I thought the pass threshold was 55%.. is it really only 25% ?!
Edit: I checked and the rules are:
Minimum score to pass Portugal’s A2 exam (CIPLE):
You must score at least 55% overall AND at least 25% in every section.
So a 25% is the minimum per section but you also need an average above 55% to pass.
From my experience, the classes tend to reduce the speed of instructions to the lowest common denominator, that is the most challenged student in the class. I often find that a struggling student will inadvertently reduce the efficiency of the overall curriculum even if it is fairly ambitious at the onset of the class. That generally fails to deliver good results.
Another issue is that classes often tend to talk about the language more than they try to force you actually speak the language. There are plenty of those who will explain to you the grammer (useful, no doubt, but overwhelming when you are first starting) rather than just let you speak the best you can. For me, that is very limiting.
Personally, I prefer the following:
Start with few basic lessons on the web, trying to start reading the language ASAP. Portuguese was one of more difficult (as compared to Italian, French, and even Spanish), but once you can start reading, you are picking up vocabulary and basic grammer. Remember, there is plenty of Latin still packed into English, and that stays the same across all Romance languages, including Portuguese - saves you quite a bit of learning right there.
Start writing in Portuguese. Yes, it is very difficult, but even if you are writing a sentence (or two?) per day, you are beginning to think in Portuguese. I check all my writing with Google translate to verify my thoughts, grammer, and punctuation, but only after I written the sentence the best I could. The advantage here is that you are formulating your ideas in the new language at your own pace and without fear of embarrassment of stumbling with every word. Hint: install the Portuguese language proofing tools in your Microsoft Word to help you with spelling, language structure, and thesaurus. Adding English International keyboard also helps.
Listening to the language. Even if you don’t understand but few words here and there, you are still training your ears. That’s will ultimately be required for any communication, and so the sooner you start - the better. News like CNN Portugal are often very helpful, especially if you already have listend to the world news on any other channel and you know the subject matter.
Speaking at every occasion. This is the hardest, and typically because of the inner language barrier, but you must start no matter what. If you want to save yourself some awkwardness, try to use AI for your conversation - no embarrassment when talking to a machine.
It is not as hard as it might look, but it requires discipline. The classes help more with the latter, yet if you could organise yourself, you will progress much further and much quicker than any class will afford you.
That sounds about right. And so, as long as you can do well in reading (say 70% - 80%), which is the easiest, and perhaps score some 60% to 70% on writing, you might be able to get away with much lower scores on the other two parts.
There’s something even better than Google/Deepl translate now: LLMs. For all their faults, large LANGUAGE models really are masters at LANGUAGE!
ChatGPT or Gemini can even tell you when you used a Brazilian idiom, and the European Portuguese idiom you should use instead. (Provided you prompt them initially that you want to learn European Portuguese.)
I already passed my CIPLE but I’m going back to a saved ChatGPT chat every day where it’s asking me to answer simple questions in Portuguese and then correcting me.
P.S. listening practice is another beast entirely, to prepared for this I listened to podcasts (I recommend Practice Portuguese Shorties and Portugueses no Mundo) every spare moment: while walking, while driving, at the gym etc. Even if you don’t understand everything, immersing yourself in podcasts helps train your ear.
I got muito bom on the exam, and I never studied a Latin language (e.g. Spanish) before this.
You may be surprised. Everyone finds the listening extremely difficult. I did an A1 course then a lot of additional study to prepare for the exam, and still felt I may not have got 25% in the listening. My friend’s husband calculated the probability of achieving a certain score if you randomly answered the listening and it was 24% for the particular exam we had. So you only need to know the answer to a few questions in order to score 25% with random responses for the rest! As it turned out I got 56% in the listening.
Then I did ok in the speaking and writing, and very well in the reading, to good a bom overall - just missed out on muito bom!
There is a strategy to the writing that I missed - you apparently need to work out what verb tense they’re looking for and I failed to do that. I only missed muito bom by 1 mark.
But between taking the exam and getting the result I was really not sure I’d passed, because the listening had been soooo hard. I was fairly confident I’d done enough to pass on the rest.
Thank you for this. I am feeling really bad about my effort and doubting that I passed. I am already shopping for a new 150 course since I already applied for nationality my application is not going to get through until i pass or redo. I did submit the certificate from the original 15o course that I took- although it seems not to be legit. This has become the trail of tears…
I don’t think that’s entirely true. It just depends on the course.
I do agree that the wrong mix of students can result in the course getting bogged down. And especially in zoom-format courses, it’s hard to do it in a way that there’s a lot of interaction, since only one person can speak at a time - you get 16 people on a zoom class, there’s no time to do any talking.
