Cons:
not organized or designed as a dictionary; difficult to use as a primary language lesson course without further resources; extra resources available cost extra and intended for classroom use; extensive vocabulary lists require lots of memorization; designed for Brazilians studying English, though this does little to impact its usefulness

The OPD English/Brazilian Portuguese is less of a dictionary and more of an extensive, themed vocabulary list with a few extras like questions, simple activities and a reference index. These image-driven pages full of categorized Portuguese words may help you expand your understanding of Portuguese, and offer a way of visualizing vocabulary as you learn to speak the language.

The heart of the book is divided into broad categories like people, food, work and plants & animals, and narrow subcategories like a grocery store or a restaurant (under “food”) or feelings or daily routines (under “people”).

Each subcategory takes up one or two pages, and includes either one large image or a series of smaller, square pictures in rows. The images are all full-color, realistically illustrated cartoons. Letters or numbers on each image relate to a particular vocab word. The word or word list is written next to the image.

The OPD extends its use by including questions for further discussion and practice activities on many pages. Certain pages also contain reading activities, but, since all readings and questions are in English, you’ll quickly realize this book’s real target audience: Brazilian ESL learners.

The Oxford Picture Dictionary offers an attractive and well-organized way to visualize Portuguese vocabulary, or, at least, to connect words with images. Still, it’s not a fully developed vocabulary lesson book on the one hand, and far from a real dictionary on the other. If you’re a beginner and could use such a Brazilian vocabulary resource, this book should be worth your purchase. If you want to get more out of the book, the same press offers OPD Lesson Plans, OPD: Low Beginning Workbook and the OPD Classroom Activities, although all of these are intended primarily for teaching ESL.

Cons:
more scholarly and linguistic than other books reviewed here; whatever your skill level, you must be willing to take it for what it is and extract useful examples and explanatory analysis for your own learning benefit

Mario Perini’s Modern Portuguese intends to bridge the linguistic gap between standard Portuguese and real-life Brazilian language use in his thorough breakdown of Brazilian Portuguese grammar.

The foreword and introduction are very academic, mostly of interest to linguists. From there, Perini moves on to an extremely detailed coverage of Portuguese grammar, with a specific focus on the structure of Brazilian usage.

There’s no point in keeping students in the dark about the difference between standard Portuguese and the real Brazilian Portuguese language as it’s spoken. It’s not a matter of slang or improper speech – people of all walks of life in Brazil speak differently than they write.

To shed light on this subject, Perini builds a robust, well-organized guide that breaks down all the essentials of Brazilian grammar. The topics covered are rather technical, and that’s where a knowledge of linguistics comes in handy.

Yet even if your knowledge of linguistics stops at “nouns” and “verbs”, the exposure to real Brazilian usage is the key here. Unit by unit, section by section, the book tackles every major topic of grammar and sentence structure. You’ll read plenty of fluent examples that illustrate each point along the way.

The book does an excellent job of analyzing Portuguese grammar into smaller, manageable chunks, and tracking down examples that illustrate those chunks. It sets out to cover the whole of Brazilian grammar, and does an equally commendable job of covering such a wid range of topics. Some have mentioned mistakes, but I didn’t see anything that would keep me away.

If you’re learning Brazilian Portuguese, Mario Perini’s Modern Portuguese is a welcome addition to your collection. Non-linguists will have to use this as a secondary grammar reference, not as a main lesson course. Any student of Brazilian will be able to mine examples and quickly find topics of interest in this methodical, deep, well-organized resource.

Cons:
includes Brazilian words but is published in and focused on Portugal; must know Portuguese to get full use; many versions are older (I referenced one from the eighties); price; size (if need to use on the go); some potentially confusing variants still missing keyword cues

As you might have guessed by their names, the Dicionário Inglês-Português and Dicionário Português-Inglês are dictionaries published in O Porto, Portugal for Portuguese speakers. Because of that (and their large size and depth), let’s establish something before moving towards a review: intermediate and advanced learners of European Portuguese are the target audience, and should read on to see why I’ll recommend this dictionary. If you know enough Portuguese, this dictionary “não requer instruções prévias especiais”.

The English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English translations are split between two volumes. Each book is well over 1,000 pages, and almost every one of those 1,000+ pages is devoted to doing what a language dictionary should: they offer you translated words to look up.

Entries are in bold type, and set apart from the rest of the text by a reverse-indent. IPA phonetic spelling is listed to the right of each entry. Parts of speech are given as well, in abbreviated form (vt for transitive verb, s for sustantivo (noun), etc.).

Each word is covered by a robust number of translations, including variants. Where unclear, variants are accompanied by key terms in parentheses. For example, the use of dub includes the translation “dobrar (um filme)”, specific to dubbing a movie.

The top of each page includes page numbers and the first three letters of the first and last words on the page. Pages are divided into two columns, and the font is small enough to bother weaker eyes, but standard for a dictionary.

The sheer number of terms covered is unmatched by foreigner-targeted Portuguese dicitonaries, at least any that I’ve seen. The drawbacks I noticed in the copy I reviewed included its awkward size, its older date (1980s) and its lower relevance if you’re dealing with Brazil. If you need a serious European Portuguese and English language dictionary, these dicionários are my best recommendation so far.

