Learning Portuguese doesn’t need to be a chore. A sense of pleasure and fulfillment will easily drift into your language learning journey as soon as you get hold of enticing materials – just like stories can be.

Not only will stories bring a sense of satisfaction to your practice but they will also lead to more productive, idiomatically rich language learning. Hands down.

Now, you may not find it very enticing if you jump straight into José Saramago or Clarice Lispector. What you really need is to find reads especially designed for language learners that match your current language skills.

Crucially, all these reads are CEFR-graded according to the different levels of language proficiency. 

For instance, as a beginner, you may want to get hold of stories that cater to the A1-A2 levels. These will typically be reads divided into short chapters made of paragraphs and simple sentences. 

If you find yourself in the low-intermediate tier, you may want to raise the game a notch or two by finding something within the A2-B1 range, and so on.

Here’s the bottom line. Your reads should be challenging enough to expand your language skills, but not overwhelmingly difficult to the point that all your reading joy is stripped away and you give up.

A good read (from a language learning perspective) is then a balancing act between it being ambitious but, nonetheless, pleasurable.