Portuguese is specifically a difficult language with luxuriant tenses, and second language acquisition (SLA) is regarded as highly variable. Many (Chinese) students who learn Portuguese as their second language (L2) are hardly to gain a mastery of it. In this paper, we proposed to employ i Learning method in building a data mining model to discover the regularities and factors that govern the acquisition process and learning quality of the students. The results reveal that knowledge generated through our model is able to explain the acquisition behavior in practice, which can benefit the subsequent linguistic analysis in SLA and can contribute to studies of Portuguese language acquisition. © 2010 IEEE.