The addition of this manual of Portuguese to "Marlborough’s self-taught series" completes the group of modern Latin languages included in the series. To anyone with a knowledge of Spanish, particularly if that knowledge has been obtained through the medium of Marlborough’s system of phonetic pronunciation, the acquirement of the sister tongue by the aid of Portuguese Self-Taught will present no difficulty. The most noticeable differences, perhaps, are the absence of the Spanish gutturals, and the unexpected presence of the nasal sound, resembling the French nasal, which is a feature of the Portuguese language though not found in Spanish. The third or phonetic column, which is added throughout the vocabularies and the conversational phrases and sentences, supplies the pronunciation of every word in so simple and natural a manner that the business man, tourist, or traveller is enabled to speak the language intelligibly without previous acquaintance with it, and with the minimum of trouble in mastering the system of phonetics employed. The key to the pronunciation is given in the opening pages of the book, and can be readily referred to for any arbitrary phonetic sign which by its nature is not clearly self-explanatory.
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