Hi.

My name is Russell Walker, I live in the UK, and I have been studying the Portuguese language since 2001.  The main study material I used to learn Portuguese was Linguaphone, and I can certainly recommend their courses if you seriously want to make progress in conversational Portuguese.

My main interest is 'European' or 'Continental' Portuguese ('Português de Portugal' as the natives say), so most of the resources on this site are slanted towards learning the Portuguese of Europe and Africa rather than Brazil.

If you are interested in learning Brazilian Portuguese, I suggest you pay a visit to Sonia Althoff's excellent website: www.sonia-portuguese.com.  Having said that, I'm sure you will find the resources on this site useful even if you are only interested in the Brazilian flavour of the language.

Unlike Sonia, I am not a language teacher - although Sonia has kindly proof-read my language guide for me and made corrections, and I have also sought the opinions of experienced and educated native Portuguese speakers to ensure that the content of this site is as accurate as possible despite the fact that I am only 'a learner' myself.  Special thanks also go to Krystoffer Bakof for further proof-reading, and supplying some of the Brazilian alternatives. If you spot any errors though, please let me know.

In my efforts to learn the language and attain a reasonable degree of fluency, I discovered many fascinating things about language in general - and I made it a point to become familiar with rules of grammar and pronunciation.  What I have learned about the nature of language has enriched my appreciation for my own language as well as being an enormous help in understanding how Portuguese works, and how and why it differs from English.

The resources on this site are an attempt to share some of my discoveries and to assist others in learning languages, and of course Portuguese in particular.  To round things out, I have added some notes about the different countries where Portuguese is spoken.

My personal aspiration is to visit all of the countries and island groups where Portuguese is an official language.  I will probably not succeed in visiting them all, but so far I have been fortunate enough to make it to Portugal, Madeira, Cape Verde, The Azores, and Brazil.  You can see photos of my travels in the online photo album, and the articles about these countries are based on my own experiences there as well as more traditional research methods.  For the articles on other places, I have had to rely solely on research.
All of the photographs on this website (except the one on this page) were taken by me, and all of the maps were drawn by me.  As such I retain the copyright to them.  However, you may use them on your own website if you wish, free of charge, as long as you give me credit as the photographer, and provide a link back to this website on the same page as the photo appears.

The primary resource on this site is my "Idiot's Guide to learning Portuguese" - which is made available here free of charge.  This guide provides a detailed and progressive explanation of Portuguese pronunciation and grammar, which I hope will provide students of the language with a helpful and easily understandable resource.  There are also links to other sites that will help you to learn Portuguese online for free.