Teach Yourself Portuguese Conversation (Teach Yourself Conversations) |
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Author:
Sue Tyson-Ward
By Teach Yourself
Average Customer Rating:   
List Price: £19.56
Our Price: £8.00
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 9780340912409
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 0340912405
Label: Teach Yourself
Manufacturer: Teach Yourself
Number Of Pages: 48
Publication Date: 2005-12-30
Publisher: Teach Yourself
Studio: Teach Yourself |
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Is this Spanish?, 2007-10-08
The cover shows a photo of a restaurant, its name ESCORIAL. Escorial is in Spain, isn't it? That's probably why some voices are a bit funny. They must be Spanish people speaking Portuguese, with a foreign accent. No good. Sorry but I cannot recommend this Portuguese conversation at all!
Disappointing, 2007-07-25
Teach Yourself Portuguese Conversation replicates the main Teach Yourself Portuguese course. The dialogues run parallel to those in the main course and are extremely similar. The main difference is that in Teach Yourself Portuguese Conversation the emphasis is on comments between the dialogues and tasks while in the Teach Yourself Portuguese main course the dialogues integrate language learning where structures and vocabulary are explained and then rehearsed.
I bought both the main course and the conversation, but I feel I have wasted money on the latter. The main course is superb, the conversation does not add anything of value to it. The comments are also a bit irritating and I am not too sure some are quite right, but who am I, just a learner! As a learner I would strongly recommend Teach Yourself Portuguese main course but not Teach Yourself Portuguese Conversation. I hope this is useful to other learners.
Don't bother!, 2007-06-28
This is a repeat of Manuela Cook's Teach Yourself Portuguese course but on three CDs. The dialogues are virtually the same. So far so good, for the Cook's course is excellent.
The snag is that these CDs go off course... here and there and not for the better. Each time Manuela Cook's dialogues are altered something odd creeps in. The comments given in English between dialogues can also be rather misleading.
I could go on quoting 'whoopsies' but one or two should make the point. Booklet and CDs deliberate on forms of address but they don't get it right. You don't address someone as 'senhor' and then move on to 'tu'. This would be like addressing someone as 'sir' and next calling him 'love'. For eating out, Ana asks for a 'bica'. This is a colloquial way of referring to a black coffee you hear in Lisbon and to some extent in the Algarve, not in other regions of Portugal, never mind other countries, which contradicts the statement made at the beginning of CD 1 that these CDs are for the Portuguese speaking world.
You expect an audio you can trust. Well, don't. The actors may not be actors at all, some have poor diction and an accent that hardly gives you a model you can copy as a learner. The number of speakers is also rather limited. You hear a lot of the same and not too good.
I have returned my CDs. They distort and confuse the sound teaching you get from Manuela Cook's course (which has better CDs anyway) which is what I am using together with a native speaker I meet regularly to practise the language with.
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