Score:
1 2 (3) 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
“Three outta ten!”
Pros:
sixty pages of Portuguesee phrases; decent attempt at conceptualizing “fill-in” phrases (to help you build a variety of Portuguese sentences); price
Cons:
attempts to be Portugal-centric (European only), but includes some Brazilian without indicating the difference; does not TEACH you Portuguese like the name suggests, only lists phrases; the intro is a distraction; imperfect selection and layout of phrase topics; missing a good way to look up specific phrases
The Research and Education Association (or REA) publishes Portuguese Made Nice & Easy with the intend of giving you “just enough of the language to get around and be understood.”
In its meager seventy pages, this introduction to the Portuguese language dedicates the bulk of its text to a phrasebook-style list of Portuguese vocabulary and sentences. The short foreword presents a missable history of Portugal and an overview of Portuguese pronunciation (actually more of an introduction to their English-friendly way of transliterating spoken Portuguese).
After this, you’ll find sixty pages of phrases, interspersed with b&w photos of buildings and statuary in Portugal. Each line of this phrase book uses the following layout: English phrase praw-nun-see-AY-shan (Portuguese phrase). For instance, you’ll see Where is AWN-djee AH (Onde há).
If you don’t understand the pronunciation system, you’ll find little guidance. Even if you do, it fails to distinguish between dialects and, in extreme cases, leaves you with a pronunciation that will sound flat-out wrong to most Portuguese speakers. Despite the book’s focus on Portugal, some words are given only in Brazilian without any indication, such as twenty VEEN-chee (vinte).
The phrase book goes beyond a list of words and phrases by dealing with a good range of “fill-in” sentences. You’re told how to say “I want___” / “I like ___” and given a list of things to fill in the blank. While the technique is ubiquitous in phrase books, it’s approached somewhat methodically and consistently here. Still, the phrases leave something to be desired, particularly in how they fail to lead learners toward more complex (but necessary!) constructions like verb+noun+adjective.
The book has no index, but the table of contents offers a very rough overview of topics. The range of those topics alone leaves room for improvement and expansion. An alphabetized word list with selected vocabulary ends the book, but it’s unclear what’s been selected here and why, especially with no page numbers to cross-reference.
Overall, it’s a sub-par phrase book for students and travelers to Portugal or even Brazil (it insists on using você, never tu, for example). Specifically, I can’t condone the pronunciation key or coverage of topics. This is nothing more than a quick, cheap, lackluster way to get a feel for Portuguese phrases. I don’t imagine a better one should cost you much more.