22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not enough audio, October 2, 2000
I think this is a poor choice for the total beginner. The audio starts with fairly advanced dialogue, spoken very quickly. While that may well be the way the Brazilians speak, it is useless to the beginning student. The book is comprehensive, but poor for self study - picture your high school Spanish text, without the teacher. I gave up on this one after two fruitless hours, and bought Pimsleur's Audio course. I may go back to Portuguese of Brazil - The Complete Course for Beginners, but only AFTER I finish Pimsleurs.
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible!, July 23, 2002
This book would be a nightmare for a beginner because it jumps into Portuguese in such a confusing way. It just throws lists of words for you to memorize, and introduces grammar that is hardly even practiced in the exercises.
This book is also very aloof, and hardly forms a "relationship" with the reader. All the explanations are not in-depth. New grammar and vocabulary is just explained with a sentence, and then the reader is left on his/her own.
Here's an example of an exercise:
Exercise 2
Can you remember what the following are in Portuguese?
duty-free, boarding card, departure board, non-smoking, passport control, departure lounge, departure gate
No, I can't remember what they are-all I was given was a list of words!
Compared to Colloquial Icelandic(which is an EXCELLENT Colloquial course), this book is severely lacking, and that is quite surprising. A language spoken by around 200,000 people is taught so much more in depth than one spoken by almost 200,000,000!
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good reference book, November 6, 2000
Although this book was a disappointment when I was first learning Portuguese six months ago, now that I am an intermediate plus Portuguese speaker/writer I find this book an invaluable reference. It is well indexed, making it easy to find the topic I need to review. It includes enough examples to make the point clear (but not enough when I was first learning).
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