English as She is Spoke

From the time of Shakspere downwards, wits and authors innumerable have made themselves and the public more or less merry at the expense of the earlier efforts of the student of a strange tongue. Still, it has been reserved to our own time for a soi-disant instructor to perpetrate—at his own expense—the monstrous joke of publishing a Guide to Conversation in a language of which it is only too evident that every word is utterly strange to him. The Teutonic sage who evolved the ideal portrait of an elephant from his “inner consciousness” was a commonplace, matter-of-fact person compared with the daring visionary who conjures up a complete language system from the same fertile but untrustworthy source.

The piquancy of Senhor Pedro Carolino’s New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English is enhanced by the evident bona fides and careful compilation of “the little book,” or as Pedro himself gravely expresses it, “for the care what we wrote him, and for her typographical correction.” In short, the New Guide to Conversation in Portuguese and English was written with serious intent to introduce Portuguese students to the mysteries of the English language.