Stop playing Angry Birds and learn Spanish instead.

From next week, this website will be written in Portuguese.

What? You don’t speak Portuguese? That’s not a problem.

We didn’t either, until a couple of weeks ago. But now we’re practically fluent* and so excited to start writing our site das mulheres in the world’s seventh most-spoken language.

It’s all thanks to this app called DuoLingo.

It’s sort of like Candy Crush, or Angry Birds, but, instead of being a stupid waste of time that does nothing but use up your battery and give you mild forms of RSI, it actually has, you know, some sort of utility.

The app is split into five languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish and – the language you’d better start brushing up on if you ever want to communicate with us again – Portuguese.

For each language, there are lessons, which are game-based activities that test your ability to read, write and speak the language of your choice. You have a certain number of lives each lesson, and if you make enough mistakes and lose them all, you have to start the lesson again.

As you move on, the lessons get harder, until, one day, you wake up and you are so proficient in that particular Western European language other than English, you could write your thesis in it.

It’s seriously addictive. And, the best part is that it actually has real world applications, unlike most other apps that you would play with on the morning commute. (Unless you have a real world use for the bird catapulting skills such apps teach, in which case: play on.)

So, yeah. Portuguese. Começar, MMers.

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. We just get really into apps in the office sometimes. Game of Phones, anyone? Also ‘fluent’ is probably, um, an exaggeration of epic proportions.

Have you played Duolingo?