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Rating: 
Summary: finally, the real facts about portuguese
Review: Portuguese is one of those languages (especially the Brazilian variant) whose speakers insist on maintaining a huge gap between the written standard and the spoken reality...which is fine. May the speakers of each language write as they will. But when foreign learners have to go out into the real world and defend themselves, they soon discover that all those pronouns they learned and half of those tenses they memorized are either not used, are used in a different way or are used "incorrectly" even by native speakers. This excellent grammar simply tries to give a well-presented explanation of these phenomena. I believe it is a necessary book, because there are already dozens of Portuguese grammar books that teach you ONLY standard grammar ("ajudar-nos-ão" muito pouco na vida real!), but this is the only one i have found that tells you, "hey, student!, by the way, that future tense and those mesoclitic pronouns you learned, you will only find them in books...people in real life never use them!..." To me that information is incredibly valuable so that I don't sound like a fool when speaking. At the same time, it provides the information on the formal usages, so you are not missing out on that, as well as totally unaccepted usages, which just happen to be used by nearly 100% of the native speakers of the language, so that you can actually understand people when they speak. Some of the other reviewers give the impression that the book teaches non-standard usages as "correct", but this is not true. The book very clearly states by each sentence whether the usage is formal, informal, archaic, only written, only spoken, etc., an approach I find excellent.
Rating: 
Summary: It is a matter of standards!
Review: This book is an attempt to explain the Portuguese language on both sides of the Atlantic and understand some of its colloquialisms specifically in Brazil. It contains useful information. What is wrong is trying to elevate some sub-standard practices to the status of standard language. It will be better to promote the colloquial, but correct, Portuguese used in Brazilian newspapers and good quality Brazilian magazines like for example Veja. Acknowledgment of colloquialisms is OK, promoting sub-standard language is not!
Rating:
Summary: Sub-standard vesus standard
Review: This book tries to convince the reader that some sub-standard practices in spoken portuguese are after all standard. It goes to the extreme of distorting grammatical categories to make the argument look right. The sections on imperative and the pronouns are rather mixed up. The author should stick to the portuguese spoken on good brazilian TV programmes and that you read in interviews etc in reputable brazilian magazines. The worst is that this book is presented as suitable for foreigners. You want to learn standard, not sub-standard language!
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