Cons:
Portugal-focused, leaving out info about Brazil and some Brazilian usage; no reference page numbers in the vocabulary/dictionary (needs quick search by word or phrase); learners: this is still just a survival Portuguese phrasebook!

Berlitz Portuguese Phrase Book is a little phrasebook with glossy pages, an attractive layout and clearly defined sections. The edges of each section are marked by different colors, and the section’s topic written in the upper right of each odd page. All this makes the book visually easy to flip through.

For such a small book, the range of phrases covered is commendable. The organization and layout is also useful. For example, English phrases are on the left unless the situation calls for translation from Portuguese, like reading a menu. Portuguese examples are given in red, with Brazilian variants bracketed (like comboios [trens] for “trains”). English translations are in black.

Blue and yellow “Essential” boxes focus your attention on key Portuguese phrases you need to know. “You May See” and “You May Hear” boxes give you an instant idea of other words you’ll encounter. Color photos visually enhance some sections.

A basic pronunciation key helps you speak the phrase aloud, but you can rely on the CD to actually listen to native Portuguese speakers read every phrase in the “Essentials” boxes.

This is clearly intended to be used as a survival travel phrasebook, not a way to learn Portuguese. In that light, it’s best suited to travelers heading to Portugal. Brazilian variants render the book multi-dialectal, but coverage of Brazil and Brazilianisms isn’t watertight by any means. It would be even more convenient to have audio examples for every phrase, but what’s here is enough to start getting by in Portuguese.

Cons:
too compact to cover some of the more difficult aspects of many topics; explanations focus on formation over real-life usage; index not quite as robust as I’d like for a reference guide

Harrap’s Pocket Portuguese Grammar offers students a colorful and well organized on-the-go grammar reference guide for both Brazilian and European Portuguese.

Chapters are divided up between the major players of Portuguese grammar – articles, pronouns, nouns, verbs, etc. The topic (like VERBS) is always listed at the upper, outer corner of each page to make this reference easy to flip through.

Within each chapter, sections explain and give examples of how to build and use a certain part of speech – compound tenses of verbs, for example. Explanations are short and to the point. Portuguese examples are also short, but relevant and plentiful. They’re also easy to spot: Portuguese phrases are in bold, and the part of the phrase relevant to the topic at hand is in bold blue.

This guide is easy to compare to Prista’s Essential Portuguese Grammar in length, scope and intended audience. Harrap has produced a reference guide focused on formal grammar topics, while the Essential Portuguese Grammar leans a bit more towards function. Harrap’s Pocket Portuguese, for example, introduces the word que in verbal contexts where it’s used, while the other has a short section on que that distinguishes its basic functions in its own right. Honestly, in a reference grammar that I’ll search through on the go, I prefer Harrap’s focus.

This grammar is fairly complete if you’re a beginner or early intermediate student of Portuguese. It even has a handy seven page reference index. If you’re more advanced, you’ll find what’s lacking fairly quickly. The guide only lists certain irregular verbs it considers “common”, for instance.

I can’t argue with the setup, coloring and organization of this guide. Portuguese students trying to keep all the basics of grammar straight would do well the buy this pocket-sized guide and keep it nearby. If you’re a more experienced learner, you might try searching for a more comprehensive grammar, but you may still find enough coverage here to merit your consideration.

Sue Tyson-Ward’s Portuguese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar promises an in-depth look at the basics of verbs and other points of grammar to beginning and intermediate students.

The book is divided into two halves. One half covers “verbs”, while the other takes on the “essentials of grammar”. Chapters in each half touch on some grammatical topic, like “Perfect (Compound) Tenses” or “Adjectives and Adverbs”, for example. The sections within each chapter then divvy up specific points, like “The Future Perfect” or “Comparison of Adjectives”. There, you’ll find short, one-to-four sentence explanations of the point in consideration, followed by a number of Portuguese examples with English translations.

A few comments about this way of structuring a grammar course. The relation between the sections and chapters isn’t always clear, which it must be for learners. “Perfect (Compound) Tenses”, for instance, begins by teaching how past participles are formed, but doesn’t clearly teach, step by step, how past participles play into constructions with the verb ter to create perfects. The author only offers a quick line telling you this is so.

Another point where I take issue with the course: lack of practical application exercises. No exercises means you can’t hone your grammar skills with this book. You just get to read about grammar, not practice it.

All that leads me to think of the book as an at-hand reference guide rather than a lesson book. In that case, you’ll pull the book out when you need to refer to some Portuguese grammar topic. Well, we come to another problem. To use this as a reference guide, you’ll need a sturdy way to search for and find topics. But the table of contents is too skimpy and the index far too short to make this a powerful grammar reference. The “Verb Index” doesn’t even give page, section or even chapter numbers.

The main contents of this book do provide a decent overview of the major points of Portuguese grammar, particularly verbs. And for such a decent overview with abundant & clear examples, the price is right. Still, it’s lacking things that other reference guides I’ve reviewed here have in spades, such as Barron’s 501 Portuguese Verbs.

