foreign languages

While this is a useful, fun book to get a basic handle on Brazilian Portuguese, it does have a major failing in its guide to pronunciation of the language. The book while good at phonetically spelling out the words fails to indicate on what syllable the stress should be placed. It does indicate that accent marks indicate stress placement, but if the word lacks them, just where should the stress (what syallable) be when saying the word? For example, the word "onde" (where). It does not tell you if its OHN-jee or ohn-JEE. You really need to use a Portuguese grammar manual or audio tapes/CDs to tell you how to correctly pronounce the words. For the record, the stress in this case is on the OHN. The text just has "ohn-jee."
This should be corrected in the next edition to better teach the Brazilian variation of Portuguese.

This book is great for learning basic phrases and building vocabulary. Especially nice are the following points 1) the already made flash cards and stickers were a big help...I laminated the flash cards and me and my wife quized each other all the time. They were convenient, I carried them everywhere. 2) I did carry the cut out language map doohickey it provides and used it upon first arriving in Brazil 3)the phonectic pronunciation typed above or below the words was a great help not found in most other publications. I highley recommend!

It's a good workbook for travelling purposes. It was quite helpful wih pronunciation.