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Spanish speakers can learn Brazilian Portuguese much more rapidly than any other language, and thousands of students have used Antônio Simões's text/workbook Com licença: Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers to make the transition between the two languages. Recognizing the need for a text that incorporates current cultural references and the latest language pedagogy, Simões now offers Pois não: Brazilian Portuguese Course for Spanish Speakers, with Basic Reference Grammar.

Pois não contrasts Portuguese and Spanish, which accomplishes two main goals. It teaches the equivalent of one year of college Portuguese in one semester, three times a week, to Spanish speakers who also have a solid understanding of English. Additionally, the book serves as a basic reference guide to Brazilian Portuguese for the same audience.

Pois não can be used by students in the classroom or by independent learners. Users of the book may focus on the drills alone, concentrate on both the explanations and drills, or use the book as a reference for consultation only. Answers to all of the exercises are included in the book. Audio and video recordings by native Brazilian speakers of dialogues that appear in the book can be downloaded at https://utexas.box.com/v/PoisNaoAudio.

Mnemonics is an age-old device for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. The Portuguese Memory Book, by William F. Harrison and Dorothy Welker, makes use of this reliable memory help in a series of mnemonic jingles that are by turns playful, sardonic, touching, and heroic to help both students and independent learners acquire and remember Portuguese vocabulary.

The mnemonic jingles present both the sound of the  Portuguese word (indicated by syllables in underlined boldface type) and its English meaning (given by a word or phrase in boldface type):

noite (f.) night

Don't annoy Chihuahuas in the night.
If you ignore their bark, you'll feel their bite.

This innovative approach to vocabulary building is simple, effective, and entertaining. The authors also include a general pronunciation guide to Brazilian Portuguese, particularly to the Carioca dialect of Rio de Janeiro.

An essential, comprehensive guide for all who are interested in learning the Portuguese language and mastering its complexities, Portuguese: A Reference Manual supplements the phonetic and grammatical explanations offered in basic textbooks. While the Manual focuses on Brazilian Portuguese, it incorporates European Portuguese variants and thus provides a more complete description of the language. Accessible to non-linguists and novice language learners, as well as informative for instructors of Portuguese and specialists in other languages, this guide incorporates the Orthographic Accord (in effect since 2009–2010), which attempts to standardize Portuguese orthography.

The Manual reflects the language as it is currently taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels by providing detailed explanations of the sound and writing systems and the grammar of the principal Portuguese dialects. A reference guide rather than a textbook, the Manual also provides extensive verb charts, as well as comparisons of Portuguese with English and Spanish.

Long before the concept of “globalization,” the Portuguese constructed a vast empire that extended into Africa, India, Brazil, and mid-Atlantic territories, as well as parts of China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Using this empire as its starting point and spanning seven centuries and four continents, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora examines literary and artistic works about the ensuing diaspora, or the dispersion of people within the Portuguese-speaking world, resulting from colonization, the slave trade, adventure seeking, religious conversion, political exile, forced labor, war, economic migration, and tourism.

Based on a broad array of written and visual materials, including historiography, letters, memoirs, plays, poetry, fiction, cartographic imagery, paintings, photographs, and films, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is the first detailed analysis of the different and sometimes conflicting cultural productions of the imperial diaspora in its heyday and an important context for understanding the more complex and broader-based culture of population travel and displacement from the former colonies to present-day “homelands.” The topics that Darlene J. Sadlier discusses include exploration and settlement by the Portuguese in different parts of the empire; the Black Atlantic slave trade; nineteenth-century travel and Orientalist imaginings; the colonial wars; and the return of populations to Portugal following African independence. A wide-ranging study of the art and literature of these and other diasporic movements, this book is a major contribution to the growing field of Lusophone studies.

Elizabeth Lowe charts her journey to becoming a translator through a series of vignettes relating her life as a “third-culture kid” and living and working abroad in a kaleidoscope of cultures and languages. She lived in Germany as a young child immediately after the Second World War while her father worked in the Nuremberg trials and as a newly married military spouse during the Vietnam War; she lived in Haiti just prior to Papa Doc's consolidation of power, in Brazil when the military dictatorship seized the country in its two-decade vise, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal during Salazar, and Colombia at the height of the guerrilla conflicts, and in Miami during the heyday of the cartels. The book is a reflection on translation as an art, on five decades teaching languages, literatures, and translation, and on her close relationship with writers from the Lusophone world. It explores theoretical aspects of translation as well as practical challenges faced by translators, especially those working in Portuguese literature. Lowe offers intimate insights into the creative process of the writers she translates and her own philosophy of literary translation.