But good classes have positives -
As you say, it’s “if you could organize yourself” …but most of us tend to be pretty bad at that on our own. I know all the good intentions in the world aren’t keeping my nose to the grindstone.
All that said… there’s clearly a lot of bad classes and bad teachers out there, and if you get one, it’s a waste of time and money. And there’s probably more bad ones than good.
That is what I generally find in a targeted conversation group. I participate in a French and an Italian groups where we break out into conversation with like-minded and somewhat evenly-matched partners. I would very much advocate joining one (or more) - it is far more rewarding than a grinding and dreary lesson.
Ultimately, as you rightfully state, we are not as good in organising ourselves. Perhaps a course in self-motivation and goal-setting should be a pre-requisite to all language learning… 
Or moving there. Nothing like the press of actual events to cram it down your throat. My wife learned Italian by studying in Perugia at the famous language school there, where no small part of the program was simply not ever being allowed to speak anything but Italian. 
Necessity the mother of invention and all that.
Admittedly even that has not helped any number of people in the Algarve, at least by my observation, so it is hardly a cure-all.
This is what my friend and I did to prepare for the A2 speaking. We met up and spent time doing actual practice speaking tests from a text book. Describing photos, introducing ourselves, and practicing scenarios. It was very very helpful.
Then we got lucky on exam day. There were a few no shows so they had to re-jig who was paired with whom for the speaking part of the exam, and they put us together. I’m pretty certain they deliberately put us together as we were the only two native English speakers taking the exam that day (the others were Chinese). The examiners were very nice and seemed to want to help bring out the best in the candidates.
Live in Lisbon a bit and walk a dog early when only grannies are about and you will get a lot of practice.
Reading Bonnie C’s post here I am starting to a doubt about the credibility of my A2 Course to deliver the certificate I need, it is painfully inefficient for me and my wife and I would largely progress better and faster with private tutoring.
My question to the community is how I can verify -very- reliably that the course will yield the certificate we need for citizenship application purposes.
If you are taking a course that is 150 hours in length and is a PLA acredited course, you should be good. This link was shared in this forum Feb 20 and seems to be the only legit way to determine if a course is accredited. Qualifica
Verify your program here to be sure. If you dont see it, then you may have a problem. I have learned the hard way that many “schools” have an educational partner that has the accreditation so you may need to reverse search.
Private, accredited tutors are going to be really expensive, but if you can afford one it would be far and away the fastest and easiest way to do it. I know that Ciple Master offers private classes and they’re partnered with a trade school in Funchal, but you’re looking at close to $15K.
Thanks a lot Bonnie. Kind of you to guide me. I actually have checked them on the Qualifica platform when we started classes and got a clear confirmation from them IRN would accept their certificate and that it’s PLA accredited and so on. What raised my doubts is that you have received the same assurances and discovered the truth later. So I am very keen to learn from your experience and triple check this.
I supplemented my CIPLE prep with a tutor, and she was great, Loide Andrade. I think she charged me €25/hr for just me. Her WhatsApp is +351.913.197.667. If I dont pass my CIPLE, it isnt because of her…it is entirely on me.
Thanks , couple of my friend completed PLA from Edpro , they are satisfied. I’m thinking to join them.
Any feedback about Edpro before starting my program?
Edpro ticked the box for us. We travel a lot and chose afternoon Porto time so morning when we were in the US. The class moves so fast it didn’t really allow time for the lessons to sink in, so tbh didn’t retain a whole lot.
I did the EdPro course and then enrolled both my children on it (one was 16, the other 18). In all cases we were very happy with the quality of teachers and while the pace was fast, we learnt so much. Also learnt about the culture from the teachers which I felt was very beneficial and had some interesting discussions about traditional foods and festivals. Well worth the course fee.
It really depends on the teacher you get, it would seem.
For my wife, all she accomplished was to check the box - and I will note that she speaks Italian and Spanish, and has a college degree in ancient languages, so it has nothing to do with her being a poor student. By maybe 1/3-way through, she was just clocking on-screen time and barely paying attention under a heading of “this is a waste of my time, I have better things to do” and she bluffed through the tests using her Spanish and Italian alone.
On the other hand I had a course signed up via EdPro run by LSBS and it was fantastic. (It’s one of the choices in the drop-down on the sign-up page.)
AFAICT, LSBS has made a genuine effort to improve the course. It appears to run through ZonaVerde, which is actually a company that does corporate training broadly instead of being focused on the PLA. (It’s hard to understand the relationships between ZonaVerde, LSBS, and EdPro.) It doesn’t use the government materials; they’ve developed a whole new textbook that is light-years better and appears to actually sink money and effort into a better experience that is about as well-paced as is possible in the format. So if you do EdPro I might suggest trying them. And yes it’s appropriately credited.