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português · English

Learn Portuguese with short stories

Read Portuguese books with English alongside, or English books with Portuguese alongside: the original and the translation side by side, paragraph by paragraph.

Free Portuguese–English stories and ebooks

Stories to read in Portuguese, with the English beside each paragraph. They open in the browser, with no account needed, and each one is also a free Portuguese–English ebook for Kindle, Kobo or any e-reader: downloading needs a free account, no payment (which file to pick).

By level:

Free graded readers in Portuguese

Every story here carries its level on the Common European Framework, from A1 for beginners to C1 and beyond, so the library works as a set of free Portuguese graded readers: start at the level where you understand most of a page, and move up when the English beside it is something you check only now and then.

Want a book that isn’t here? Make your own Portuguese–English parallel text from any EPUB or PDF: free preview, and 50 free pages when you sign up.

Reading Portuguese with English alongside

Portuguese looks friendlier on the page than it sounds. Its nasal vowels and swallowed endings can make speech hard to follow at first, but in writing much of its vocabulary shares Latin roots with English, so many words are recognisable long before you would catch them in conversation.

What slows readers down is the grammar: a subjunctive with a future tense of its own, an infinitive that takes personal endings, and small words that merge into one another.

Reading English books with Portuguese alongside

For Portuguese speakers, a parallel text is a way into books in English without reaching for a dictionary every few lines. Read the English and look across to the Portuguese when a phrasal verb or an idiom doesn’t land.

It works for bilingual families too, whether in Brazil, Portugal or elsewhere: one book, two languages on the same page, so a parent and a child can each follow in the language they read best.

Where a parallel text helps most in Portuguese

Words that merge

Prepositions fuse with articles and pronouns: de and o become do, em and a become na, and de and ele become dele. Seeing the English beside each sentence shows what the short forms are made of.

The future subjunctive

Portuguese uses a future subjunctive in everyday sentences (quando eu tiver tempo, se você quiser), a form English has no match for. Read beside the translation, it soon stops looking strange.

False friends

Puxar means to pull, not to push; pretender means to intend, and livraria is a bookshop. The translation next to the sentence catches them before they mislead you.

Portuguese classics to read in parallel

Long out of copyright and easy to find as EPUBs. Any of them makes a good first Portuguese–English parallel text:

  • Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis
  • Os Maias, Eça de Queirós
  • Iracema, José de Alencar
  • Os Lusíadas, Luís de Camões

Or use a book you already own: the method works best with something you actually want to read. See how to read a parallel text to get the most from it.