I Built My Own Portuguese Picture Books
I couldn't find reading material easy enough for a true beginner, so I made my own. Thirty tiny books so far, free to read.
I’m teaching myself Brazilian Portuguese. The single hardest part, for me, has been finding stuff to read. Not because there aren’t Portuguese books. There are millions. The problem is that almost none of them are easy enough for someone at the very start.
Even books made for learners assume you already know a few hundred words. Children’s books are worse than you’d think. They’re full of animal sounds, rhymes, and words like “porcupine” that a three-year-old loves and a beginner never needs.
So I built my own. It’s called Leitura (that’s “reading” in Portuguese), and you can use it free at leitura.everydad.dad.
The idea I stole
There’s a theory in language learning called comprehensible input. The short version: you learn a language by reading and hearing things you can actually understand, not by memorizing rules. If you understand the message, your brain does the rest.
The catch is that “understandable” has to be almost embarrassingly easy. Like, one sentence per page easy. That’s the material I couldn’t find, so that’s the material I made.
What the books look like
Each book is a tiny picture book. One sentence per page. The picture shows you exactly what the sentence means, so you never need a dictionary or a translation. There’s a button to hear each sentence read out loud in Brazilian Portuguese.
The stories follow a dad named Steve, his dog Spot, and his cat Nel. Spot is loyal and a little dumb. Nel is a menace. Steve is tired. That’s the whole cast, and it turns out that’s plenty.
The rules behind them
The books look simple, but there’s a system underneath:
- Every book adds only a handful of new words.
- A word only shows up after a book has properly introduced it.
- Each book teaches at most one new piece of grammar, and always with words you already know.
- Books are 40 to 55 words total. You can read one in a minute.
The point of the rules is that book 30 still feels easy. Easy is the feature.
Nerd corner: the exposure math
This is the part I actually care about, so let me show my work.
You don’t learn a word by seeing it once. You learn it by running into it over and over, in different scenes, spread out over time. Flashcards fake this with a schedule. I wanted the stories themselves to be the schedule.
So the series tracks 110 core words and 17 grammar patterns in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet has one big rule: every tracked word has to appear in at least 12 different books. Grammar patterns have to appear in 15. Not 12 repetitions on one page. Twelve separate books, read on separate days, each one showing the word in a slightly different scene.
Now the fun part. Do the multiplication and the budget gets scary:
- 110 words times 12 books each is 1,320 word-to-book pairings I owe the reader.
- But each book is only 40 to 55 running words. One sentence per page, no sentence over 9 words. A book that small can realistically carry 14 to 18 tracked words.
- The series is planned at 90 books. As I write this there are 31 done, and the tracker says I still owe 1,120 pairings with 59 books left. That’s 19 per book. Against a capacity of 14 to 18.
In other words, the budget doesn’t close with room to spare. It barely closes at all. There’s no space for a word that’s just passing through. Every noun in every sentence has to be pulling weight.
The rule that makes it work: whenever the story could use one word or another, use the one with the worst coverage. If the cat can knock over a cup or a box, and “cup” is behind on its 12 books, the cat knocks over the cup. A little script recounts everything after each book, so the next book always works from real numbers.
Two more numbers I like. After 31 books, the whole series is 1,217 words of text but only 94 unique word forms. That’s the entire reading vocabulary so far, and a beginner who read the series knows basically all of it. And the word “olha” (look) appears in 27 of the 31 books. The system decided looking at things is the most important skill in Portuguese, and honestly, for a story about a dog and a cat, it’s right.
The grammar side has one safety rule that I think of as the seesaw: new grammar only rides on old words, and new words only ride on old grammar. Book 31 introduces “tá comendo” (is eating), and it does it with “come,” a verb the reader has known since the food books. Nothing new ever has to carry anything else new.
The part where I confess
I didn’t draw the pictures, record the audio, or even write most of the sentences. AI did the production work. I built the system: the word lists, the grammar rules, the characters, and the checks that keep every book inside the rules. Then I put AI to work making books inside that system.
As I write this, there’s an AI agent running on my computer making books 31 through 40 on its own. I’ll check its work before it publishes anything. That feels like a fair trade: I steer, it types.
Does it work?
Honest answer: I don’t know yet. I made this for myself and I’m the only test subject. Reading book 30 feels easy to me now, and it wouldn’t have on day one. That’s all the proof I have so far.
If you’re learning Portuguese, try it and tell me if it helps. It’s free, it works on your phone, and there are thirty books waiting: leitura.everydad.dad.