This is likely my final or penultimate update unless anyone has questions (feel free to AMA.)
Our last exam is on Monday. That will require some prep this weekend but I am confident I will be ready to pass it. Tuesday is paperwork, evaluations, feedback and maybe reading one last passage. And then, we’re done.
It sounds like it takes about a month get certification. I have my other paperwork in order to apply for citizenship as soon as the certification is complete.
So how did it go? I guess the top line is: very well. I believe nearly anyone willing to show up and put in effort can pass this course, and it is designed that way very carefully. O CIPLE, in contrast, feels like it is designed to not let too many people pass, and feels like much more of a roll of the dice even for highly proficient people, which I am not.
It is exhausting. 20 hours a week of online Portuguese left me with my brain hurting, literally, some weeks. Intensive is right! On the plus side there is no homework and preparation for class is minimal. I do need to allocate time prior to exams but that’s the only non-class time I feel that I need to put in. More is better, of course, but that’s not happening for me.
Ok, it’s a great way to get A2 certification, but did I learn anything? Surprisingly, yes, I learned a great deal. There are topics where I needed multiple sources to get it – class, exercises, text books, podcasts, and my go to best resource is always Practice Portuguese learning notes. I am notably slow at language acquisition so if you are not, you might need a lot less. But for the first maybe 3/4s of the course I had already done these paths for trying to learn the topics. It was not first impression; it was reinforcing what I had done before. So here I should warn that I think the course would be brutally hard for anyone walking in cold. However, if you have spent time on very basic A1 topics, know present regular conjugations at least for -ar verbs, and know maybe 4 irregular verbs (ser, estar, ter, ir) to start out, then I think it is possible to pick up the rest as you go. In other words, you can pick up what you need between the time you sign up for the course and when it starts, IMHO.
There were three areas in which the course really helped me. First, reflexive verbs. I absolutely had not figured those out “on my own” without being able to do Q&A with an instructor, and it helped to have a bunch of exercises to highlight the exceptions. Now I get why it wasn’t something I was going to figure out just by reading in Portuguese.
Second, subjunctive. It took me the longest time to understand that the Particípio actually changes to match gender and number as if it were a noun. It’s a whole messy topic but there is no way I would have figured this out without a human leading me through it. I got lucky – our teacher is excellent. The materials on this topic are not well developed online.
Third, true of any good course, just the practice of getting things wrong and getting corrections in real time. I’m still making utter beginner mistakes. It’s humbling. But I’d rather take the pain here than in “real life” after we move to Portugal.
EdPro is seeing a huge surge of interest in this course. They have temporarily stopped offering new B1 courses to try to meet demand for A1/A2. Expect a waiting list.
Again, I got lucky with an excellent instructor. No idea what the others are like. But the structure of the course should be similar.
As an alternative to O CIPLE, for me, there was no question that this was the better path. It’s much more deterministic: show up, do the work, pass. I am grateful to have had the option. I recommend it to anyone who does not like the all-or-nothing pressure of a national language exam. Anyone who is already a native level speaker might prefer the exam as a one-and-done but otherwise, I recommend EDPro.
As a way to learn Portuguese, for me, it’s more mixed. It was worth the money and even the time for the language learning aspects. But personally, I would not take this course just for the learning. For example, I might have had a better experience with half the time and fewer fellow students. 20 students reading the same passage means hearing 20 mistakes with only one instructor’s read. And 20 hours a week of anything in an online course format is brutal. You have to really want it. Citizenship is enough motivation; anything less might not be for me.
Boa sorte, and I’m happy to answer any questions.
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Não necessita nadar! 
Que bom, pode tomar as aulas da manhã ou tarde porque fica em Portugal. EdPro é um pouco caro, mas não usa uma roupa de mergulho!
Yikes. I can see where it might be worth that much to have such a high degree of certainty: do the work of showing up and participating, and you will pass. Plus there are so few seats for o CIPLE that it can be a long wait right there. I just find the scalping to be obnoxious.