About DailyNata

I’m Amin, and I started DailyNata after moving to Porto. I wanted to learn Portuguese, but nothing I tried held me. The apps turned it into a game, the textbooks bored me, and none of it worked the way I actually learn. So I made something for myself instead.

It started as a daily email. Each one opened with a quote, a joke or a short story I liked, with the punchline in Portuguese and everything else in English. I wasn’t sure anyone else would want it. Within a few weeks there were over a thousand people reading, and they started writing back, asking for exercises, longer lessons, somewhere to keep going.

So I built it. That became DailyNata Plus. Around the same time I moved the free email to Saturdays, once a week, so I could put more into each one.

The whole thing runs on how I like to learn. I can’t sit and study for an hour, and I don’t think most people can either. So instead of drills, there’s a new lesson every week that starts with something worth reading. The Portuguese stays simple. Plain words, real situations, the sort of thing you’d actually say at a table or in a shop, rather than grammar for its own sake. You pick it up by showing up, a bit at a time.

It’s European Portuguese only, which sounds obvious until you go looking and find almost everything is Brazilian.

Three and a half years on, it’s still here and still made the same way. For people who want to learn the language without it feeling like homework.