Customer Reviews

Portuguese: Lonely Planet Phrasebook

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lonely planet never fails to provide the best travel books. This tiny book provides a wealth of useful information. What I like about this book is that it focuses specifically on communicating in Portugal, rather than Brazil. It is well organized into several handy cagetories such as directions, shopping, lodging, etc. The front contains standard info such as numbers, days of the week, and survival phrases, while the back contains a mini-dictionary.

The best part about this book is the fact that it not only gives the Portuguese phrase with its English equivalent, it also provides a spelled-out phonetic pronunciation. Out of all the study material I have, these simple phonetic spell-outs have been the greatest help in my pronunciation, and I now have nearly perfected my portuguese accent.
I've seen similar Portuguese pocket books, and they just don't compare to this one.

This is a wonderful little phrase book, which is handy, yet expansive (stretching beyond the simple "transport", "food" and "necessities", to go into suggested phrases for more esoteric areas including romantic encounters). The book also includes a short (but useful) dictionary at the end.

Beware, though, that the iPhone app by the same name(also by Lonely Planet), while more expensive, is far, far inferior, both in terms of usefulness and depth.

If you are travelling to Portugal (or Brazil, or any other Portugese-speaking country) grab the printed version (a week in advance, so you can read through it) and off you go.

If you really study the pronumciation examples and then use the phrases you'll go far!

This dictionary/phrase book has very handy information in a pocket-sized version making it very easy to carry and use. However, because so many people in Portugal speak English and/or many restaurants have an English menu, we really didn't use it as much as we thought we would.

Bought this phrasebook because I like the LP travel guides. It turns out being good in one does not guarantee you're good in the other. The organization of "situations" in which you need pecific words is not very logical and the priority given to various phrases is also odd. In the restaurant and café section I missed several basis phrases. In the restaurant mini-dictionary following phrases the situation was similar. I ended up not using this book and instead used my 20 year old portuguese-english mini dictionary. One of the vacations in which I learned the least about the local language.

good book, does just what it says it does. Not to learn the language, but great for traveling and quick reference.