Fortheo wrote:Then again, there's always the next language. Hopefully I can get some use out of Linguaphone for German, even though there seems to be like 6 different books for it haha.
From what I've seen, the Linguaphone German course is top notch and every bit as good as the French course. If you're in the States, you can find one on Ebay for $50 or so with shipping (or you could try winning a bid war for less). I found a way to get the recordings in mp3 format, so I don't have to deal with the tapes. PM if you're interested in the link.
James29 wrote:FYI, there is definitely an "old" Linguaphone Brazilian Portuguese course. I saw it several years ago in a local University library. I was looking for their "old" Spanish one which I could not find. The Portuguese one looked amazing.
I still have yet to come across an old Linguaphone Brazilian Portuguese from the 70's
Could the one you saw at the library have been a 1960's version? I hear the 60's are good too, though I know they were quite different from the 70's versions.James29 wrote:Also, I may have missed it but, which Portuguese Assimil did you use? There is not an English based one that I am aware of and your profile suggests you are better in Portuguese than French or Spanish.
Ahh yes, so because I was intent on using Assimil to learn Brazilian Portuguese, and as you pointed out there is not an Portuguese-English version but only PT-SP and PT-FR, I had to hack my Assimil to get any use out of it. I incidentally had the FR-PT version, and my girlfriend at the time was a trilingual Brazilian with great ability in English and French. She translated all the dialogues into English for me, and if I had any questions about the grammar, she was able to explain the grammatical notes. That being said, I rarely looked to the grammatical notes, basically because I couldn't understand them, but went to a number of other resources for grammar. My Spanish knowledge from high school also helped a great deal, and I didn't start Assimil until about one month into studying Portuguese, so that I was able to stay ahead of Assimil grammatically, but use Assimil as good activation of that grammatical knowledge, at least passively, by printing and cutting out the English dialogues and taping them into my book.
I guess you could say my Assimil experience wasn't a complete one, because I was not using the explanations in the book. However, I shadowed the book for a good 2 months working 10 lessons a day (day 1 lesson 1, day 2 lesson 1 and 2, day 3 lesson 1, 2 and 3... day 10 first 10 lessons... day 20 lessons 10-20, etc). By the time I stopped, I was well primed for A2 and B1 resources, including some native stuff.
