du Brasil
So I'm trying to learn Portuguese. At least a few lines here and there.
I bought the 6-disc CD set from Barnes & Noble's for about $20. It's the Brazilian Portuguese and I want to learn because my mom is from Brazil. She was born there and came to America when she was 7. When I was growing up she taught me a few words here and there. However we really only spoke English and Portuguese is not something they offered in high school. Or even at my college, so i didn't know where or when I would learn it. Then a friend told me he was learning via the Pimsleur method, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
It's basically just a call and response way of learning. "Listen and repeat" is the phrase I hear most often on this 5-disc set. I say 5-disc because the first one is merely an overview/instruction manual. About 10 minutes into it, I realized it was word-for-word what I read before opening the cd's. It came with a little booklet that was the intro. After awhile I picked it up and read along with the cd thinking, "why am I wasting my time?"
It's split up into 10 lessons, two per CD. I'm on lesson 7 or 8, but I think I need to go back. It's been a few weeks since I listened to the last one.
I'm not sure how much I will know by the end. I can say the requisite "Hello, how are you?" "Good morning/afternoon/evening." "Where is the Hotel/Restaurant?" "Pleased to meet you" "goodbye" and a few other sundry items.
I guess that's enough if I ever wake up to find myself in the middle of Sao Paulo and don't know where to go. What I really want is to have a semi-correct conversation with my mom without stopping to translate back to English and then translate my response back to Portuguese. It would be fun to impress her....
I bought the 6-disc CD set from Barnes & Noble's for about $20. It's the Brazilian Portuguese and I want to learn because my mom is from Brazil. She was born there and came to America when she was 7. When I was growing up she taught me a few words here and there. However we really only spoke English and Portuguese is not something they offered in high school. Or even at my college, so i didn't know where or when I would learn it. Then a friend told me he was learning via the Pimsleur method, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
It's basically just a call and response way of learning. "Listen and repeat" is the phrase I hear most often on this 5-disc set. I say 5-disc because the first one is merely an overview/instruction manual. About 10 minutes into it, I realized it was word-for-word what I read before opening the cd's. It came with a little booklet that was the intro. After awhile I picked it up and read along with the cd thinking, "why am I wasting my time?"
It's split up into 10 lessons, two per CD. I'm on lesson 7 or 8, but I think I need to go back. It's been a few weeks since I listened to the last one.
I'm not sure how much I will know by the end. I can say the requisite "Hello, how are you?" "Good morning/afternoon/evening." "Where is the Hotel/Restaurant?" "Pleased to meet you" "goodbye" and a few other sundry items.
I guess that's enough if I ever wake up to find myself in the middle of Sao Paulo and don't know where to go. What I really want is to have a semi-correct conversation with my mom without stopping to translate back to English and then translate my response back to Portuguese. It would be fun to impress her....
posted by Count Olaf | 5:20 PM
1 Comments:
Hello,
Excuse me if I don't refer to you as Count... ;=)
I used the Pimsleur Italian CD sets I II & III , thats 45 CDs (90 lessons).
Pimsleur will not teach you very much vocabulary or verbs, but some conversational phrases. In other words, you need some additional materials. BTW, Go to your library to see if they have a full set. If so tape them and return them. Otherwise the cost is like $250US a set ($125 used on Ebay). But here is what you will learn if you stay with Pimsleur.
Pimsleur will teach you to effortlessly and correctly pronounce all the new and unique sounds that are in Portuguese and not in English. It will teach you to speak with an clean upperclass pronunciation. Think of Dr Higgins in Pygmalion (My Fair Lady) teaching Liza Doolittle. That should be your only focus with Pimsleur: pronunciation and enunciation.
I am currently learning Italian, but if you have any questions, leave me a comment on my Italian blog.
Good luck,
Leo
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