In Pois não, Antônio Simões delivers a Portuguese course with a “basic reference grammar”. It’s different from your typical Portuguese course, as it targets learners who already speak Spanish. Although there are great differences between Spanish and Portuguese, the author capitalizes on the mass of similarities between these two Ibero-Italic languages to speed up the learning process. The theme and style are reminiscent of Simões’ other effort, Com Licença!: Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers.

In this book, you learn grammar, syntax / sentence structure, vocabulary and conversation skills through modular lessons. Lessons include explanations of a variety of language topics, along with drills and exercises. Throughout the text (actually, in both books mentioned above), the writer consistently draws comparisons between Spanish and Portuguese, highlighting each language topic.

Since I haven’t acquired a copy of this book to read thoroughly, I don’t give this book a score or a full review. If you have any recommendations related to Pois não, please post your comments below.

Cons:
European Portuguese only (but sometimes covers Brazilian use without really explaining what’s going on); organization only so-so, especially study/grammar points; quality of activities and short length of dialogues may put off some learners; explanations often miss the mark, failing to connect the dots or explain grammar as well as they should

Sue Tyson-Ward’s Teach Yourself Beginner’s Portuguese attempts to break down and teach the basics of Portuguese to new students over the course of 19 lessons. The book & CD combo expose you to an array of conversational and grammar topics.

The book’s format is typical of a TY course (or most other conversational language courses). Chapters start with dialogues, then give grammar or language topic explanations over a few pages. You’ll do paragraph-long reading exercises, as well as practice activities. Readings, dialogs, explanations and activities are often interchanged, which adds variety at the expense of consistency.

The course opens with a short crash course in pronunciation, which is enough to get the ball rolling if you’re learning Continental European Portuguese. The CD or cassette tape follows along, pronouncing a few dozen words so you can get an ear for the language.

Each dialogue is fairly short, but believable. Dialogues and readings are quick and disjointed, so expect to use them for repetition practice, not for any engaging immersion to Portuguese. Unfortunately, not all dialogues are covered on the audio CDs.

The explanations of grammar and language topics sometimes throw verb tables or grammar rules your way without proper introduction, other times offer adequate instructions. Mostly, it’s disappointing that they build on each other mildly and bear minimal connection to the chapter topics or overall course organization. What’s worse, they’re sometimes misleading or conflicting.

Exercises give you a chance to do the typical fill-in-the-blanks or translation & repetition more than anything else. At times, you’ll stray from that formula by, say, picking out what’s going on in a cartoon drawing, or filling out a crossword puzzle.

The end of the book has answers to activities, a Portuguese-English vocabulary glossary and short index. The table of contents also lists chapters by title and summarizes the main points in each chapter.

If you’re looking to ease into conversational Portuguese, and can withstand some of the faults I found in this course, Teach Yourself Beginner’s Portuguese is one way of getting through the basics. But, personally, I recommend other of the many courses available to you.

Cons:
European Portuguese only; the barrage of pronunciation and conversation drills have no setting or context; exercises and explanations always point back to repetition drills; two-way conversation drills suggest this course is designed for partner or classroom use

Barron’s FSI Mastering Portuguese wraps the Foreign Service Institute’s language training program into a book and tape course for beginners. Over the course of 25 lessons (units), students will read, hear and repeat countless variations of words and phrases until learning to speak basic Portuguese.

Each unit begins by asking you to repeat along with the audio as it reads aloud words and parts of words. The text in the book focuses on troublesome sounds. For instance, one section asks you to practice a variety of words ending in -om, taking care not to pronounce the “final m” the way you would in English.

Then, you’ll charge ahead through conversation dialogues. These start out as simple, two or three line exchanges. Later, the exchanges become more intense. The book includes many of them, with many variations on a single theme to make sure you’ve nailed down a specific facet of Portuguese conversation.

Units spend some time introducing and explaining grammar topics, but you’ll always sense they play second fiddle to the ever-present conversation drills. Practice exercises are here, too, but they often involve repeating lists of Portuguese sentences, or creating slightly different versions of a single phrase. Additionally, some sections improve your Portuguese vocabulary building skills, encouraging you to recognize words related to English, avoid “false friends” (cognates with different meanings in English and Portuguese), and so on.

