Product Description

Brazil is at the forefront of the travel boom in Latin America, with over 5 million visitors in 2006 generating an estimated US$4.4 billion in earnings (WTO).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8327 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English, Portuguese
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

Customer Reviews

Deeply flawed
At first sight, a useful book despite a dictionary at the back that contains some glaring omissions of basic words such as 'from' and 'please', as well as other useful words such as 'sting'. Its culinary reader is threadbare too, with plenty of omissions - annoying when tried to decipher a menu.

But the real flaw is in the phonetic spellings of the Portuguese words. The author uses 'ng' to indicate the nasal vowels that characterise Brazilian Portuguese, but this only works about half the time. The rest of the time you're just mispronouncing the word.

The biggest omission of all, though, is as follows. In Brazilian Portuguese, when a 't' is followed by an 'e' or an 'i', this means the 't' is pronounced like the 'j' in jam or 'ch' in church. It soon transpired that this is a key and crucial part of Brazilian Portuguese speech and it's not mentioned anywhere in this book, thereby rendering several phonetic spellings inaccurate and useless.

Interestingly I later discovered that the Lonely Planet guide to Brazil, published two years later than this book, does include this bit of information in its few pages devoted to the language - but if they now know this to be the case they should really have withdrawn this Brazilian Portuguese phrasebook and published a new edition with the correct phonetic spellings. Given that this is the third edition of the book, the fact that it will have taken Lonely Planet four editions of the book to include a fairly rudimentary aspect of pronounciation does not inspire confidence that they know what they're doing. As it is, the book is devalued and my confidence in the Lonely Planet brand weakened.

Going to Brazil? Buy this and make it your companion!
We were lucky enough to visit Brazil and found this book and absouloutley invaluable guide! The phrasebook was dead useful, and when we managed to lose it after a boozy night on the town it felt like our we'd lost our bestest companion. Good book, great country! Buy the book, visit the country!

Useful little number!
Bought this book for my mother in law to take to Rio with her. She is studying portugease at present but it nervous to use it in sentences and out of the classroom, without her dictionery. Needless to say short conversations can take an age when you have to look up each word. I hope this book will give her the confidence she needs to communicate when travelling alone in Brazil - Very handy!!