About Conversa
I have been learning Portuguese for four years, and I still find it difficult to chat with my in-laws. That is genuinely embarrassing, and it is why this app exists.
The actual problem
My wife is Portuguese. Her family is Portuguese. We spend a lot of time in Portugal — around Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra. So I have every advantage a learner could ask for: constant exposure, native speakers who want me to succeed, and a very good reason to keep going.
And four years in, a long family lunch is still mostly happening without me. I can read. I can follow a slow conversation about something I know is coming. What I cannot reliably do is join in, at speed, about whatever everyone has decided to talk about — which is, of course, the only thing that actually counts as speaking a language.
That gap between studying Portuguese and speaking Portuguese is not a knowledge problem. I know more words than I can produce. It is that I have had thousands of hours of input and almost no practice at output, because output is the part that requires another person, and requiring another person is exactly what makes it rare.
Which is why it had to be European Portuguese
I am not on a crusade about dialects. I want to talk to my family, and my family speaks the Portuguese of Portugal — so an app teaching me Brazilian Portuguese is not a philosophical problem, it is just the wrong tool for the only job I care about.
I was careful about this, and being careful turned out not to be enough. A lot of apps teach Brazilian Portuguese while presenting themselves as teaching "Portuguese" — sometimes noted somewhere in the settings, sometimes not noted at all. The two are mutually intelligible, so nothing dramatic happens; you just gradually pick up the wrong version and find out later. And the sounds are where it bites hardest: European Portuguese swallows its unstressed vowels and runs words together in a way Brazilian Portuguese does not, which is exactly why practice on Brazilian audio does not prepare you for a room full of Portuguese people talking.
So it does two things
Conversa started as a four-part app — flashcards with spaced repetition, listening practice, speaking, and AI conversation. Most of that got deleted.
Vocabulary drilling is a solved problem and Anki solves it for free. What is not solved is getting someone who has studied for years to open their mouth without the fear of getting it wrong in front of a person whose opinion they care about. So Conversa does conversation and pronunciation, and nothing else. No flashcards, no streaks, no points, no leaderboards, no grammar drills. If it didn't help you speak, it went.
An AI tutor is not better than a real conversation. It is better than the conversation you do not have because you are embarrassed — and it is available at eleven at night, when you are not at a lunch table with everyone waiting for you to finish a sentence.
Why it will never add Spanish
Doing European Portuguese properly means work that doesn't transfer to anything else: a lint that checks every AI reply for Brazilian forms and regenerates it rather than show you one, pronunciation scoring tuned to pt-PT, a phrase library of nearly 3,000 sentences from Portugal, and voices from Portugal rather than Brazilian voices reading European text.
Adding a second language would mean doing all of that again, worse, and the result would be another app that lists a dozen languages and does none of them properly. Those already exist, and they are the reason I needed to build this one.
Built by one person
Conversa is designed, built and supported by me, Peter Duffy. That cuts both ways, so here is the honest version:
- Support is me. Email about a bug and you reach the person who can fix it, not a ticket queue.
- It's cheaper than it would otherwise be. €8.99/month is the cheapest monthly plan in this category, which is possible because there is no company to feed.
- It moves at one person's pace. Fewer features, more slowly, and iOS only for the foreseeable future.
- You are not the product. Subscriptions pay for it. That is why there is no account to create, no analytics in the app, and no advertiser anywhere near it.
- I am the target user. Every decision gets made by someone who will be using it at a kitchen table in Portugal, trying to keep up.
Get in touch
Email peterjduffy@gmail.com. If you speak European Portuguese and something in the app sounds wrong to you, that is the most useful message I can get — send me the sentence and it goes into the lint.