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Description
Speed Date Portuguese is a method that will have you speaking Portuguese much more quickly than traditional approaches to language study.
The book is based on the way the author learnt Portuguese. Faced with three hours to wait before going on a date with a girl who did not speak any English, he discovered that most language learning systems or phrase books give you very little in terms of real Portuguese. Instead they give a simple collection of phrases or non-related elements of language structure which means it impossible to actually make conversation.
Speed Date Portuguese offers a solution to the usual Portuguese learning problems. Initially, it covers a key concept missed by most language systems. That is, how do you speak English? As we learnt to talk when we were young most of us do not have a clue how we actually speak our own language. This is a problem because Portuguese is structured differently to English.
Portuguese has the same structure as the other Latin languages (Spanish, Italian, French etc). It is therefore easier for people from these countries to learn each others languages. For an English speaker to learn them, they are much more difficult. The first step to success comes in having a greater understanding of how you speak English and then to understand the contrasting structure of Portuguese.
The book places a heavy emphasis on verbs and the verb formulas from which every sentence is constructed. Most language learning systems shy away from verbs because people think they are "boring". However, if faced with a real life situation where you will be meeting a non-English speaker you are much more concerned about long awkward silences than how entertaining it is to study a language.
The early part of the book offers a 120 verb formulations which if learnt will allow you to make conversation in many different ways. This can be contrasted with learning say 120 words of vocabulary. With 120 verbs formulations you can say "I will go, I went, I had, I would have, I was doing, etc". The possibility of conversation thereafter is almost infinite compared to knowing a set of random words "cat, red, table, car". This works well on a date because in general it is easy to communicate a specific word, for example. to say 'a dog', you could mime a dog barking, point at one across the square or look it up on google. However, to mime or look up "I used to have (a dog)" is difficult and time consuming.
The latter section of the book has an in-depth Portuguese vocabulary to compliment the verb structure. The book also has hundreds of example sentences throughout to give you a feel of the speaking Portuguese. Finally, it includes has some powerful methods for rapidly learning the language.
This book is the Brazil Edition. For Portuguese outside of Brazil please see the Portugal Edition
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