You will find that you can carry much of your Spanish grammar into Portuguese. For example, nearly all of the major Portuguese verb tenses are close copies of something you already know in Spanish. The present tense, the two past tenses (Past I and II, or 'preterite' and 'imperfect', if you prefer), the present and past subjunctives, the conditional, the future, the commands, and most of the compound tenses all look and sound very much like they do in Spanish. And, more importantly, they usually behave that way too. Thus, for example, if you have already won the battle of the distribution of the two past tenses in Spanish, you will not need to re-fight it in Portuguese. The rules that guided you in the former are equally applicable in the latter. Likewise, if you have learned to use the Spanish present tense as a substitute for the future tense at those times when the future is rather imminent (e.g. lo veo mañana), you should have no problem doing the same thing in Portuguese. Verbs make up a large part of the grammar of both languages, and the high incidence of direct transfer from one to another will undoubtedly prove to be a most useful tool.
There are other areas where Portuguese is a near mirror-image of Spanish. Portuguese has the same rigid gender and number relationships between nouns and adjectives. The object pronoun system is at times conveniently similar, at other times surprisingly different. (More about this later.) Most conjunctions, prepositions and other relator-type words and expressions tend
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