a both-sides exercise — pt-drill genuinely loses on a long list of features that matter to most learners.
- No mobile app. pt-drill runs in a browser. It works on a phone browser, but there is no App Store listing, no install prompt, no native offline mode. Memrise's iOS and Android apps are far more pleasant to open every day.
- No audio. Zero. No native speaker clips, no text-to-speech, no pronunciation feedback. If your goal is listening comprehension for pt-PT, pt-drill cannot help. Memrise's Learn with Locals clips are exactly the kind of content pt-drill is missing.
- Tiny vocabulary catalog. 3,871 lemmas across A1–B2. That's enough to cover the frequency core, but Memrise's catalog is materially larger and includes phrases, idioms, and situational vocabulary that pt-drill doesn't ship.
- One-person side project. pt-drill is built and maintained by a single developer in spare time. There is no roadmap, no support team, no SLA. If a bug ships at 2am, it gets fixed when it gets fixed. Memrise is a venture-backed company with engineers, designers, and customer support.
- No community. No forums, no shared decks, no leaderboards, no social features. Some learners thrive on community; pt-drill offers none of it.
- No gamification. If streaks and points are what get you to open an app every day, the absence of them in pt-drill will hurt your consistency.
If any of these matter to you, Memrise is the more sensible primary tool and pt-drill is at best a supplement.
Where pt-drill is better
The list is short, but it's specific and it's not negotiable for serious European Portuguese learners.
All 10 EU-PT tenses with full paradigms
pt-drill drills every form of every supported verb in every tense: Presente, Pretérito Perfeito, Pretérito Imperfeito, Futuro Imperfeito, Condicional, Mais-que-perfeito, Conjuntivo Presente, Conjuntivo Imperfeito, Conjuntivo Futuro, and Imperativo. Each card asks for the full table — eu, tu, ele, nós, vós, eles — and grades you per slot with accent-insensitive matching. The vós row is included in every tense. Memrise teaches none of this as structured drilling. If your CIPLE/DEPLE/DIPLE practice depends on getting se eu fosse right, this is not optional.
Free, with no upsell mechanics
No ads, no paywall, no premium tier, no "unlock the next tense for $4.99". The whole product is the free product. There is no growth team trying to convert you. You can open the trainer right now without signing up; the magic-link email is only there if you want to sync between devices.
EU-PT-native, not "Portuguese in general"
Every conjugation table, every irregular stem, every vocabulary lemma is European Portuguese. The grammar reference, kindly provided by Vladimir Prus at portuguese.vladimirprus.com, is the canonical pt-PT source it links into. Memrise's official course is also EU-PT, but the supporting content (especially after the community-course sunset) is thinner.
Leitner with visible boxes
Six boxes, intervals 1/2/4/8/16/32 days, all on screen. You can see exactly where every card is. Memrise's SRS is proprietary and opaque — you trust it or you don't. The pt-drill model is the same algorithm Sebastian Leitner published in 1972; it works, it's auditable, and you can predict the next time you'll see any specific card.
No gamification, no streak shame
For some learners this is a bug; for others it's the defining feature. pt-drill will not nag you about a broken streak, will not show you a leaderboard, and will not award badges. If gamification has made you quit other apps, this one removes the entire surface. If you'd like a softer mass-market take on the same idea, Drops and Practice Portuguese are worth comparing too.
Who should pick which
Pick Memrise if you're a beginner who needs a friendly mobile app, wants to hear native speakers from Portugal, doesn't mind paying ~$80–$100 a year, and is happy to learn grammar elsewhere (or not at all yet). It's particularly good as your first month of pt-PT immersion.
Pick pt-drill if you're at A2 or above, your conjugation is the thing actively holding you back, you want vós included, and you don't want to pay or be nagged. Open the trainer and the first verb is already loaded. Many learners use both: Memrise for listening and vocabulary breadth, pt-drill for the conjugation drilling Memrise doesn't do. They overlap less than you'd think.
FAQ
Is Memrise good for European Portuguese?
Memrise's official Portuguese (Portugal) course is genuinely useful for vocabulary and listening — the native-speaker video clips filmed in Portugal are its standout feature and you won't find equivalents in most competitors. It's weaker as a full learning tool because it teaches no verb conjugation as structured drills, the vós forms are absent, and the deep EU-PT content that previously came from community courses was retired in 2024. For most A2–B2 learners it works best as a supplementary listening and vocabulary app rather than a sole resource.
Did Memrise remove community courses?
Yes. On March 31, 2024 Memrise permanently removed all user-created community courses from its main app and website. Eight years of crowd-sourced decks — including most of the popular European Portuguese courses — were moved to a separate read-only domain at community-courses.memrise.com. That sunset domain was originally scheduled to close at the end of 2024 and has been extended to the end of 2025. The Memrise community forum closed on December 8, 2023. Recommendations from before 2024 often point to content that lives on this sunset domain.
What's the best free Memrise alternative for European Portuguese?
If you specifically need free, EU-PT-focused conjugation practice, pt-drill is one of the few options that drills all 10 tenses with full paradigms including vós, costs nothing, and shows no ads. Anki with a good shared EU-PT deck is the long-standing free alternative for vocabulary. For audio and listening, the free tier of Practice Portuguese gives you a handful of Shorties before the paywall kicks in. Each covers a different gap — none of them replaces Memrise's native-speaker video clips outright.
Does Memrise teach vós?
Not as a structured topic. Memrise teaches vocabulary, phrases, and listening — it does not present conjugation paradigm tables, so vós forms aren't drilled and aren't tested. In fairness, vós is archaic in everyday European Portuguese; many learner-facing resources leave it out. If you need it for B2-level reading, formal writing, or the DIPLE exam, you'll need a resource that explicitly drills it. pt-drill includes vós in every tense paradigm.
Is pt-drill better than Memrise?
It depends what you want. pt-drill is better for free, structured verb conjugation across all 10 European Portuguese tenses with vós included — that's the narrow lane it was built for. Memrise is better at almost everything else: it has a polished iOS and Android app, native-speaker video clips filmed in Portugal, a much wider vocabulary catalog, MemBot conversation practice, and offline mode. They aren't really direct competitors — they solve different problems.
How much does Memrise cost?
Pricing varies by region and promotion. Third-party reviews report monthly plans around $14.99 USD (sometimes $24.99 or $39.99 in different cohorts), annual plans at $79.99 for the first year and roughly $89.99–$99.99 at renewal, and a lifetime tier at $199.99 (reportedly $329.99 in some regions). Memrise's official pricing page renders empty to bots, so the most reliable check is to open the in-app upgrade screen from your region. The free tier exists but is heavily gated.
Can I use Memrise offline?
Offline mode is available on the mobile apps, but only for Memrise Pro subscribers. Free users on the mobile app cannot download courses for offline use. The web version of Memrise requires a live connection. By contrast, pt-drill is a browser-based progressive web page that stores your progress in localStorage, so individual sessions work fine offline once the page has loaded — though there is no installable mobile app and no formal offline mode.
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