Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44601 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback

Customer Reviews

Excellent Beginner's Portuguese Course
A really good beginner's course for learning the Portuguese language. My copy is rather dog-eared now, as I have used it so much and even though it is a beginner's course, it is still useful to refer back to when you have gone beyond that stage and up to intermediate level. The situations are useful and practical, and everything is arranged in a good and reasonably logical order. All in all, an excellent book I'd always recommend.

Painlessly
Although the CDs could be better I still give this course a five star rating. Why? Because this is one of the best foreign language courses I have ever come across.

The way it is organised is the key to its sucess. There are no loose ends, everything leads on to something else, all is related and helps learners build up their Portuguese with a greatly reduced effort.

I have a linguistic background but am aware that many learners do not have grammatical knowledge. This course helps in this area too. Grammar is there but presented in a painlessly manner. Learners can get the concepts and put them to work in practice without the difficulties and boredom usually associated with grammar.

The course covers basic concepts but also some more detailed points like the position of direct and indirect pronouns and reflexive pronouns. Pages 87-88, 223-224 and 236-237 are particularly helpful in this area.

Warning - CD now protected so you can't put it on your mp3!
I've used the Teach Yourself books before and they are a great way to learn a language - you get useful conversation plus the grammar.

But this most recent one I've bought won't allow me to copy it to my mp3 player - previous ones did. I want to be able to listen to it on the way to work and back - unfortunately that's no longer possible.

I won't be using this series again.