TDSounds

Brazilian Portuguese podcasts

 Learning Portuguese by memorising samba lyrics is great for pronunciation, but leaves one with a big vocabulary and      no idea how to string it together. I’ve been trying to fill in some gaps by studying some free Portuguese lesson podcasts whilst away on holiday (hence the recent lack of posts).  A little spoken Portuguese goes a long way when visiting Brazil.

The podcast courses were very variable in quality, and the two most useful were:

1. For  complete beginners –    Survivalphrases.com – Brazilian Portuguese

Although this is a complete beginners’ course I still found it very informative. It gives basic survival phrases, and it is very good at giving the context in which you use them and the correct pronunciation. I found the presenter’s style  appealing, and learnt a lot. Each episode only covers a small amount of material, but very well. Great support for your first trip to Brazil.

2. For beginners to advanced –   Brazilianpodclass.com

This is exactly what I needed. It’s a very well constructed and extremely dense course, packed with material. I downloaded podcasts 199 -203 which was quite enough for a two week holiday, but I’m going to start again from the complete beginning, at lesson 1. This is a complete course in the Portuguese language, with everything spoken so that the pronunciation is correct. The lessons are free but you have to pay for the downloadable lesson notes if you want them - I wish I'd done this before I went away. I particularly enjoyed their video lesson on Brazilian body language, which you can find at youtube.com/watch?v=9GSyw4AAAaA.