Customer Reviews

Just Enough Portuguese

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The words in this book were very hard to locate, but not to worry, it did not have most of the words we really needed, anyway.

We used this book for a week's travel in Portugal. I picked this one because it was the only phrase book at the local bookstore, and I figured a phrase book would be more useful than a dictionary. It didn't quite work out that way. We found you really need a dictionary as well, because it's quite hard to find specific things in a phrase book. When you want to say "chicken", sometimes you just want to look up "chicken". This book in particular has some interesting organization because it's so old -- it was published over 20 years ago. Nothing about any modern technology like computers or cell phones, nothing about the euro, but a whole chapter about choosing meats at the butcher. The other failing is that there's no pronunciation guide. So it doesn't help you at all in saying place names, which are some of the hardest things in Portuguese.

I really enjoyed the Passport Books series in various languages. When I was travelling to Brazil often I would take my handy JUST ENOUGH PORTUGUESE and use it as my communications helper. Unlike a regular dictionary JUST ENOUGH teaches you popular phrases that you would actually use during your trip. Very helpful!