FSI From Spanish to Portuguese Course

The FSI Spanish to Portuguese course is one of the shortest courses of the FSI language series. It consists of only 3 units running 97 minutes of audio (1 hour 37 minutes) and 103 pages of instruction.

The course is designed for students who have a proficient working knowledge of the Spanish language that wish to learn Portuguese.

Spanish and Portuguese are arguable the two closest languages in the romance language family, sharing up to 85% lexicon similarity. Therefore knowledge of Spanish allows faster acquisition of Portuguese than a non-Spanish speaking student, due to the similar grammar, immense amount of cognates and familiar vowel sounds.

Students will be able to get a well-rounded idea of the similarities and differences between the two languages, allowing them to appreciate these distinctions as they progress with their Portuguese language acquisition.

This course does not cover in detail most aspects of the Portuguese language. It serves merely as an overview of the differences and similarities to facilitate the student to effectively learn Portuguese without encountering the major common pitfalls that plagues Spanish-speaking students of Portuguese.

The course is centred around 4 topics:

•        Sounds
•        Grammar
•        Vocabulary
•        Pronunciation Exercises

Sounds - the differences in the vowel sounds are covered, with Portuguese having similar vowels, but also an array of new vowels. Diphthongs and consonants are compared and contrasted also, although they don't vary wildly.

Grammar - noted differences in the word order , verb tenses and personal pronoun usage. Preposition contractions are vastly more common in Portuguese and these are covered in detail.

Vocabulary - Spanish will greatly influence a Portuguese student's vocabulary acquisition. A large amount of cognates are guessable by following some simple letter swapping patterns, the course will show you the most common ones. Commonly found false cognates are listed out as well.

Pronunciation Exercises - the supplementary pronunciation exercises will help the student vocally distinguish the Portuguese pronunciation patterns from Spanish.

In Summary

The student will come away from this course having a firm knowledge of the main differences and similarities between Spanish and Portuguese in terms of sounds, grammar and vocabulary. This allows the student to avoid the common pitfalls that most Spanish-speaking students of Portuguese encounter.

The ability to replicate Portuguese sounds without confusing them with Spanish is essential to comprehension from natives speakers, whom would otherwise have a hard time dealing with foreign sounds.