This book is a study companion written in plain English, which explains the things that you need to know to be successful in learning Portuguese. No prior grammatical knowledge is assumed, and technical terms are explained clearly and progressively. Exercises are provided to help you consolidate what you have learned and build your Portuguese vocabulary. Although the main focus is on European Portuguese, Brazilian alternatives are also given. Among the many things covered in this book: How do you pronounce words in Portuguese? What do all those funny little squiggles mean? What exactly are verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and pronouns? How do you know when to use 'ser' and when to use 'estar'? How do you use the personal infinitive? How does the subjunctive work? If you don't know your diacritic from your diphthong, you've come to the right place!

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

"Contains material adapted and abridged from 'The everything learning Brazilian Portuguese book' ... copyright 2007 by F+W Media, Inc."--Title page verso.

Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages -- Teutonic, Romance, Greek -- helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a language as it is actually used in everyday life.

Brazilian Portuguese made easy--and fun! The Everything Learning Brazilian Portuguese Book makes Brazilian Portuguese a breeze to learn! Author Fernanda L. Ferreira, Ph.D., provides you with step-by-step instruction in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Learn how to: Understand Portuguese grammar Improve pronunciation Ask questions in Portuguese Have basic conversations when traveling, dining out, conducting business, and shopping Packed with dialogue examples, self-tests, and English-to-Portuguese and Portuguese-to-English dictionaries, The Everything Learning Brazilian Portuguese Book will have you speaking--and understanding--Portuguese in no time.

When ideas fail, words come in handy. But sometimes you can't find the right word, and what you want to say can't be found in the dictionary. English has its limitations, but the expression you're searching for may exist in another language. In Other Words is a unique collection of well-known and absolutely obscure "untranslatables"-linguistic gems that convey a feeling or notion with satisfying precision yet resist simple translation. This quirky lexicon of hard-to-translate words gives the reader a new way to look at the world and how words relate to us. The words are arranged by region or country of origin, and a brief introduction to each section-each done by a respected translator-gives insight into the culture of the people as well as the language. Each of these singular words is cleverly and thoroughly defined, with interesting details and references throughout. The search for that elusive mot juste may be over.

“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)