[.ca] Mastering Portuguese: Book and 12 Cassettes (ISBN 0812074793)

Very good and inexpensive way to learn Brazilian portuguese:
This book and 12 tape set (90 minutes each) will give you a very solid foundation in Brazilian portuguese. You should have excellent pronounciation, be able to have long meaningful conversations, and be able to understand others very well when finished. It is also a great value for the money - a lot cheaper than other multi-tape courses! Each unit is broken into smaller parts that build on each other, so you can easily work at your own pace. And since it builds gradually, you will not forget material you previously learned. As others have commented, the book does look like it was done on a type writer and has no interior graphics or color - very dull looking. Also, the vocabulary should be more extensive - the same nouns and verbs are generally used to teach new usages and tenses. But if you get a basic dictionary, once you look up a new word or verb, you will know how to use it in many contexts and tenses. I tried several other items before I bought this one and I have been very pleased with my purchase.

Instant Brazilian communication:
This program is the best one I have found on the market. It is filled with topics used daily by speakers. Its pronunciation has made my Portuguese totally recognizable in Brazil; its cultural inclusion is of great value. Overall, I know of no better way to learn Portuguese here in the United States, short of speaking with native speakers. I only wish there were another program to go beyond this excellent basic training.

Good foundation for Portuguese:
This program is very effective in grounding you in the fundamentals of the Brazilian Portuguese language, especially if you already have a strong base in another Romance language. If you are a motivated language learner, "Mastering Portuguese" will help you acquire the skills necessary to carry on simple conversations in practical situations....but you will not possess "total fluency", as the program states. There's no way to become totally fluent with simply a book and 12 tapes. Don't get me wrong, I think this is an awesome method of learning Brazilian Portuguese if you are dedicated, but it isn't sufficient to become "totally fluent" in the language....no book/audio program is. But this is the best I've seen yet. My advice: work hard through the program, read news articles in Portuguese and look up the words you don't know, and watch the news in Portuguese (on the internet). And even better, find a native Portuguese speaker and practice, practice, and practice.

Excellent beginning course:
This is an excellent beginners course. It goes well beyond the superficial memorization of phrases and includes detailed practice on pronunciation. Highly recommended. Excellent value. I recently spent 3 months working in Mozambique, and completing this course prior to arrival there provided me with an excellent foundation. For those wanting more practice, I suggest listening to an international news service such as BBC, VOA or Deutsche Welle, available on the internet, for Portuguese news. This is an excellent way to hear either spoken Brazilian or Continental Portuguese, and you can gain valuable and free vocabulary practice reading news bulletins as well.

Dry, academic, but masterful:
If you want fun and happy learning with gentle, friendly encouragement, go buy a "Portuguese for Dummies" book. You won't learn the language, but you'll enjoy yourself. If you just want to get a few phrases, go get a Lonely Planet phrasebook. But if you aren't afraid of hard work and want the BEST there is, then get the Foreign Language Institute series. If language courses were judged on cosmetic features, this course would get zero. There are no glossy pictures, cheerful icons, in fact the text book was clearly written with a typewriter (!) The writing style is dry as a bone and the content rigorous and academic. But if you have the ability to see through that, then the course is utterly flawless. You will need LOTS of self-discipline (but then you need that to learn any language, regardless of the course chosen). I've usd this course for a few months and have already been able to have some basic conversations with some Brazillian friends. I'm planning on getting some more FLI series as a result. As a final note - be aware that the course is designed for Brazillian, not European Portuguese. These dialects are quite different from each other, much moreso than the US-British English differences. If you are travelling to Africa (ie. Mozambique, Angola, etc) this course will serve you very well.