Essential Portuguese Grammar (Dover Books on Language),   ISBN:9780486216508

Customer Rating: 

Very helpful when you know portugese or english word to find word in other language. Use this book often.

Customer Rating: 

What can I say? The book covers the basics well. It is good as a basic reference for beginners, but is inadequate for anyone who wants the finer points. Same problem with most books in most languages, it seems. Some older books are better.

Customer Rating: 

This is a good essential grammar, concise, to the point, useful information. But... there is a but... it is too biased towards Peninsular Portuguese. With a better balance between Peninsular and Brazilian Portuguese, it would have earned five stars from me.

Customer Rating: 

I consider this an excellent first time grammar for learning Portuguese. It does what it professes and I highly recommend it.

Customer Rating: 

If you are somewhat of an amateur linguist, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. In any Portuguese textbook, this information is always buried in different chapters. It is true, this is far from the way people speak Portuguese in Brazil, but some people more educated Brazilians do use some of the more difficult forms, occassionally. As a rule, Brazilians tend to drop objects altogether, so you could certainly get by in Brazil without this part of the information.

However, the conjugation of verbs, is, at least for me, presented in a very logical way. However, I also have a good command of Spanish, and this might be difficult for someone not as interested in language and linguistics. I never quite understood books like 700 verbs in Portuguese or Spanish, when you can figure out almost everthing from a book like this instead. I do have one of those for Portuguese, which I do use occasionally, only because the Portuguese conjugations used in Brazil sometime differ in spelling (and always in pronunciation) from the ones used in Portugal.