Definately a great buy !
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I think the other reviews have summed it up. I just wanted to show my appreciation for it !
Thanks to the authors !!
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Good for the right audience
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This book does exactly as it says on the tin: presents you with 501 verbs fully conjugated for every tense. If you know what all these tenses are and when to use them then this is the ideal book for you; a reference manual to which you can refer if you've forgotten what the 1st person singular past subjunctive is for "ter", for example. However, one must realise that this book is hopeless for anyone who hasn't studied Portuguese before as the explanation on usage of tenses is completely lacking. OK, some examples containing verbs in context can be found on each page, but that hardly suffices for a clear overview of each tense that could so easily have been placed at the front of the book. Instead, the first few pages are filled with grammatical jargon and rather unappetizing details on "pronouns and their peculiarities" etc. This is all well and good for the connoisseur, but the authors should make it clear that the book is not suitable for beginners unless they understand verb conjugations.
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"Me Tarzan, you Jane" ??
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Do you love learning Portuguese but HATE the awful task of mastering verbs in a foreign language?. Me too... What can we do?. Which are our options?. Well, we really don't have much choice. It is either learn those annoying and somehow distressing verbs, or face the dire fate of never learning to speak Portuguese well. Can you imagine yourself in a situation inspired in the classical "Me Tarzan, you Jane"?. I bet your answer is no, if you can avoid it. So the real question is not whether you will learn Portuguese verbs, but how to make the whole verb learning experience less traumatic. This book is, in my opinion, a good answer to that question. Yes, it is neither original nor overly engaging, but it is very useful. It has 501 Portuguese verbs, fully conjugated in all tenses, and even samples of how each verb is used in everyday conversation. The only reason why I don't give it five stars is because it doesn't explain too well the grammatical conjugation rules, even though it mentions them. All the same, I think that wasn't the aim of the book, and that if you cannot avoid having to learn verbs (and nobody who really wants to speak Portuguese well can), you should tackle the task with some good tools. I recommend this one :) Belen Alcat
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Excellent for what it is
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I have been usig this book for some time and I think that it deserves five stars for what it is, mainly a catalogue of Portuguese verb tenses, with their endings and forms. But it stops there. The information you get is clear and reliable, but you need something else if you want to understand how Portuguese verbs actually work, how they behave in a sentence, how they compare with English verbs. I have now found an excellent book for all that, Portuguese Verbs Explained by Manuela Cook. It goes well beyond this one.
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this book is my bible!
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This book is essential if you're learning Portuguese. It has all the tenses of 501 of the most common verbs, and also a section at the beginning telling you what the tenses actually mean - e.g. it tells you what the 'preterit indicative' tense is, which I'd never even heard of before! It may seem like the lazy way to do things by just looking up the tense of the verb that you need, but it really isn't - I've learned so much from this book. Also at the back it has a little 'verb dictionary' so you can learn verbs that aren't in the book and learn to conjugate them yourself using the examples in the book as guidelines. I couldn't cope without this book!
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