Customer Reviews

Portuguese: An Essential Grammar (Essential Grammars)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is an excellent tool for intermediate learners. It covers both European and Brazilian Portuguese. But there are two drawbacks: 1) The book should have listed the alphabets and their pronunciations (e.g. how to pronounce the foreign-borrowed letter 'k' in Portuguese.) 2) Chapter seven: 'verbs': this chapter should be the core of this book. The authors, however, do not give the English meanings of the irregular verbs they list in this chapter. They provide the English tranlations of everything but the irregular verbs presented in chapter seven. This is weird. Overall, this book is highly recommended for intermediate learners to review and grasp a solid understanding to the verbs and grammars of the language.

This grammar book is better than most. I like the well organised way materials are presented, systematically numbered, so you can find the item you want. The index is helpful too.

The book is well balanced with a fair amount of detail on everything except perhaps verbs. There could have been more detail there. For detail on verbs you have better buy another book, and Portuguese Verbs Explained by Manuela Cook is the one I have bought and am quite pleased with.

More detail could have been given to grammar points in this grammar if space had been used more appropriately. There is a whole section on historical and cultural notes including literature, music, cinema, etc. As interesting as all this may be, it has nothing to do with grammar. If I wanted a book on music or cinema, I had bought one. In a grammar what I expect is grammar!

I am a student of Portuguese and have tried other grammars. Hoping to economise on money, first I went for some cheaper books but I regret it now. Since the late nineties the mass market has been littered with a number of sub standard Portuguese grammars. This grammar is a fortunate exception and I am glad I have bought it. You pay more but you get a grammar you can feel comfortable with, you can trust it will not let you down, unlike some amateurish grammars that do not know what they are talking about and confuse more than help.

This grammar helps by giving you info you feel you can rely on and by the way this info is presented. It is all very well organised, each section is numbered, so you can find what you are looking for. The index is quite long, and you can find everything there. It gives you the section number for what you are looking for. Sometimes a page number would be easier but you can't go wrong with section numbers. This is a grammar I can recommend to any learner of Portuguese.

I have only purchased a free sample of this book for my Kindle, but it is already enough to tell me that I cannot buy the full book. There appear to be vital charts that I simply cannot read. If there are key elements to pronunciation that are inaccessible to me, I am missing out on the major point of the book.

This grammar describes Lisbon variety of Continental Portuguese and misses to explain other usages, especially Brazilian Portuguese ones, which limits its range of functionality. The grammar is not particularly friendly of colloquialisms and it is more appropriate for those interested in old literature. Using the language explained here will certainly cause strange looks, not only in Brazil, but in some parts of Portugal as well. This is such a poor effort, it almost hurts to have to write this review.

Portuguese: An Essential Grammar is a very helpful review of the correct grammar for learning Brazilian or European Portuguese. It is easily & simply formatted for fast reference and extremely helpful. I suggest using it in conjunction with this handy little Brazilian grammar book Português Descomplicado. And you can also combine Portuguese: An Essential Grammar with a Portuguese-Only textbook, such as Falar Ler Escrever Portugues Text (Falar...Ler...Escrever...Portugues Portuguese Edition).

IMPORTANT UPDATE: This book has NOT been revised for the Novo Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa (2008). I don't recommend this book because you will learn the old spellings for Portuguese. Wait until they release a new edition. If you use this book, you'll be learning obsolete spellings that are no longer correct.

This book is great if you want to learn European Portuguese, but if your interest lies in the most wide spread form of Portuguese, in other words, Brazilian Portuguese, it's worthless. Not only does it gloss over Brazilian Portuguese and treat it like a subcategory of the European dialect even though Brazilian is spoken by nearly 30 times as many people, but it treats the real spoken language of the Brazilian people as though it were erroneous, even though any linguistic worth his salt knows that there is no good or bad language, only official and unofficial, and that language is in a constant state of change. Seriously, don't buy this book and support this author's eurocentric egotism unless you really have you heart set on spending time in Portugal and never in Brazil, because if you speak this way in Brazil, you will sound archaic and will probably have trouble understanding what people say to you, because it's so incredibly different. I have no probably with European Portuguese; I've been to Portugal and it's a truly lovely place, but a good Portuguese grammar should tell you how to communicate in both places without placing such heavy emphasis on one, particularly the much, much smaller one with only 10 million speakers and it most certainly should not treat what native speakers use in their daily lives like unintelligent prattle and more or less lie about what people say out of his desire to preserve the language in a state is has not been in for nearly century.