501 Portuguese Verbs (Barron's 501 Portuguese Verbs)

What can we do?. Which are our options?. Well, we really don't have much choice. It is either learn those annoying and somehow distressing verbs, or face the dire fate of never learning to speak Portuguese well. Can you imagine yourself in a situation inspired in the classical "Me Tarzan, you Jane"?. I bet your answer is no, if you can avoid it.

So the real question is not whether you will learn Portuguese verbs, but how to make the whole verb learning experience less traumatic. This book is, in my opinion, a good answer to that question. Yes, it is neither original nor overly engaging, but it is very useful. It has 501 Portuguese verbs, fully conjugated in all tenses, and even samples of how each verb is used in everyday conversation. The only reason why I don't give it five stars is because it doesn't explain too well the grammatical conjugation rules, even though it mentions them. All the same, I think that wasn't the aim of the book, and that if you cannot avoid having to learn verbs (and nobody who really wants to speak Portuguese well can), you should tackle the task with some good tools. I recommend this one :)

Belen Alcat


Excellent for what it is   September 1, 2004
Monica Roberts (Manchester, England)
30 out of 31 found this review helpful

I have been usig this book for some time and I think that it deserves five stars for what it is, mainly a catalogue of Portuguese verb tenses, with their endings and forms. But it stops there. The information you get is clear and reliable, but you need something else if you want to understand how Portuguese verbs actually work, how they behave in a sentence, how they compare with English verbs. I have now found an excellent book for all that, Portuguese Verbs Explained by Manuela Cook. It goes well beyond this one.


this book is my bible!   November 29, 2003
9 out of 39 found this review helpful

This book is essential if you're learning Portuguese. It has all the tenses of 501 of the most common verbs, and also a section at the beginning telling you what the tenses actually mean - e.g. it tells you what the 'preterit indicative' tense is, which I'd never even heard of before! It may seem like the lazy way to do things by just looking up the tense of the verb that you need, but it really isn't - I've learned so much from this book. Also at the back it has a little 'verb dictionary' so you can learn verbs that aren't in the book and learn to conjugate them yourself using the examples in the book as guidelines. I couldn't cope without this book!