Sonia-Portuguese.com

Sonia-Portuguese.com is a reliable online guide to essential Brazilian Portuguese, with clear explanations and lots of sound files. Carefully assembled cultural pages add fun to this great free resource for visitors to Brazil willing to communicate in Portuguese.

Some professionals just go the extra mile, and Sonia Celegatti Althoff is one of them. A certified language teacher and author, Sonia has done more than create a website that will work as teaser to her works Sonia's Portuguese Course – A Complete and Practical Language Course on Contemporary Brazilian Portuguese on CD-Rom and Portuguese Grammar – A Complete, Concise Guide and Practical Reference.

The website is a free basic language survival kit that will get you off to a good start in Portuguese speaking while you consider buying language materials, be it from Sonia or from other authors. Practice the sound files and try to memorize some expressions. It will all come in handy once you're past the airplane and the English-speaking crew.

I'd only make a few changes to the slang page. Beginner speakers of a language should approach slang with caution anyhow, and many Brazilians today only see fuzzy limits between zones of language appropriateness. But I still think the following terms should be checked off as taboo or very rude:

• In Adjectives/Nouns: the first term for "coward"; the term for "a very fussy person"; the second term for "in deep trouble" (that's the f-adjective)
• In Verbs, the terms for "to be/get very angry/upset"
• Of course, whatever terms are listed as taboo in English.

Still in Verbs, I wouldn’t use the translation "have an affair" for the terms ficar and namorar sem compromisso. Neither one of these terms necessarily imply the sexual connotation of "have an affair". Ficar is a term Brazilian teenagers use to describe inconsequent kissing and making out (possibly with many girls/boys on the same night) at clubs and parties, for example. Namorar is the Brazilian verb for having a boyfriend/girlfriend, and if it's sem compromisso, that means dating that hasn't become steady enough to be committed and exclusive.