Com licença! : Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

Rating:
Summary: Error filled and poorly organized
Review: This book is full of gramtical and typographical errors and has never been used by Antonio Simoes to teach a class. The organization of the book is horrendous. All explanantions escape me as to why this book, aimed at Spanish speakers, is written in English. Perhaps a second edition will solve all the problems with the book, but until then I would not recommend its use.

Rating:
Summary: Excelent Book for spanish speakers intrested in Portuguese!
Review: This is a wonderful book for spanish speakers, or people with knowlege of the spanish language (I took up to spanish IV and two excelerated spanish classes at the high school level, and it is at the perfect level). It introduces the Portuguese Language, focusing on Brazilian Portuguese, both pronunciation and vocabulary. It is in a straight foward aproach, and is easy to follow, with vocab in English, Spanish and Portugues, for easy comprehension. It pinpoints important differences between the two languages, and shows the many similarities in a format that makes learning quick and easy for Spanish Speakers. This is an excelent book, and it has introduced me to a beautiful language which has shown me a facinating culture. This book is highly reccomended!!

Rating:
Summary: Beats a poke in the eye, but....
Review: This is the only book of its kind in existence--a textbook of Portuguese for those who already know Spanish. It does a good job highlighting the differences between the two languages, and wastes little time on concepts which are identical.
That said, this book is a very poor guide to learning Portuguese. The organization is terrible, with some irregular verbs in the beginning, more later, and a few more splashed in here and there. The vocabulary doesn't follow any sort of progression throughout the book, either.
This book was the text in a course "Portuguese for Spanish Speakers" at CU-Boulder. The only reason I can hack it in Portuguese is because of my instructor. The book works much better in a classroom setting, but even then it confused my whole class.

Rating:
Summary: Spanish speaker? Wanna learn Portuguese? This is it!
Review: Used this text while a student at UC Berkeley. If your Spanish is near fluent, you can quickly acquire basic Portuguese using this text.You skip a lot of junk because the languages are so similar The text focuses on comparing and contrasting the two languages. I used it in a classroom setting, but would say it would be great for the autodidact as well.

Rating:
Summary: Text fails to meet expectations
Review: While the concept of this book is great--Portuguese for Spanish speakers--the book falls flat in a number of areas crucial to language acquisition. First, all of the instructions are in English, followed by examples in Portuguese and Spanish. At first this sounds ideal, but it is very taxing to work between the three languages--especially in a collegiate level language course that moves very quickly. In addition, the instructions are incomplete, and often say that they provide basic information because the student is not ready for the entire explanation. A complete beginner with a Spanish background may find this book a useful reference for the absolute basic sentence constructions, but anyone attempting to learn about more advanced constructions (such as the personal infinitive, the future subjunctive, etc.) should consider alternative textbooks and audiocassette series.

Rating:
Summary: Text fails to meet expectations
Review: While the concept of this book is great--Portuguese for Spanish speakers--the book falls flat in a number of areas crucial to language acquisition. First, all of the instructions are in English, followed by examples in Portuguese and Spanish. At first this sounds ideal, but it is very taxing to work between the three languages--especially in a collegiate level language course that moves very quickly. In addition, the instructions are incomplete, and often say that they provide basic information because the student is not ready for the entire explanation. A complete beginner with a Spanish background may find this book a useful reference for the absolute basic sentence constructions, but anyone attempting to learn about more advanced constructions (such as the personal infinitive, the future subjunctive, etc.) should consider alternative textbooks and audiocassette series.