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: #25235 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information in its few pages devoted to the language - but if they now know this to be the case they should really have withdrawn this Brazilian Portuguese phrasebook and published a new edition with the correct phonetic spellings.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!

Disappointing quality
This is a review on the 4th edition. Being Brazilian myself, I bought this book as a gift for a British friend who has a Brazilian partner, but I decided to examine it beforehand. I have found things that strike me as simply unacceptable in a phrase book.

The translator, or whoever was in charge of the text, often makes mistakes that suggest she/he is not a native speaker, or that she/he has been living abroad for too long. Some examples: "portuguêses" (wrong accentuation), "pasagem" (wrong spelling), "amanha" (missing accent), pronunciation of "você" misleadingly indicating that the first syllable should be stressed, "kilo" (wrong spelling) etc. - all that was just in the first pages. The translator also seems to have a problem with the crasis accent, which appears to be wrong almost every time.

If you follow the book, you will end up saying "É um hora" (It's one o'clock) instead of "É uma hora"; if you are vegan, you will use a word just invented by this book, "vegitalista" (there is no such thing); and the crying-out-loud, ear-hurting error that would be unacceptable even at a kindergarten level: "estrupo" instead of "estupro".

The very low price and the huge variety of situational expressions included in the book may compensate for the errors for some people. (There is even a very amusing section on sex talk!) However, on almost any given page I randomly pick, there is a typo and/or a grammar error. I have learned that most typos are actually consistent spelling errors. In addition, errors in the pronunciation keys are not rare, sometimes indicating the wrong syllable to be stressed. That brings us to another serious problem posed by the book, which is the pronunciation system (barely understandable) and the choice of a regional accent. Do not believe them when they say that there are small variations in pronunciation across the country. I am not saying that they should provide a key for all possible variations you can find, but the differences can be huge indeed, and this book does not even mention that.

To sum up, it should have undergone serious proofreading before being published. The way it is presented now, it damages Lonely Planet's reputation.