Hello all!
My wife and I are interested in taking an intensive, preferably in-person, PLA course for our Portuguese citizenship application. We have found EdPro and CPTI, both in Lisbon. Does anybody have any experience with either of these that they can share? Positives, negatives?
Also, does anybody know of intensive PLA courses in Porto or the Algarve?
Thanks,
Daniel.
It depends on what you are looking for. Most of the PLA courses offered are funded by the government and it is free by default and available in almost every city and in bigger cities like Lisboa, Porto, Braga et al on a multiple locations. These are the list of schools/institutions offering them below:
https://www.acm.gov.pt/documents/10181/1480867/Cursos-PLA-Escolas-Publicas-2023-2024.pdf/3e834b58-0b25-4cfc-8fb3-c9ff4c64ad50
The only disadvantage with the free PLAs are they are usually full and quite difficult to get accomadated into the course. However the paid versions from the above mentioned institutes are just facilitators of one of the qualifica centres. They do offer online and intensive courses which are equivalent to in-person ones on a certificate recognition basis.
Alternatively, you can choose an in-person A1 or A2 depending on your language placement test in most of the major schools in portugal, like Univ. of Porto, Lisboa, Coimbra, Braga et al., these are paid but reasonably priced ones. Quality of teaching in these schools are way higher than what you get through EdPro and CPTI.
Hi Tomás, thank you for your detailed reply!
It depends on what you are looking for.
We’re looking for an in-person class that directly satisfies the nationality A2 language requirement without us needing to take the CIPLE exam. We’d like to attend the class in the minimum number of calendar days, which we’d expect to be about 38 days of 4 hour classes. (150 required hours / 4 hours per day).
From what I saw when looking at the list of public schools is that the classes are often semester-long classes, which is not ideal for us.
Obviously, free would be nice! But we can pay for a class.
Thanks,
Dan.
As others have mentioned, I strongly recommend in-person class over online class.
Not necessarily, look at the summer intensive courses at major schools. A friend of mine did attend Univ. of Porto for an A2 after the placement test. If you are not familiar with the PT language, you shall be placed at an A1 level initially, you might need to do an A2 next year. It’s something you can’t avoid to take an online course if you are limited on time. In-person uni level courses are of high quality and you shall be able to meet many people and have some good time in the class… If you take an online course (like I did), you shall be getting a valid certificate and all your classmates do disappear as there’s absolutely no real connections being made and the teacher’s are incentivised not to fail almost anyone (even the ones who’s working during the class, the ones who never does the homework, doesn’t have a clue on what’s going on and couldn’t construct a single sentence in portuguese) as they’ve paid a decent amount and the quality and the overall experience quickly spirals down as the course progresses.
I completed a1/a2 over two semesters at Uminho - unless you are already past that in another romance language or good with languages generally I can’t recommend anything other than that. I had already completed memrise before coming to Portugal but the structure and grammar are so different from english that even with that head start it was very difficult for me. Add to that the complication with a lot of Brazilian spoken in Braga still makes my head spin. I have had great difficulty trying to schedule B level classes with the free classes btw…
I finally received approval for my visa, so I need to find a PLA language course to take. I’m hoping to find something in-person early next year. But having gone through the list of places which offer them, very few of them have anything listed on their website and what they do have is for the current year. Nobody seems to have anything for 2025 posted yet.
Does anyone know where I can find the information? I’m hoping to enroll in an intensive course.