Portuguese (Brazilian) II [Unbound]

Pimsleur Language Programs (Author)

Product Details

• Unbound
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671579622
• ISBN-13: 978-0671579623
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,121,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dr. Paul Pimsleur (b. 1926, d. 1976) devoted his life to language teaching and testing and was one of the world's leading experts in applied linguistics. He was fluent in French, good in German, and had a working knowledge of Italian, Russian, Modern Greek, and Mandarin Chinese. After obtaining his Ph.D. in French and a Masters in Psychology from Columbia University, he taught French Phonetics and Linguistics at UCLA. He later became Professor of Romance Languages and Language Education, and Director of The Listening Center (a state-wide language lab) at Ohio State University; Professor of Education and Romance Languages at the State University of New York at Albany; and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. He did research on the psychology of language learning and in 1969 was Section Head of Psychology of Second Language Learning at the International Congress of Applied Linguistics.

Dr. Pimsleur was a member of the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), American Educational Research Association (AERA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

His many books and articles revolutionized theories of language learning and teaching. After years of experience and research, Dr. Pimsleur developed a new method (The Pimsleur Method) that is based on two key principles: the Principle of Anticipation and a scientific principle of memory training that he called "Graduated Interval Recall." This Method has been applied to the many levels and languages of the "Pimsleur Programs."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Continental Portuguese Deserves Better, January 9, 2000

By 

Jerry L. Guthrie (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Portuguese (Continental) (Pimsleur Language Program) (Audio Cassette)

These tapes cost too much for what they deliver. I love the Pimsleur method of teaching and have used their French tapes with much success. However, the speakers on these Portuguese tapes sound bored, the vocabulary is extremely limited, and unfortunately, you are not at all ready to use the language as a traveler when done with these tapes. I would love to see Pimsleur do justice to continental Portuguese.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor value!, May 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Portuguese (Continental) (Pimsleur Language Program) (Audio Cassette)

The Pimsleur method itself is really quite good. I used the comprehensive Italian course and was quite pleased with my results. The problem with the "compact course" is that there really isn't enough "meat". By the end of this course I was quite comfortable asking " Do you speak Portuguese?" "Would you like something to eat?" and "Do you have escudos?" That, however is about the extent of the vocabulary one will pick up from this course. Really not worth 70 dollars.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't let this be your only Portuguese resource, July 26, 2007

By 

C. Peterson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Portuguese (European), Compact: Learn to Speak and Understand European Portuguese with Pimsleur Language Programs (Audio CD)

I bought the Pimsleur European Portuguese system about four weeks before a trip to Mozambique. It contains 10 lessons, each about 25 minutes long. All but the first lesson is followed by a five-minute reading lesson where words or short phrases are repeated. It was helpful in some ways and limited in others. I do find myself using the information, but I wonder if it could have been more efficiently presented.

The strength of this system is that it is audio only; it forces me to learn Portuguese as it is spoken, rather than from a book where I learn to speak Portuguese words with American pronunciation. The speakers spoke clearly and slowly enough to follow easily, and the repetition was sufficient for memorization.

However, I found the audio-only approach limiting in that it doesn't help with reading. I have some minor hearing loss and it would have been helpful to have a script/workbook. The reading lessons in the packet (lists of about 15 words, many of which do not appear in the lesson just completed) are not very helpful.

A feature that I found infuriating was that they start you off using one form of "you" (the formal form: o senhor/a senhora - which I'm told nobody uses, not even in Portugal) then halfway through introduce the more common "voc^e." They also interchange the words for "something" and "anything," which I found distracting as I tried to repeat after the speakers.

Overall, the system is helpful, but I am glad I had other books (Bilingual Books "Portuguese in 10 Minutes a Day" and Lonely Planet's Portuguese Phrasebook).