Score:
1 2 3 4 (5) 6 7 8 9 10
“Five outta ten!”
Pros:
price, especially if you send away for the free CD/cassette; plenty of conversational back and forth; difficulty increases progressively; each example is highlighted by slightly different variations to practice
Cons:
exercises require repeating and assimilating but without much guidance from the course; some topics are useless or outdated; no explanations of tricky points (hardly any explanations at all); grammar is too terse for anything but quick look-up and reference
Conversational Brazilian Portuguese: The Easy Method in 20 Lessons intends to teach you Portuguese through hordes of back-and-forth conversational phrases. The idea is that these snippets of mock dialogue should illustrate key language points as you progress the course. Conversations become increasingly more difficult as you go on, building on previous points.
The course has two main sections – the larger conversation lessons that make up the bulk of the book, and the shorter Portuguese reference grammar that follows the lessons.
Each lesson starts out with a few dozen basic phrases to practice (the first chapters also include some vocabulary words), with Portuguese on the left hand side of the page and English translations on the right. This is followed by a prolonged “exercises” section, which is actually the heart of the lesson. Each exercise starts with a bold Portuguese sentence, with English written below it. The sentence is always some interchange (like “How are you? – I’m fine”). Below that phrase, there are three to six very similar phrases for you to practice.
“Practice” here means repeating along and attempting to understand. This type of language drill is the basis of the “Cortina Method”. Practice this way for sixteen lessons, and you’ve completed the course.
The grammar section after the lessons is terse, methodical and full of tables, including regular and irregular verbs. It’s a quick way to reference individual grammatical topics, but it’s not a study guide or grammar lesson in itself. I wouldn’t even consider it an introduction to Portuguese grammar, since it’s more of a short collection of basic grammar topics.
A short but decent Portuguese-English vocabulary interspersed with alphabetized language topics, and thus doubling as an index, ends the book. As well as the clumsily integrated index, the course has a detailed enough table of contents to get a good sense of the layout of the course, and to search through the book later on.
If you’ve got a knack for figuring out how languages work from conversation exchanges without any intervening explanations, this is a good introduction to Brazilian Portuguese. Even then, certain topics and expressions will seem dated or hardly useful. If you get the free CD or cassette, you can listen along, repeat and assimilate.
For most students, though, I think it’s better to use these Portuguese lessons with a Brazilian speaker for structured conversations, or maybe as the backbone of a classroom course. In either case, I recommend purchasing or borrowing supplementary materials to help you with grammar, pronunciation and more real-life conversational language.