Score:
1 2 3 4 (5) 6 7 8 9 10
“Five outta ten!”
Pros:
covers a good mix of phrases and vocabulary; some audio to get an ear for Portuguese; decent price; explains some basic grammar in context
Cons:
some “days” will take you longer than a day to process; skims over some major points so fast you might not assimilate them; short, limited exercises; for beginners and near-beginners; Portugal-focused, but with Brazilian variants
The 90 glossy, illustrated, color pages of Conversational Portuguese present seven days worth of phrases, explanations and grammatical building blocks to get you started in Portuguese.
The phrasebook lays out phrases and side-notes for seven days (Monday through Sunday), with three parts to each day (for morning, afternoon and evening). As you can see, actually following this plan requires seven days of dedication. Each section tries to balance dialogues, vocabulary words and phrases and notes and explanations in a way that maximizes your exposure to and assimilation of the basics. The language used in the course is European Portuguese, but Brazilian variants are mentioned.
Short exercises help you grasp some of those words and phrases in context. They’re always quick and nearly always relevant. Accompanying color drawings and travel-book-like photos stimulate visual relations, too, but only to a limited extent.
The audio CDs offer some extra practice, allowing you to listen to the phrases, but they don’t present a complete conversational course approach like more expensive conversational audio packages. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to find the CD on Amazon, so I can only provide a link to the book.
A short Portuguese to English vocabulary glossary ends the book, but there are no page numbers here, and the book is missing an index, so yo can’t easily go back and find important phrases or topics you learned.
As a once-through survival introduction to Portuguese with some audio (if you manage to track down the CD or cassettes), this course is a good start. Skim exercises, no reusability or reference use (like as a tourist phrasebook), and odd day-to-day pacing keep this course from being anything more.