These lessons have a decent table of contents, listing units and section names and numbers, but no index. You’ll also find a Portuguese-English vocabulary glossary at the end of the book.

As a language learning course, Mastering Portuguese is either a repetitious and routine or exacting and practical coverage of conversational Portuguese for beginners. You’ll skip some important grammar points and miss out on more creative approaches by taking on this lesson program. Yet you’ll have plenty of practice with a wide range of Portuguese words and phrases, with nuanced variations of each. Dedicated students looking to gain some real conversational abilities in European Portuguese will appreciate this course. You certainly won’t be afraid to hear or read Portuguese anymore, and you may be a good deal more prepared to speak it.

Cons:
listen & repeat approach to learning phrases may tire students; exercises are routine and simplistic; juggling both Brazilian and European in one course can be trouble for some learners; long vocabulary and phrase lists to memorize; organization and pacing is only so-so; audio only reads parts of the book, and all in Brazilian (only a con for learners of European Portuguese)

Living Language’s Portuguese Complete Course offers a book and CD package for beginners. The repetition-heavy lessons stress conversational words and phrases, then ramp up to tougher reading, listening and understanding skills.

The pronunciation guide in lessons 1-4 reads through a series of words. The rest of the lessons focus on introducing more and more vocabulary and phrases in lists. By lesson 30 or so, you begin to read fuller sentences.

The book explains chunks of grammar along the way, and gives more information about how to pronounce Portuguese throughout the lessons. Explanations of grammar and short exercises break up the flow of progressively harder vocabulary in later lessons.

Small practice exercises test your skill allong the way, but are rather simple (often “fill in the blank”). For all the material covered, sections tend to repeat lists of words and phrases or embed them in basic dialogues. The organization of material is haphazard enough to make some sections a real challenge or a real bore. In the end, most students will have a gone through lots of material, but still struggle to understand the big picture, especially when it comes to grammar.

The CD reads straight through in Brazilian Portuguese (even though the book tackles both European and Continental dialects), and at a normal speed. It’s meant to be used alongside the book, allowing you to hear what’s written there. The audio portion doesn’t last long, which means that auditory learners won’t get much repetition or well-paced help.

A couple of extras round out this lesson course. The appendix has a summary of grammar, complete with verb tables and overviews of key points. There are also examples of written letters and e-mail in Portuguese. In addition, the set comes with a separate Portuguese & English vocab dictionary. I have already reviewed that dictionary on this site.

I enjoyed the free-flowing and complementary nature of the audio CD-book that build on each other. I like the progression from reading words to phrases to dialogues and letters in Portuguese. I’m curious to see if such a barrage of exposure to progressively tougher Portuguese could be turned into a more immersive, less cumbersome experience.

As it is, the Portuguese Complete Course is too scattered to give you a really organized understanding of beginning Portuguese, but it does cover a good chunk of material in the written guide, and manages to provide a full introduction to spoken and written Portuguese. Few basic courses cover this much territory. Still, auditory learners will get more from Pimsleur’s Brazilian Portuguese (they offer a separate European version, too). If you want to stick with a Living Language product, I prefer the structure of Ultimate Portuguese.

Cons:
sense of progress marred by ambiguous presnetation of material; explanations get dense or problematic at times; too tough for beginners, but many sections just review for intermediate learners; questionable organization of material; a bad course for fresh beginners and students who can’t find their own way without extra guidance

The author of Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese flexes her grammatical muscles in this attempt to present Portuguese grammar to self-taught learners pursuing a “complete understanding” of the language.

Teach Yourself Portuguese Grammar begins with a glossary of grammar terms (noun, verb, etc… all in English with English examples). Then, there are some notes about Portuguese spelling, punctuation, accent marks and stress.

Beyond that point, the book is taken up with a thorough presentation of all the basic and intermediate points of Portuguese grammar and sentence structure. It even manages to cover some advanced topics. As a learner, I know your next question without you asking: but how well does the book teach Portuguese grammar?

Over the course of 45 lessons (46 total minus the spelling unit mentioned above), you will read and reread sections that explain a range of grammar topics. Some topics deal with specific words (like por and para), while others focus on general patterns (like the inflected infinitive of verbs).

