The Everything Brazilian Portuguese Phrase Book

Learn Basic Brazilian Portuguese Phrases - For Any Situation!

Fernanda Ferreira

• Publisher: Everything
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781440555275
• eBook ISBN: 9781440555282
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The ultimate phrase guide for travel, business, and more!

"I'll have the chicken dish, please." "How do you get to the theater?"
"Let's set up a meeting."

Packed with everything you'll need to understand--and be understood by--Brazilian-Portuguese speakers, this pocket guide is the ultimate translator to have on an airplane, in a boardroom, at a restaurant, and anywhere else this beautiful language is spoken. Conveniently organized by subject and situation, this handy guide includes information on:

• How to make introductions, professionally and casually
• Ordering food in restaurants (with phrases for special diets and allergies)
• Asking for and giving directions
• Explaining medical emergencies to doctors
• Crafting status updates and tweets online
• Slang phrases for casual chatting

Complete with Brazilian Portuguese-English and English-Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries for quick reference, The Everything Brazilian Portuguese Phrase Book gives you the right words and phrases--whatever the situation!

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Brazilian Portuguese

Portuguese is spoken by close to 200 million people, in far-reaching parts of the globe, such as Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and even Goa (India) and Macau (China). Brazil is by far the largest and most populated country where Portuguese is the official language. Thus, many people are interested in learning the Brazilian dialect. There are significant differences between the Brazilian and the European dialect, such as vocabulary, pronunciation, and word order. Nevertheless, with a lot of patience and repetition, speakers of each dialect can understand each other. If you picked up this book because you are traveling to Brazil, that was an excellent choice. If you decide to travel to Portugal, you can still use this book and apply some of the same useful phrases. We all share the same language.

Why Portuguese?

Have you ever listened to a bossa nova love song and wondered what the lyrics mean? Perhaps after years of careful contemplation, you finally booked that dream vacation to Brazil, and you want to learn how to speak like a native Brazilian. Maybe your grandparents emigrated from the Azores, Madeira, or Portugal, and you always wanted to write to them in their language. Or you might even be interested in learning Portuguese phrases to communicate with your coworkers or people you meet during a vacation.

Many people in the world speak Portuguese. You might be interested to know that many African and Asian countries have Portuguese as their official language. In addition, there is a growing Portuguese-speaking population in the United States. And because it is such an uncommonly taught language, learning a few phrases from this beautiful language will certainly impress your friends and family; it will help you understand the lyrics of famous bossa nova songs or the prose of an incredibly diverse body of literature.

Whatever the reason, be it personal enrichment, learning more about the diversity of Latin America, or discovering new worlds of cuisine, literature, and history, learning how to communicate in Brazilian Portuguese is a great step in your life. So put on your samba shoes and let’s get started!

Portuguese: A Romance Language

Portuguese is a Romance language, which does not mean that it is full of loving words, but simply that it originated from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Along with other Romance languages, Portuguese came from Vulgar Latin, which simply meant that it was the “common,” everyday speech of soldiers, farmers, settlers, and slaves of the Roman Empire.

Romance languages include Italian, French, Spanish, Galician, Romanian, and Catalan. There are also minority languages such as Occitan, Provençal, Friulian, and Ladin, among many other tongues whose origins can be traced back to Latin. With the decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Vulgar Latin began to change slowly, taking on the diverse features and styles of the localities where it was spoken, thus generating the incredible array of Romance languages. The Visigoths, a group of barbaric tribes that invaded the Iberian Peninsula, added to the development of Portuguese and Spanish.

Portuguese is becoming more and more popular in Asia. The number of Portuguese speakers has grown in particular in Macau, China, due to the region’s increase in diplomatic and economic relations with Portugal and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Brazilian Portuguese
• Chapter 2: Introducing Yourself
• Chapter 3: Essential Brazilian Portuguese
• Chapter 4: Meeting People
• Chapter 5: Airports and Hotels
• Chapter 6: Getting Around Town
• Chapter 7: Time for Dinner
• Chapter 8: Shopping and Services
• Chapter 9: Brazilian Portuguese for Business
• Chapter 10: Brazilian Portuguese Medical Phrases
• Chapter 11: In Your Community
• Chapter 12: Brazilian Portuguese in the Digital World
• Chapter 13: Overview of Brazilian Culture
• Appendix A: ENGLISH TO PORTUGUESE GLOSSARY
• Appendix B: PORTUGUESE TO ENGLISH GLOSSARY
• Copyright