Ultimate Portuguese Beginner Intermediate
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  • Ultimate Portuguese Beginner Intermediate
  • Living Language
  • Published by: Living Language
  • Level: Intermediate
  • First Published in: 2004

This course offers everything students need to learn Portuguese from scratch or revive the Portuguese that they learned years ago. This multilevel course book combines conversation and culture in an easy-to-follow, enjoyable, and effective format.

REVIEW BY Emily Smith Book EXPERT
Review posted: 09/01/2014
Have you used this book?

Have you been learning Portuguese for a while now but don’t feel quite confident enough to call yourself an “intermediate” student? Don’t worry; others face the same dilemma, largely because when it comes to language learning material there always seems to be a big jump between a beginner’s book and an intermediate book. Thankfully Living Language has made a book and audio set just for you. Ultimate Portuguese Beginner-Intermediate may work for you.

Unlike other intermediate books that offer no instruction in English, Ultimate Portuguese Beginner-Intermediate still provides students with short instructional notes in English. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s one of the best things about this book. As a language learner, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed even when you’ve passed the initial stages. Keeping a few short instructional lines in English rather than going fully to Portuguese ensures the students can keep up and not feel lost at any point. This is probably one of the main differences between a student who is a “beginner” and one who is “intermediate”, which is why the transition between the two levels is sometimes quite difficult. Ultimate Portuguese addresses the issue perfectly so as not to force a student who has done well in beginner’s Portuguese to keep studying basic content.


"With Ultimate Portuguese you can learn linguistic similarities and differences which will make your Portuguese more useful rather than regionally isolated."


Ultimate Portuguese also comes with audio CDs that help students to further grasp Portuguese pronunciation and to improve listening and comprehension skills. This also makes it easier to use this set without a teacher. Some students find that the “listen and repeat” sections are difficult; some of the phrases are three-to-four sentences long, which would be difficult to remember verbatim in one’s native language, let alone a foreign language. Instead you can use these sections to test your comprehension rather than to learn to repeat.

Another great thing about this book and audio set is that it teaches you both Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, whereas most books or audio sets focus on one or the other. With Ultimate Portuguese you can learn linguistic similarities and differences which will make your Portuguese more useful rather than regionally isolated.

It’s important to remember that as a Beginner-Intermediate book, students will have to have some existing Portuguese skills to feel comfortable using this book. If you already have the basics down, though, this book and audio set can help you get a lot further along in your Portuguese language skills.

If you are a Portuguese language teacher, you can use this book and audio set in your class. Since your students have an audio reference at home, they should be able to come to class with some practice listening and repeating which you can then test in class. This makes it easier for you to utilize classroom time in the best possible way. Overall, Ultimate Portuguese is a pretty decent book for the price. Sure, there may be better books out there, but there’s also many that are a whole lot worse.

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