Taking the CIPLE exam, immigration, and stuff

I’ve been a resident of Portugal since early 2020 and it’s possible to get a citizenship after five years of residency. The main obstacle for that is usually the requirement to prove proficiency in the Portuguese language up to a reasonable A2 level. Most people who are not originally from a Portuguese-speaking country satisfy this requirement by taking the CIPLE exam.

I’m head-down embarrassed by how long it took me to make the effort to properly learn Portuguese; it got to the point where I found myself changing plans, avoiding people, and flexing the truth about how long I’ve been living here, just so I’m not confronted with it.

Earlier on I used to joke that I blame COVID, but that became old and it wasn’t the truth… I was just being lazy. My vocabulary was actually quite good, but I couldn’t quite string together a sentence or open my mouth to speak because I needed the words to be perfectly arranged, conjugated, and fluent. “Perfection is a skinned knee.” Learning a language doesn’t work like that, obviously; to get anywhere you must mumble, wave hands, invent words, get red-faced, and obsess about what you should have actually said while you’re trying to fall asleep.

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The CIPLE exam is administered in many countries, but only a few times a year with limited spaces in each session. The slots open up at the beginning of January and dry up by around February with the most popular cities and ealier-in-the-year exams full within mere days (I checked for fun). Every morning in January I checked for spots until they started to appear on Monday January 6th. I quickly booked the test for May 8th in Porto; I figured that five months are about right to get sorted.

Here’s what I’d recommend and that worked for me. Subscribe to Practice Portuguese, by far the best app for learning European Portuguese; worth every euro cent. Just go through their lessons. Don’t bother with other apps, and particularly avoid Duolingo, which only “teaches” Brazilian Portuguese and that will only confuse you and make you sound silly (in Portugal!).

Then sign up with an online tutoring platform — I used Preply (referral link) — and found two tutors, out of four that I tried. One tutor was more for structured learning and another was more for conversations (it’s what I asked for, both could do either as they accommodate what you need or want). Find tutors that you connect with, and that have different styles and backgrounds, so you get a bit of variety. Don’t pay too much attention to rankings or lesson cost… I found that they don’t necessarily correlate with a good experience. Keep trying tutors until you hit it off with the right ones for you.

I took two to three 50-min lessons a week. Within a couple of weeks I was not going to shoot myself in the head after mumbling to a neighbour! That was huge progress and that’s what good tutors give you. I tried speaking more, but it was hard and I had to be super comfortable to get going even with ones close to me. But the confidence slowly built up, and there’s still a lot of work ahead.

There are few example CIPLE tests online; your tutor might have more. Do as many as you can because some questions may appear in your exam (one or two did in mine). My goal was to learn to speak correctly and coherently, and if I didn’t pass the exam, that’s fine… I could take it again, and I can continue living here without the citizenship anyway.

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The test itself is what they say in the paperwork. For me, from easiest to hardest were the reading comprehension, writing, speaking, and hearing comprehension sections, the latter being super-hard! I’m not sure if I missed something in the prep but the last section of the listening comprehension was in a style I haven’t seen before, which threw me off.

There are plenty of testimonials elsewhere about the ‘exam day’. I don’t have much to add… just follow the instructions that they provide before the exam; it’s all there.

(Side note. Being a security- and privacy-minded person I was concerned about the laxness of authenticating the participants; at the start of the first exam (speaking, done in pairs) the invigilator just looked at the passport or residence card to see if the numbers matched. I’m pretty sure that if someone wanted to send someone else to do the exam, they could. Not good. Then, after the final exam, the invigilator let people take a photo of the signup page that had everyone’s name, unique test-id (that you use to check your score), and passport/residence card number on it. I wish that I had said something, but I was completely out of it — the last exam is the listening part! — and I just wanted to leave. Finally, a few people were no-shows, which means that they wasted a valuable slot that could have been used by someone else… I wish that they dealt with that too.)

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The results came in last week on the 2nd of July. I passed with ‘Bom’ (good) rating, in-between the other passing categories of ‘Muito bom’ (very good) and ‘Suficiente` (satisfactory).

But by now the entire situation has changed. The government wants to increase the residency period for citizenship from five to ten years, along with stricter application requirements. The excellent Portugal decoded substack has had a couple of newsletters about these proposed changes, here and here. The changes are meant to be retroactive to June 19th, which is unfortunate for me… but may also be unconstitutional… vamos ver. I’m unsure whether to apply now or wait.

I love Portugal, and I look forward to being officially Portuguese. And whilst these proposed changes may delay that moment and make my application more complex and costly, I support some of them, even if they are sometimes presented in a populist way by far-right parties like Chega. Immigrants are vital to most countries, but they/we are often unfairly vilified and used to mask other, harder to solve, issues, like, for example, the low wages here in Portugal. As it often happens, it’s easiest to blame those who have no power and can’t vote. I’ve experienced this unpleasantness previously in the UK.

That said, from what I understand, immigration procedures and criteria in Portugal are currently too lax and re-hauling them will generally be a good thing; I truly trust the Portuguese to eventually come to a reasonable balance in this matter and keep this place such a great and safe place to live.