Matthew's Journal

I described my first impressions of the Instant Portuguese course. I completed the course today (with an "excellent" overall score), so thought I'd write a little more about how I found the course. Once I'm back from Portugal, I shall say whether the Portuguese I learned was actually useful or not!

Despite the fact I'm about to pick nits, on the whole I think this was quite a good course - there's plenty of audio material which is read by native speakers, so you get a reasonable idea of what Portuguese should sound like. The material seems reasonably relevant to what you might want to say whilst on holiday. I think the attitude of "this is some grammar, but don't worry about it too much" is probably reasonable, even if it frustrated me at times! Using anki to help with the vocab learning was a very good idea; if anyone wants my "deck" at some point, let me know.

My biggest criticism, I think, is the verb pacing. From about the middle of week 4, you suddenly have to learn a new irregular verb a day, many of which are quite similar (e.g. vejo/vê/vemos/vêem vs venho/vem/vimos/vêm). Personally, I would have rather started the verb-learning earlier in the process, and not had it quite so intensely at the end. My second problem was with ambiguities. For example, conheço is introduced as "I know", and then later on "sei" is introduced as "I know". No-where is the difference explained (I bought a little grammar and a little dictionary, so can tell you that the former is in the sense of a person/author/place you know, and the latter is for facts and the like). A related issue is the use of multiple different words/idioms for the same thing: for example, we are told that o marco means "the postbox", and then one of the end-of-week tests expects you to use "a caixa de correio" instead. This is just sloppy - either only ever use one word, or explain that there are two equivalent words (or explain the difference).