Customer Reviews

Colloquial Portuguese: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

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In Japan, we have lots of difficuties in finding the textbook for conversations of European Portuguese.
I'm very happy to find this.
Actually it doesn't have the detail about grammer,but don't worry, we heve some useful ones in Japan.
Next time I visit Portugal, I hope I can make many friends with Portuguese.
Thanks a lot!!!
Muito obrigado!!!

Being Brazilian, I can tell that there are indeed several differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese, but the main difficulty are the local expressions that differ a lot and the pronunciation/accent. It is harder to understand the European accent than the Brazilian one. Grammarwise, the main and maybe only significant difference is the use of the Gerund in Brazil for continuous actions, forsaken long ago in Portugal. However, both countries do speak the same language and one can be understood in either one regardless what "Portuguese" he or she learned. By the same authors, there is the "Colloquial Portuguese from Brazil", which has enough grammar discussions and real life dialogues based on "Brazilian Portuguese", despite using over formal and unnatural structures, sometimes. A comment on the first review made about this book: What is "Continental Portuguese"? Is Brazil an Island? Or is Europe the only "Continent" with capital C so that the Portuguese spoken in Portugal can be labelled "Continental"?

This book is completely on Continental (or European) Portuguese.
At times, dialogs between Brazilians are presented but words and sentence structure is Continental, something Brazilian speakers would never say or use. Don't get me wrong. This book is okay if your aim is to learn Continental Portuguese (10 millions of speakers). If you are interested in Brazilian Portuguese this book will be no use and might teach you wrong.

Once again a course from Routledge that is all but destroyed by a very common error. No wordlists.

For some reason, quite a few of the authors in the Colloquial series seem to be under the false impression that providing English translations of the dialogues is a satisfactory substitute for listing the new words. I disagree 100%. There are no languages that can be translated word by word into English and the result of this is that you end up not knowing which words in Portuguese that corresponds to a given English word.

The result of this is that you can memorize the phrases in this book like a parrot, but that won't get you any far and is no better than a much cheaper and more extensive phrasebook. As you're not given the chance to learn and repeat new words, you simply won't be able to construct sentences on your own. This makes the book rather unhelpful for learners. Look for Teach Yourself Portuguese instead. The cover is not as nice, but the content is much better with proper word-lists in each lesson, more extensive explanations and full coverage of the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese.