Portuguese Course

The Foreign Service Institute is a branch of the US government responsible for providing diplomatic staff with the necessary training required to prepare them for postings abroad. The intensive Basic courses are the core component of FSI’s language training and are designed to allow diplomats to reach the relatively high degree of proficiency necessary to function effectively in their positions.

However, since these courses usually last around six months and are extremely comprehensive, the shorter and lighter Programmatic courses were created to offer an introduction to several key languages. Completing a Programmatic course gives a student a good foundation in the language, leaving them better prepared to begin a more demanding Basic course as well as allowing them to achieve a higher level of success.

The FSI Spanish to Portuguese course is one of the shortest courses of the FSI language series. It consists of only 3 units running 97 minutes of audio (1 hour 37 minutes) and 103 pages of instruction.

The course is designed for students who have a proficient working knowledge of the Spanish language that wish to learn Portuguese.

Spanish and Portuguese are arguable the two closest languages in the romance language family, sharing up to 85% lexicon similarity. Therefore knowledge of Spanish allows faster acquisition of Portuguese than a non-Spanish speaking student, due to the similar grammar, immense amount of cognates and familiar vowel sounds.

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the arm of the US government charged with providing the necessary training for diplomatic staff preparing for postings abroad. A large part of this involves language instruction, and the mainstay of FSI’s classes are the six-month intensive Basic courses that are designed to give students a solid foundation in their target language.

However, for those unable to commit to a half-year program of study, FSI developed the shorter FAST courses. FAST stands for Familiarization And Short-Term Training, and these courses were intended to give students a more basic grasp of the languages they needed to know, along with an introduction to the culture and customs of the countries where they were being sent.