Michel Thomas Method: Portuguese Introductory Course

If I didn't have to listen to the students I would rate this 5 stars. maybe 4. The teacher is rather annoying to listen to. She loves to hear herself talk, but regardless, the teacher and native speaker (Paulo) are good.I do not like having to listen to the other students fail and by the time they're done fumbling over the phrase and paulo says it, I've nearly forgotten what the phrase was to begin with and have to rewind and listen to it again.For the first few lessons, I took the audio tracks into Audacity (a free audio editing program) and edited out all the student sections and duplicated Paulo's pronunciation so I didn't have to pause it and this worked perfectly for me. I was able to remember the phrase and hear it spoken perfectly. This sped up my learning process exponentially.Recording yourself trying to copy Paulo via a phone or computer recorder is also really good if you have something like this available to you. You can compare your pronunciations to Paulo's. If maybe I was sitting in the same room as the students doing this, it might of been fine. I just don't want to start a bad habit mispronouncing stuff because of the students and found editing them out was perfect. If they could release an edit of this with just the teacher and Paulo, I would buy it again.

Wanted to practice Portuguese when I returned from a trip there. Sure helped.

The beginner's course is $15. Why, why, why would anyone in their right mind pay two grand for an audio course? I could fly to Portugual for that amount of money!

Only had this for a couple of weeks, and haven't got past the first CD - I presume that you stick at that until you're confident enough to proceed to the next one (?). There were no written instructions with the course, and the verbal ones on the first disc didn't really say exactly how to go about learning the language, except to relax and don't revise - just sit back and listen and speak . . . At this early stage, it seems like a good method for learning basic Portuguese - when I reach the end of the course, I hope to be able to post a review in that language. Happy enough so far, but I couldn't give it a five-star until I get further into the course.

I like the fact that this course concentrates on listening and repeating, and building up sentences in a modular format. This enables you to construct sentences quite quickly. It also includes lots of useful verbs. What i didn't like was the way that by CD6, i felt really bogged down by learning lots of verb endings (which are of course, essential) but not much else, and i completely lost interest. The strength of this course is that it will get you used to speaking portuguese, it will get you a pretty good accent and there is a lot of repetition which always helps the memory. What it fails on is access to numbers, colours, telling the time, how to ask for anything complicated in the shop - all of which you can pick up if you find another portuguese language book to use alongside. I will continue to use it, and i would recommend it to others, but not as a stand alone course for learning portuguese.

I love this method. It is quite expensive, but I listened to it every single day while at uni, so it was worth every penny. Just make sure you use it to reap the benefits!

Need to devote serious time to this and there will be lots of rewards. ok ok ok ok ok ok

Michel Thomas, the language genius who pioneered this learning style, sadly died a few years ago, and this is a course in his style, rather than by him. Sadly, this isn't as good as his Spanish course  Michel Thomas Foundation Course: Spanish (Michel Thomas Series) , for example, but it's an innovative way to grasp a new language.Learning from your knowledge of English you construct phrases in Portuguese rather than learn words. For example, all 'cion' words like 'information' in English all end 'ção' in Portuguese - so 'informação'. You're encouraged to see the patterns and think it through yourself rather than parrot back.The course fails slightly on a few things - mainly that pronouncing Portuguese is very hard, and more attention is needed especially with the vowel sounds. It's not too helpful. Also, the section on Brazilian Portuguese is literally 5mins at the very end - disappointing and odd, especially as Brazilian is much easier to pronounce than European (in my opinion at least). Finally, the voice and attitude of the main speaker is grating, especially after eight hours - she's a bit too patronising and nasal to listen too comfortably.All in all, good, but not a patch on Michel's original courses. Michel Thomas Foundation Course: Spanish (Michel Thomas Series)