Fala Gringo

"Fala, gringo!" — the Rio greeting, and exactly what this app makes you do.

Live at falagringo.com — free, no account, works offline.

A tool for learning everyday Brazilian Portuguese — the spoken carioca register you actually hear in Rio, not textbook European Portuguese. It is aimed at an English speaker: you are shown English and type the Portuguese.

Browse 162 verbs with their conjugations across three indicative tenses — plus the present and imperfect subjunctive on a 58-verb core — or drill any of thirteen topics by typing the answer.

Static site, no build step, no required dependencies. Optional sync and production-only usage analytics run separately from lessons. Open index.html directly from disk or serve the repository root (production is Cloudflare Pages).

Tabs

3096 quiz cards in total.

Espero que dê certo — the present subjunctive (Subj. Presente tab)

"I hope it works out" — the mood of wishes, doubts and everything you want someone else to do.

The forms derive from the presente eu form: drop the -o, add -e / -e / -emos / -em for -ar verbs and -a / -a / -amos / -am for the rest (falo → fale, tenho → tenha, faço → faça, peço → peça), an -ar stem keeping its sound (fico → fique, chego → chegue, começo → comece). Six verbs have no eu form in -o and keep their old forms: ser seja, estar esteja, ir vá, dar dê, saber saiba, querer queira. The data checks verify all 232 stored forms against that rule.

Every example embeds a trigger: quero/espero que…, tomara que…, talvez…, é importante que…, não acho que…, duvido que…, caso…. The drill accepts the bare form, eu fale, and que eu fale. Same 58-verb core as the imperfect below.

Se eu soubesse… — the imperfect subjunctive (Subj. Imperfeito tab)

"If only I knew…" — the tense of hindsight, and the feeling of every language learner.

The forms are the easy half: for every Portuguese verb, regular or irregular, the imperfect subjunctive derives from the pretérito perfeito 3pl — drop -ram, add -sse / -sse / -ssemos / -ssem (falaram → falasse, fizeram → fizesse, foram → fosse). The data checks verify all 232 stored forms against that rule.

The hard half is knowing when to use it, so every gloss and example embeds a trigger: se… hypotheticals, queria/gostaria que… past wishes, como se… (as if), era melhor que…, antes que…. The drill accepts the bare form, eu falasse, and the trigger-prefixed se/que eu falasse. The Sentences tab's Hypotheticals & wishes group practices producing whole trigger sentences.

It covers a curated 58-verb core (the verbs you actually reach for in hypotheticals) rather than all 162 — and haver stays out for the same reason it is not drilled elsewhere: only 3sg houvesse is live usage.

How the drill works

• The prompt is English; you type the Portuguese.
• Answers are case-, accent- and punctuation-insensitive — nos falavamos is accepted for nós falávamos. For verbs, the bare form works too (falávamos as well as nós falávamos).
• A wrong answer does not clear the card. It goes back into the deck and returns until you get it right. Getting it wrong reveals the answer, an example sentence and the full conjugation table.
• Every verb has both a written pronunciation and a listen button, using the browser's Brazilian-Portuguese voice.
• With Foco off, a deck is the whole topic, minus any category chips you switch off.
• Each tab shows how much of it you have mastered; a card counts as mastered once you have answered it correctly. A reset link next to the count clears that topic's mastery. Mastery, the Hard/Easy choice, the light/dark choice and today's Daily result are the only things stored, all under a single localStorage key (pvs:v1).
• Light and dark themes, following the system setting unless you override it with the toggle in the top bar.

Hard Mode (the default) and Easy Mode

Hard Mode shows no Portuguese at all — the English prompt has to identify the answer on its own. Easy Mode adds the infinitive as a hint chip.

Because Hard Mode is the default, prompt uniqueness is a correctness requirement, not a nicety: no prompt may be satisfiable by two different answers. That is enforced mechanically (see below), which is why glosses carry disambiguating qualifiers — to be (permanent) vs to be (temporary), to know (a fact) vs to know (a person/place), to call (phone) vs to call (by name). Where two verbs really are interchangeable in spoken Brazilian Portuguese (pôr / botar / colocar, caminhar / andar), both answers are accepted rather than a false distinction being invented.

haver appears in Browse but not in the drills: only há ("there is/are") is live usage, so drilling hei / hão would teach the wrong thing.

Checks

Two check suites, neither needing a toolchain:

osascript -l JavaScript scripts/check.jxa    # data invariants
osascript -l JavaScript scripts/smoke.jxa    # app behaviour, against a DOM stub

They use the JavaScriptCore engine bundled with macOS. verify.html runs the same data checks in the browser — just open it.

scripts/check.jxa and verify.html share js/checks.js, which asserts: 162 verbs; 1944 forms with all three indicative tenses; every drilled form has a form, meaning, pronunciation and example; every regular verb matches an independent conjugation oracle (js/conjugate.js); every verb flagged irregular really is; 58 complete imperfect-subjunctive blocks whose forms all derive from the perfeito 3pl (a rule with no exceptions, so it verifies irregulars too) and whose examples all contain their form inside a trigger context; every card's answer is among its own accepted answers; and no ambiguous prompts — identical, distinguished only by word order, or only partly qualified.

Layout

index.html          shell: top bar, tab strip, <main>
verify.html         data checks in the browser
css/app.css         design tokens + components (light + dark)
js/lib/             text.js (normalize/shuffle), tts.js, fx.js
js/data/*.js        one file per topic
js/topics.js        registry — normalises all 9 schemas into one card shape
js/quiz.js          the single drill engine, shared by all twelve drill topics
js/browse.js        the verb list
js/daily.js         daily challenge
js/progress.js      localStorage: mastery, prefs, daily results
js/conjugate.js     regular-conjugation oracle (checks only)
js/checks.js        shared assertions
js/app.js           hash router + delegated events
scripts/check.jxa   headless data checks
scripts/smoke.jxa   headless app smoke test (+ smoke-steps.js)

Classic <script> tags rather than ES modules, deliberately: the app then works opened as a local file:// as well as over HTTP.

js/data/verbs.js is the source of truth for verb forms — they are stored explicitly rather than generated at runtime, so a pronunciation hint can hang off each form without drifting.

Credits

The content, the engine and the typing-drill format are this project's own. gjermundbae/portuguese-verb-flashcards is a sister project built on the same idea; the two verb lists were compared early on so that neither missed a common verb. The pronunciations and example sentences for 29 of the verbs (348 forms) are generated content and worth spot-checking, especially stress placement.

v1.24: settings, backups and safe progress

Search Browse in Portuguese or English; expand a verb to load its conjugations. The gear button opens the daily workload settings and per-language JSON backup export/import (backups never contain the sync code). Storage failures are visible instead of silent.

Review levels now advance only when a review is due; extra practice neither climbs nor postpones the next review. Inferred sibling reviews update their clocks without counting as answers. A reset on one device is not undone by another device's stale snapshot.

The review notes list every change with its reason, including what was rolled back in 1.24.1. The pronunciation audit records the corrected hints. The six JXA suites remain dependency-free; node --test scripts/check-sync.mjs runs the sync worker and client together with no packages.

Launch analytics

PostHog measures visits, submitted answers, practice days and return visits across the three languages. The footer offers a browser opt-out. Local development is excluded, and answers/audio/sync codes are never included. See analytics setup and dashboard definitions.

License

The code is MIT. The learning content — the card data in js/data/, ingles/js/data/ and noruegues/js/data/, and the generated verbs/ pages — is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: free to share and adapt for non-commercial use, with attribution, under the same terms.