Mia Esmeriz Academy Review: A Course To Take You From Beginner to Fluency

If you’re learning European Portuguese, you’ve probably already come across Mia Esmeriz’s YouTube channel—it’s packed with excellent videos on grammar, pronunciation, Portuguese culture, and her trips around the country. So it’s genuinely exciting that she has a full course that goes from A1 to C1. Most people will only want the A1 and A2 (the level needed for permanent residency and Portuguese citizenship), but those who are serious about integrating into Portugal will want to aim for at least B2, if not a C1.

It’s a self-study course, and at its heart it’s very grammar-focused. It feels a lot like a traditional Portuguese class you’d take in Portugal, with Mia’s charm, humor, and personality thrown in. You get video lectures, downloadable PDFs, exercises, simple quizzes, and email support, but I do feel like you’ll need to supplement it with a few other things—a tutor or language partner for speaking practice, and perhaps a few additional tools like Memrise or Anki for memorizing vocabulary.

For those who just want to pass the basic exam required for permanent residency and Portuguese citizenship, there’s an A1 and A2 bundle. Or, if you want to go further, there’s an All-In-One bundle that takes you to C1 (fluency) and has a pile of extras. Portugalist readers get 15% off with the discount code 15PORTUGALIST.

Who is Mia Esmeriz

I first came across Mia through her YouTube channel, and later interviewed her for Portugalist. She’s from Porto, holds a Master’s in Teaching Portuguese as a Second Language from the University of Porto, and has taught European Portuguese online since 2017. She’s a clear explainer with excellent English, which matters when she’s untangling why ser and estar aren’t interchangeable, or where the stress falls in a word.

What you get

The academy is built around pre-recorded video lessons, but there’s more in the box than that. Here’s what’s included, and how each part holds up.

The video lectures. The core of the course. Mia in front of the camera, classroom-style, working through grammar and vocabulary level by level. They’re thorough and genuinely well taught—but long and dense: a typical lecture runs 45 minutes to an hour, and she packs a lot into each one (a single A1 lecture covers personal pronouns, months, seasons, festivities, comparatives, superlatives, seven irregular verbs, ordinal numbers, and more). She’s warm and good company on camera—she counts on her fingers the Portuguese way and rewards you with a cartoon sardine at the end of a level. So even though the material can be a little dry—the course opens with a comparison of the verbs ser versus estar—she isn’t dry in her presentation.

That said, I do feel like a lot of people are used to more interactivity when learning a language—we can thank Duolingo for that—and may find the idea of sitting still in a chair for 50 minutes challenging. Thankfully, she puts timestamps at the bottom of the videos, which explain what each section covers. I’d suggest pausing after you’ve completed a section or two and giving yourself a break if you feel like your concentration won’t hold up for an hour.

PDFs, exercises, and quizzes. Every lecture comes with downloadable slides you can annotate offline, exercises built into the videos, and a short multiple-choice quiz at the end to check what stuck (and what didn’t). You can’t download the videos themselves—offline viewing is through the Teachable app.

The Speech Course and pronunciation. Pronunciation is the thing that makes or breaks European Portuguese, and Mia knows it—she told me it’s learners’ single biggest struggle and shouldn’t be left until the end. However, it is treated slightly separately from the rest of the main course. I’d be tempted to start with this, even though that’s not how Mia has put the course together.

Email and forum support. By every account I’ve seen, Mia actually answers emails. Students mention emailing a question and getting a real, detailed reply.

What it’s missing

I’ve said before that there’s no perfect European Portuguese course—none of them includes everything you need. Often, you’ll need to supplement a course with other apps or resources, and that’s definitely true here. Here are the main things I think this one could do with. They aren’t unique to Mia Esmeriz Academy—I see the same gaps in other Portuguese courses—but it’s worth noting where it falls short and where you might need to fill in with other resources.

• Speaking practice. You can watch every lecture and still freeze the first time someone speaks to you at full speed. A video can’t correct you. Mia is honest about this—she points students to iTalki, where she used to teach, for tutors and language partners. The course is the input; you arrange the output.
• Writing and exam prep. Written feedback is limited, and there’s no dedicated CIPLE exam prep—no mock papers, no timed practice. The content maps to the CEFR levels, so you’ll cover what the A2 exam tests, but you won’t rehearse the exam itself. If you’re aiming at citizenship, plan to add a tutor for speaking and writing in the run-up, and remember Mia’s certificate is not the official one—you still sit the CIPLE through CAPLE.
• Listening practice. Listening is one of the hardest parts of learning any language, and European Portuguese especially, because of the pronunciation. Mia doesn’t include a lot of Portuguese audio in her course, but she does have it on her YouTube channel. That’s worth a mention because, even though it isn’t part of the course, there’s so much value there.

Her cultural videos on ordering coffee, carnival traditions, and a 40-minute one on Portuguese politics are the actual audio content you need for learning Portuguese. They’re interesting, they’re real, they’re about daily life, they’re spoken by a real Portuguese person, and they have Portuguese subtitles burned in. They could do with a downloadable vocabulary list you could add to a tool like Anki or Memrise. You can create one yourself, though—either by writing down the words you don’t know or by exporting YouTube’s own transcript. However you do it, this content is really useful, not only for practicing your listening but for learning about Portuguese culture too.

Price and value

The A1–A2 bundle is $399 (about €347), a one-time payment with lifetime access and a 30-day guarantee. With the 15% Portugalist discount, that comes to roughly €295. The full All-In-One—A1 to C1 plus the Speech Course, Story Time, and extras—is $999. With the 15% discount, that comes to $849.15.

That might seem a little steep at first, but this is multiple levels of Portuguese all in one. I took a look at language courses in Lisbon and Porto, and a single level (for example, B1 or B2) could easily cost around €400. I think if you were to do this in person, you would spend at least €1,600 on in-person courses, and that’s before you include all of the extras that this bundle includes.

Lifetime access is a big selling point as well, particularly in an age where so many of us are tired of paying for streaming services and other subscriptions. There are other courses and products out there that are subscription-based and may be cheaper initially, but end up costing about the same over time.

All of that aside, this is a big investment. If you’re unsure whether it’s right for you, you could start with her Kickstart Your Portuguese course, which is completely free and gives you a sense of her teaching style and what the paid courses are like.

Verdict

The sales pages promise “fluency in six months.” Mia herself was more measured when I asked—it depends entirely on the work you put in.

Most language-learning experts would put fluency at C1 or higher. And yes, you could watch all of these videos in six months, and maybe get through all the quizzes and exercises too. But I don’t see you reaching fluency in that time unless you were studying Portuguese more or less full-time, and using not just this course but plenty of other resources alongside it.

In fact, I’d say that’s true whether you do this course in six months or six years. A course is the backbone of getting to fluency, but you’ll also need to put in a lot of other hours—practicing speaking, memorizing vocabulary, reading Portuguese, working on your writing, and listening to Portuguese audio.

And, as mentioned, you’ll need to look beyond this course for help with most of that. It’s one piece of the pie, but it isn’t the whole pie.

That said, it’s genuinely fantastic to find a course that—while still just one piece of the pie—takes you beyond A2 or B1, and in Mia’s case all the way to C1. If her classroom-style approach works for you, that means you can stick with her from complete beginner right up to the fluency threshold. And that’s a big deal. One of the biggest problems people run into when learning Portuguese is starting with a course that only goes up to A1 or A2, then getting stuck when it takes them no further.

If you’re looking for a course that’ll take you all the way, this is one of the few that can.