Brazilian Portuguese: Lonely Planet Phrasebook

 (32 customer reviews)

As the book title says it's a Brazilian phrasebook, and for those who said that most pages have multiple errors in spelling and grammatical errors, all I can say is that it's so not true. As a Brazilian born and native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, I can guarantee that. But you must remeber that Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese are almost two different languages, so you can't use this book to survive in Portugal.

As one reader put it, this book has nothing to do with Portuguese. In fact it is on Brazilian language, which is becoming a distant dialect from the latter. So if you want to learn Portuguese, avoid this book, but if you want to learn Brazilian, that is your choice.

One of earlier reviews was titled "Hardly a page not packed with mistakes". It was refering to the first edition, but it seems that the authors did not correct any errors since then. Nor did they even tried to find them.

Otherwise, it would be impossible for them not to notice 10 errors on the first 27 pages of the book. I was not looking for errors, I just read those first pages and the errors affronted my eyes.

Examples:

p. 15, "rapazess bonitos" instead of "rapazes bonitos"

p. 17, "pasagem" instead of "passagem"

p. 18, idem

p. 20, "amanha" instead of amanhã (missing ~ sign)

p. 27, "eu fala (inglês)" instead of "eu falo (inglês)"

p. 27, "eu não fala (português)" instead of "eu não falo (português)"

I don't mind a lot of errors when explaining pronunciation rules. With such a number of errors they are just useless and of course no one will speak as a "true brasileiro", as...Read more