The Pocket Portuguese Dictionary offers great coverage of loads of useful terms, words and phrases and learner-friendly language help sections in a highly compact, downsized package.

The body of the dictionary has all that I’ve come to expect from similar works: parts of speech, meaning hints for ambiguous entries, usage examples and the like. Terms are colored blue for handy reference. The layout is clean and useful.

The biggest extra is a middle blue-page insert that introduces “Portuguese in Action”. This section overviews how to use dates, times, numbers in Portuguese, gives false friends to avoid, lists Portuguese and English irregular verbs, and even has sample phone conversations and e-mails and letter writing suggestions.

At my level of studies, the “Action” section didn’t appeal to me much, since I’d just as soon have extra phrases and usage in that space, leaving the details to a grammar or conversation course. But, considering this dictionary targets a beginning crowd looking for a few bells and whistles, I applaud the inclusion.

Keep in mind that this is a small, pocket-sized dictionary. Its size limitations means it covers less of the language. You can buy a dictionary with better coverage by paying just a bit more, but the overall package presented in this handy little volume is very attractive to beginning Portuguese students.

The latest in a string of similar Portuguese-to-English and English-to-Portuguese dictionaries I’ve reviewed, the Harper Collins Concise Portuguese Dictionary broadly offers what the best of the others did (compare Oxford and Larousse): IPA phonetic readings for all entries, parts of speech marked, a list of irregular verbs, meaning cues for ambiguous words, useful phrases and usage examples.

Some slight differences exist. The quick listing of irregulars is found at the beginning of the dictionary, and only gives the irregular forms of irregular words. You’ll need your language skills and grammatical wit to fill in the rest. The dictionary explicitly marks “keywords” (like the preposition “in”) that have frequent and multiple uses. The dictionary is bigger than and has more entries than Oxford’s, and is competitive in coverage with Larousse.

Some Amazon reviewers complained that the binding fell apart after a short while, a worthy complaint if you beat up your dictionaries or carry them around on the go. Picking up a copy at the bookstore, I don’t personally notice any problems with the binding that aren’t found on similar dictionaries. Additionally, the dictionary I find on Amazon is different than the edition at one bookstore, which had blue color entries.

All in all, I’m reluctant to rate this above or below its peers. From my calculations and time spent with the reference, Harper Collin’s translation aid offers the highest number of words and phrases per dollar, making it the best bang for your buck.

Larousse’s red and green cover Concise Portuguese Dictionary is larger and thicker than the Oxford New and Oxford Color I last reviewed on this site. As you might expect from its size, it offers more coverage of terms, phrases idiomatic expressions than those dictionaries at a reasonable price.

The start of the book has a quick introduction to IPA used for phonetically representing the pronunciation of Brazilian and English words, but these one and a half pages hardly count as a pronunciation guide. There is a goodly number of usage examples and clarification on basic terms. Meaning cues in brackets guide learners to the right meaning choice if there are multiple, ambiguous translations for a single term (a crucial feature missing from the NTC and Langenscheidt Portuguese language dictionaries). In the middle of the book you’ll find samples of written letters, following a trend that’s popped up in learner dictionaries.

Irregular verb tables at the end of the volume don’t only cover irregular verbs, but also spelling-changing (“orthography-changing”) and stem-changing (or “radical-changing”) verbs that plague those who learn Portuguese during their early years. Still, the chart typically only gives the “eu” (first person singular) form of a verb, leaving your grammatical intuitions to fill out the other five forms. Knowledge of Portuguese verb conjugation and grammar is best left to a more specialized reference work, anyhow, like Barron’s 501 Verbs, also reviewed on this site.

This dictionary will be a great sidekick for beginners and intermediate students in the market for a reference dictionary. It offers more coverage than basic dictionaries, but isn’t too large, detailed, or unabridged, so it’s great for on-the-go use.

The Oxford New Portuguese Dictionary is a small, convenient dictionary with plenty of useful terms and phrases, especially considering its size. Its two halves cover English to Portuguese translation and Portuguese to English.

Both English and Portuguese entries include phonetic transcription in IPA, as well as expected grammatical cues like masculine/feminine noun gender and transitive and intransitive verbs. There is, however, no indication of which forms are irregular. A list of irregular verbs, conjugated in all forms, is found at the end of the book.

Semantic hints clue you into the meaning of multiple equivalents for the same term. Looking up “be”, we find “(permanent quality/place) ser; (temporary place/state) estar; (become) ficar.” Usage instances, phrases and expressions are given for clarity and completeness: “take” includes “take away from”, for example.

The introduction contains a short guide to Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, a note about pronouncing European Portuguese, even an English pronunciation guide for Portuguese speakers.

The Oxford Color version offers an updated, sleeker version of this same dictionary, with standout blue entries (terms, irregular verbs, etc.), but its higher price earns it the same rating.

If you’re a beginner or an intermediate student looking for a good dictionary to have at hand while you learn Portuguese, this actually compact dictionary will more than meet your needs. I especially recommend spending extra for the more appealing color version.