Within each chapter, topics are explained in the “grammar in focus” section. These explanations can be dry, dense and textbook-like. What’s more, they may leave out crucial material that beginners. Despite the book’s coverage of both Brazilian and European Portuguese, examples of the two aren’t always distinguished carefully, and some of the information (especially about those ever-tricky Portuguese verbs!) should be checked for accuracy against native speakers of each dialect.

Fortunately, the explanations are supported by well-placed Portuguese examples. Every “grammar in focus” topic has plenty of these sample sentences to digest with a Portuguese-English translation of each one. Exercises that follow offer variety and stay focused on the topics just presented. Some chapters offer a “grammar in context” activity after the exercises, which includes real-life Portuguese examples to test your understanding.

The book ends with a short list of Brazilian and European vocabulary differences, a table of regular verb endings, a table of irregular verbs (the same one found in Manuela Cook’s Teach Yourself Portuguese, and answers to the practice exercises. The book has no index, but the table of contents is thorough enough for later look-ups.

The order and choice of Portuguese grammar topics presented in each chapter is the toughest feature to accept. Related topics (such as definite articles, indefinite articles and nouns) are often grouped together, but the progression between chapters is ambiguous. It’s best if you make a separate learning plan for the grammar topics you need to learn or enhance, and refer to those sections in the book.

If you’re a later beginner looking to tighten your knowledge of Portuguese grammar, especially your abilities in the written language, I think you can learn a lot from this book. Its balance between explanations, examples and exercises, its coverage and variety are all commendable, even if the author’s way of organizing and explaining the material fails to impress.

Ultimate Portuguese Beginner-Intermediate covers most imaginable daily conversation topics and nearly every aspect of basic Portuguese grammar in its 40 book lessons and eight hours of audio on CD.

Living Language imposes a standard format on its Ultimate series, so the layout of this course is similar to other Ultimate language courses: a dialogue, grammar, vocabulary list, exercises, cultural note, answers to exercises.

The dialogues fit the chapter topics – each one covers a snippet of mock real-life conversation, using progressively more difficult grammar, vocabulary and phrases as the units go on. The grammar notes that follow treat big-picture grammar topics (like how to use the verb “ter”) and conversation-driven ones (like sending letters, faxes and telegrams). Grammar, though, is presented in a one-off fashion, through individual words. You’ll learn all the imperfect forms of “pagar”, then all the forms of “gostar”, without being told that you’re learning the same endings for both. The sample usage sentences almost make up for this extra mental work.

Vocabulary lists mainly deal with terms introduced in the dialogue and related to the topic at hand. They can become long and cumbersome for your memory, though. These are followed by multiple-choice, matching or fill-in-the-blank exercises that mostly serve to tease your learning skills. The “Notas Culturais” (Cultural Notes) that end each lesson read similar to asides in travel books, and distract you from the course’s goals. Besides, how much do you care that “Barcelos, Portugal is famous for its pottery”?

The end of the book houses a short reference overview of Portuguese grammar, with thorough tables of pronouns, adjectives, regular verbs and conjugations of common irregular verbs. This is followed by sample written letters (ranging from business to friendly), short Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese vocabulary lists and an index.

The eight audio CDs contain two parts. The first one reads through the dialogues and the vocabulary lists, and is intended for side-by-side use with the book. The second part is a stand-alone audio series that covers all forty lessons in the course, including grammar sections, with English explanations and Portuguese examples. This last addition makes the course suitable for “on the go” learning.

All in all, I enjoyed Ultimate Portuguese’s conversational approach. Some of the drawbacks I pinpointed may seem like nitpicking to some, but others may be dissuaded from buying the course. The audio component and the overall lesson structure, combined with the useful grammar selections, make this a worthy recommendation in my opinion.

Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese isn’t an awful entry in the TY series, but it isn’t stellar by any means. Its chapters feel cut-and-paste as far as vocabulary coverage and conversational phrases. Very little material links these topics and makes them stick in the Portuguese learner’s memory.

If you decide to pursue this course, purchase the package with audio CDs and complete all the exercises. But the exercises and activities are limited in effectiveness. Even late in the course, simple fill-in-the blank exercises abound.

