It’s nice that there actually is an affordable and effective book for a beginner to learn quite a bit of Brazilian Portuguese. I thought this book was really well organized and a solid introduction to the language. There are exercises throughout the book as well to practice what you learned. There is also an audio CD which is helpful (A native Brazilian speaker repeats words and phrases which are also written in the book). The chapters are:

1)Introducing the Portuguese Language (Why learn it, similarities to Spanish, European Portuguese vs. Brazilian Portuguese, tips on learning Portuguese, recognizing what you already know)

2)The Sounds of Portuguese (Portuguese alphabet, accent marks, listening practice, consonants, stress pattern in Portuguese, oral and nasal vowels, typing in Portuguese)

3)Beginning Conversation (Greetings, talking on the phone, saying goodbye, etc)

4)Nouns, Articles, and Contractions

5)Introducing “ser” (the verb “to be”)

6)Introducing “estar” (the other verb meaning “to be”)

7)Describing People and Things in Portuguese

8)The Vocabulary of Numbers

9)First Conjugation Verbs

10)Second Conjugation Verbs

11)Important Verbs to Know

12)Verb Tenses: an Overview

13)More Verbs

14)Negative Words and Constructions

15)Questions and Exclamations

16)The Future and Other Tenses

17)Imperative and Subjunctive Constructions

18)Carnaval, Samba, Feijoada, and Futebol (Brazilian culture!)

19)Means of Communication (In person, by mail, making phone calls)

20)Traveling to Samba-Land (getting papers in order, hotel reservations, currency, a bit of information about the most popular cities…)

I was mostly looking to learn the language, not the culture, and this book is indeed mostly teaching the language. I liked the bits of information about the culture though in this book and found it interesting.

I definitely recommend this for a start to anyone serious about learning the language. I went through this while going through Pimsleur lessons for Portuguese and found it to be a great supplement to my learning (In my opinion, Pimsleur goes at quite a slow pace and this book helped me learn more about grammar in a shorter amount of time, as well as expressions, etc, without going at too fast a pace). I recommend it to travelers only if they want to spend some extra time learning a bit more than they absolutely “need”.