Grammar coverage is graded, but often introduces points about tricky words and phrases rather than presenting systematic stepping-stones towards a general understanding of how Brazilian Portuguese works. This emphasis on specific traps to avoid when learning the language could be helpful, but not at the expense of basic information.

If you’re traveling to Brazil, I highly recommend other programs for conversation (such as the all-audio Pimsleur) and still others from grammar. The main Teach Yourself entry (Cook’s Teach Yourself Portuguese) deals with both European and Brazilian Portuguese, but it’s much more thorough (abut see my review for certain reservations I had).

Overall, I’m ambivalent about Portuguese in 10 Minutes a Day. To be sure, the course comes in a simple, artistic and colorful package that begs you to write and rewrite vocabulary terms and phrases. It also covers the basics of simple word and phrase lists for modular situations (looking at a house, you’ll learn the words for shower and pillow). Yet these lessons miss the fundamentals of exposure to realistic conversational situations as well as the backbones of Portuguese grammar.

A few extras make the entire package a bit more attractive. The accompanying CD reads a lot of the vocabulary lists aloud, which is a great help to beginning students. On top of that, the end of the book provides you with vocabulary stickers to place on everyday objects, providing a concrete visual cue for learners.

You will come out of this course with more Portuguese than you started with, and you may have a delightful time as you learn basic Portuguese words. If your goal is to acquire a speakable understanding, perhaps the effort you exert would reap better rewards elsewhere – which tends to be the case for me. But if you’re an absolute beginner, this is a nice enough way to ease yourself into written and spoken Portuguese.

Call me crazy, but I have trouble keeping “Everything”, “Dummies” and “Idiot’s” guides straight. And that applies to their Portuguese lessons, too. Lots of extra notes about Brazil? Check! Relevant, fluent-sounding phrases rather than dry, expected, textbook Portuguese? Check. The difference lies in the overall structure and presentation. The Everything Learning Brazilian Portuguese Book presents grammar in an organized fashion – one look at the table of contents makes that clear.

Chapters revolve around grammar topics like nouns and articles or dealing with adjectives. Each section presents some aspect of grammar, like noun gender, but does so in a rather dry tone for what I’ve come to expect from a generally lively course. Longer vocabulary lists and fill-in-the-blank exercises follow. A Portuguese to English glossary ends the book. The tables, lists and exercises encourage rote memorization and repetition, which many students I’ve worked with find to be a challenging way to learn Portuguese.

I like the organized presentation, but I think that sacrificing conversation topics for grammar will also turn learners away to something more like the Dummmies guide. I’m not a particular fan of vocabulary lists in this context, and I found the explanations given for grammar topics a little drier than this kind of lighthearted lesson series is known for. All in all, though, it’s not a bad step-by-step introduction to Portuguese grammar.

Now is a good time to recall that I am known to grade somewhat harshly. My score doesn’t mean that this guide is useless, only that it has some faults learners shouldn’t overlook before purchasing the course. I do, however, highly recommend that you supplement this book with other learning materials if you do decide to buy it.

The For Dummies series faithfully showcases its wit and informality in this entry, and it does so while presenting us learners with relevant examples and believable snippets of realistic Brazilian Portuguese.

Each lesson revolves around a topic (like going to the beach), and grammar and vocabulary are presented somewhat haphazardly throughout the course. The book maintains a conversational focus.

The author takes up a lot more of the text than expected with facts and notes about culture, travel, geography and other concerns about Brazil. Suggestions for further study, 10 favorite phrases to impress your Brazilian friends (kind of salt and pepper for your speech), exercise answers and a good index end the book.

The CD reads off dialogs, conversations and phrases, and is best used when the book indicates. In other words, the audio is secondary in this course, which may hamper students looking to really polish their conversational skills.

While I applaud the attempt at more realistic Brazilian conversation, the book has its fair share of errors in spelling, grammar and some expressions. Certain teachers believe that mistakes can cost learners dearly in the beginning, so go in prepared.

All in all, it’s a good introduction if you’re looking to learn Brazilian Portuguese. You’ll need further exposure or at least other study material to get deeper into pronunciation, grammar, or more advanced speaking situations.